T.S. Eliot
10 best books like T.S. Eliot (Peter Ackroyd): Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, John Donne: The Reformed Soul, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Hawthorne: A Life, Selected Prose, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams
Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
| Author | Joshua Muravchik |
| ISBN | 1893554457 |
Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to ground itself in 'science'. Indeed, no religion ever spread so far so fast. Yet while socialism had established itself as a fact of life by the beginning of the 20th century, it did not create societies of abundance...
Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday
| Author | Donald Clarke |
| ISBN | 0140247548 |
No singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than jazz legend Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues--and this authentic biography sets the record straight. Donald Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure...
| Author | Jonathan Bate |
| ISBN | 0062362437 |
Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets, his work infused with myth; a love of nature, conservation, and ecology; of fishing and beasts in brooding landscapes.
With an equal gift for poetry and prose,...
| Author | Lyndall Gordon |
| ISBN | 0393320936 |
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full...
| Author | John Stubbs |
| ISBN | 0393062600 |
Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from Plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns...
| Author | Andrew Motion |
| ISBN | 0374524076 |
'An exemplary biography of its kind - detailed, meticulous and sympathetic.' Peter Ackroyd, The Times
'Larkin lived a quietly noble and exemplary version of the writer's life; Motion - affectionate but undeceived about the man's frailties, a diligent researcher and a deft reader of poetry...
| Author | Brenda Wineapple |
| ISBN | 0812972910 |
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable...
| Author | T.S. Eliot |
| ISBN | 0156806541 |
Thirty-one essays-categorized as “essays in generalization,” “appreciations of individual authors,” and “social and religious criticism”- written over a half century. This volume reveals Eliot’s original ideas, cogent conclusions, and skill and grace in language. Edited...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 0375708383 |
Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium...
The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams
| Author | Donald Spoto |
| ISBN | 0306808056 |
This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Night of the...
| Author | James R. Mellow |
| ISBN | 0805073515 |
On almost every Saturday of the first half of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein would open her door to the likes of Picasso and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cocteau and Apollinaire, welcoming them into a salon alive with vivid avant-garde paintings and sparkling intellectual conversation....
| Author | Leon Edel |
| ISBN | 0006548687 |
This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist...
| Author | Morton N. Cohen |
| ISBN | 0679745629 |
Okay, there are a lot of theories about who CLD really was, what he was like, whether he was a pedophile or did drugs. A lot of people will downgrade books because they don't go along with their pet theories.
Fact is, this is a good biography that gives a lot of insight into the man. Whether it gives...
| Author | Walter Jackson Bate |
| ISBN | 0674478258 |
The life of Keats provides a unique opportunity for the study of literary greatness and of what permits or encourages its development. Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty...
Scientist, mathematician, traveler, soldier—and spy—Rene Descartes was one of the founders of the modern world. His life coincided with an extraordinary time in history: the first half of the miraculous seventeenth century, replete with genius in the arts and sciences, and wracked by civil...
First how i came across this book. I see Tolstoy's hand of Prudence in that matter.
One day as I scrolled down in one of my google searches , I found an article about 'an antique bookshop in Lahore' my home city. Caught my attention immediately. I read the article, then i read some more about the store...
| Author | Bernard Crick |
| ISBN | 0140058567 |
Re-reading this, it strikes me that I probably need to re-read most things which probably rules me out of new books for the next thirty years. A brilliant biography, complete with an introduction that should be (it probably already is) required reading for anyone contemplating writing this kind of...
| Author | Ian Hamilton |
| ISBN | 0747536406 |
In trying to research the details of J.D. Salinger's life for this book, Ian Hamilton forced the writer out of his reclusive hideaway to challenge his discoveries in an American court of law. When Ian Hamilton set out in 1983 to write a biography of Salinger, he knew that there would be difficulties. Just...
| Author | Simon Callow |
| ISBN | 0140254560 |
“A splendidly entertaining, definitive work.”—Entertainment Weekly
In this first installment of his masterful biography, Simon Callow captures the chameleonic genius of Orson Welles as only an actor/director deeply rooted in the entertainment industry could. Here is Welles’s...
| Author | Barry Miles |
| ISBN | 0753504863 |
Allen Ginsberg occupies a significant, enduring position in American literature. Following his death in '97, Barry Miles has drawn on both his long friendship with the poet & on Ginsberg's journals & correspondence to produce an immensely readable account of one of the 20th century's most...
Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966-2004
| Author | Hendrik Hertzberg |
| ISBN | 0143035533 |
Here at last are Hendrik Hertzberg’s most significant, hilarious, and devastating dispatches from the American scene he has chronicled for four decades with an uncanny blend of moral seriousness, high spirits, and perfect rhetorical pitch. Arranged thematically, each section contains the...
| Author | Inga Clendinnen |
| ISBN | 0521012694 |
The events of the Holocaust remain unthinkable to many men and women, as morally and intellectually baffling today as they were a half century ago. Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the "Gorgon effect" the sickening of imagination and the draining of the will that afflict so many of us when...
Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives
| Author | Edwin Black |
| ISBN | 0312359071 |
Internal Combustion is the compelling tale of corruption and manipulation that subjected the U.S. and the world to an oil addiction that could have been avoided, that was never necessary, and that could be ended not in ten years, not in five years, but today.
Edwin Black, award-winning...
