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The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic
Michael Sims · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAll The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West
David Gessner · 354 pages
"Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, ... nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the liv
Mad World: Evelyn Waugh And The Secrets Of Brideshead
Paula Byrne · 375 pages
A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England's greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, 'Brideshead Revisited'. Evelyn Waugh was already famous when 'Brideshead Revisited' was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, th
Tolkien: Man and Myth, a Literary Life
Joseph Pearce · 242 pages
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings took first place in a recent national poll to find the greatest book of the century. He may be the most popular writer of our age, but Tolkien is often misunderstood. This major new study of his life, his character and his work reveals the facts and confronts the myths. It explores the background to the man and the culture in which he wrote. Tolkien: Man and
The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of Three Sisters
Juliet Barker · 1,158 pages
A history of the Brontë family is based on years of research and correspondence by each family member, challenging traditionally accepted portraits of the patriarchal Patrick and revealing Charlotte's ruthless nature.
The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne
Catherine Reef · 231 pages
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Janet Malcolm · 229 pages
"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Sarah Bakewell · 400 pages
Dickens
Peter Ackroyd · 904 pages
The acclaimed chronicler of London, Peter Ackroyd, has already written three books on Dickens. This volume explores the life and times of the great author.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Ruth Franklin · 624 pages
"Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains curiously absent from the American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author behind such classics as The Haunting of Hill Hous
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
Rimbaud: A Biography
Graham Robb · 551 pages
"The poet's life was stranger than any fiction: explorer, mercenary, gun runner, and companion to slave traders. Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, a reinventor of language and perception, a breaker o
Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted
Andrew Wilson · 368 pages
In 1956, 23-year-old Sylvia Plath walked into a party and immediately spotted Ted Hughes. This encounter--now one of the most famous in all literary history--began what has become a modern myth. Sylvia viewed Ted as something of a colossus, and to this day his enormous shadow has obscured her life and work. Before she met Ted, Plath had lived a complex, creative, and disturbing life. Her father ha
Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson
Robert Polito · 543 pages
Jim Thompson wrote some of the darkest, boldest, and most celebrated modern crime novels, including The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me. In Savage Art, Robert Polito provides the first comprehensive biography of this brilliant American original. Combining exhaustive research with novelistic fluency, Polito reproduces the vital textures of Thompson's world and provides the first thorough chronic
Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson
Judy Oppenheimer · 304 pages
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
James Knowlson · 872 pages
Damned to Fame follows the reclusive literary giant's life from his birth in Foxrock, a rural suburb of Dublin, in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989. Knowlson brilliantly re-creates Beckett's early years as a struggling author in Paris, his travels through Germany in 1936-37 as the Nazis were consolidating their power, his service in the French Resistance during World War II, and the years of li
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage
Diane Wood Middlebrook · 372 pages
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
Joseph Frank · 462 pages
This present volume is the second in a series dealing with the life and works of Dostoevsky ... during the ten years [he] spent first in solitary confinement, then in a prison camp in Siberia, and finally as a soldier in one of the Siberian regiments of the Russian army. --Preface.
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of a Friendship
Colin Duriez · 244 pages
Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are known around the world as the creators of Middle-earth and Narnia. But few of their readers and fans know about the complex friendship between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Without the persistent encouragement of his friend, Tolkien would never have completed The Lord of the Rings. This great tale, along with the connected matter of The Silmarillion, would have remained m
Jane Austen: A Life
Carol Shields · 188 pages
With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relat
The Private World of Georgette Heyer
Jane Aiken Hodge · 222 pages
The classic biography of Georgette Heyer is, finally, back in print and will delight Heyer fans everywhere. She wrote more than fifty novels, yet her private life was inaccessible to any but her nearest friends and relatives. Lavishly illustrated, and with extracts from her correspondence and references to her work, The Private World reveals a formidable and energetic woman with an impeccable s

