Young Eliot: A Biography
10 best books like Young Eliot: A Biography (Robert Crawford): Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Keats, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, John Donne: The Reformed Soul, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens
| Author | Paul Strohm |
| ISBN | 0670026433 |
A lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury Tales
In 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that...
| 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 | Emily Dickinson |
| ISBN | 0963818368 |
For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence to her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century...
| Author | Andrew Motion |
| ISBN | 0226542408 |
Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters,...
| 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 | Stanley Plumly |
| ISBN | 0393065731 |
Posthumous Keats is the result of Stanley Plumly's twenty years of reflection on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romanticists. John Keats's famous epitaph—"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water"—helped cement his reputation as the archetype of the genius cut off before...
| 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 | John Drury |
| ISBN | 1846142482 |
For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.
'Love bade me welcome . . .'
'Teach me my God and King . . .'
George...
| Author | Benita Eisler |
| ISBN | 0679740856 |
In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context...
| Author | Paul Mariani |
| ISBN | 1451624379 |
A perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century—Wallace Stevens—as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience.
Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression...
| Author | Nicholas Roe |
| ISBN | 0300124651 |
This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure...
| Author | W.G. Sebald |
| ISBN | 1400068908 |
A publishing landmark—the first major collection of poems by one of the late twentieth century’s literary masters
German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of Austerlitz, the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that The Guardian called “a...
| Author | Victor Bockris |
| ISBN | 0684823632 |
"Patti Smith" came to New York at the age of nineteen, determined to become someone. And she did -- with a vengeance. Patti's intensely dramatic style, her sensuality, and her outrageous acts set her apart from other performers of the 1970s. She was an astonishingly bold and powerful artist. In "Patti...
| Author | Franny Moyle |
| ISBN | 0670922692 |
The extraordinary life of J. M. W. Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his...
| Author | Jenny Uglow |
| ISBN | 0374147515 |
Winner of the Portico Prize
Shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the Year High-spirited, witty and passionate, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age, including Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters. This biography traces Elizabeth's...
| Author | Andrew Wilson |
| ISBN | 1582344116 |
The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.
For...
| Author | Adam Begley |
| ISBN | 0061896454 |
Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.
In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers...
| Author | Charles Simic |
| ISBN | 0547928289 |
“It takes just one glimpse of Charles Simic’s work to establish that he is a master, ruler of his own eccentric kingdom of jittery syntax and signature insight.” -Los Angeles Times
For over fifty years, Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant and innovative poetic...
| Author | Peter Ackroyd |
| ISBN | 0385537395 |
Ackroyd at his best - gripping short life of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of 'The Moonstone' and 'The Woman in White'.
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part...
| 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 | Fiona MacCarthy |
| ISBN | 0394585313 |
This is my first review, and I dedicate it to my friend, Margaret Unger, who suggested that I join Goodreads. If you love the Arts and Crafts movement as I do, and yearn to understand William Morris, then this is the book for you. I selected this book as my first to review because Morris was fascinated with...
| Author | Julia Briggs |
| ISBN | 0156032295 |
Virginia Woolf is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature. She was original, passionate, vivid, dedicated to her art. Yet most writing about her still revolves around her social life and the Bloomsbury set.
In this fresh, absorbing book, Julia Briggs puts...
Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson
| Author | Adam Sisman |
| ISBN | 0142001759 |
James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself has generally been considered little more than an idiot and condemned by posterity as a lecher and drunk....
| Author | Lilian Pizzichini |
| ISBN | 0393058034 |
A groundbreaking biography of a psychologically traumatized novelist who forever changed the way we look at women in fiction.
Jean Rhys (1890–1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester—the...
| Author | Langdon Hammer |
| ISBN | 0375413332 |
Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill...
