The Lady and Her Monsters

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

Joseph Loconte · 235 pages

"The untold story of how the First World War shaped the lives, faith, and writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis"--Amazon.com.

Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith

Octavio Paz · 560 pages

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

Lesley M.M. Blume · 368 pages

"The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world. In the summer of 1925, Earnest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rival

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

Sarah Churchwell · 432 pages

" Tracing the genesis of a masterpiece, a Fitzgerald scholar follows the novelist as he begins work on The Great Gatsby. The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman for America's carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

Paul Elie · 565 pages

"In the middle of the twentieth century, four American Catholics, working independently of one another, came to believe that the best way to explore the quandaries of religious faith was in writing - in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story - a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.". "Thomas Merton was a Tr

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.

Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

Claire Harman · 341 pages

Part biography and part cultural history, this splendid book not only tells the captivating story of Jane Austen's life, but also her literary legacy. The slow growth of Austen's fame, the changing status of her work, and what it has stood for in English culture is a story of personal struggle and family dynamics as well as a history of critical practices and changing public tastes. Jane's Fame is

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

Christopher Bram · 372 pages

Describes how the trailblazing, post-war gay literary figures, including Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg, paved the way for newer generations, including Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, and Edward Albee.

Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation

Daisy Hay · 364 pages

Focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon

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.

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

Joe Gould's Teeth

Jill Lepore · 235 pages

"A "New Yorker" staff writer and Harvard historian chronicles the discovery of Joe Gould's long-lost manuscript, "The Oral History of Our Time," and of the violence, betrayals, and madness that led to its concealment,"--NoveList. From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a centur

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer

Fred Kaplan · 406 pages

Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Bloomsbury Sigma)

Kathryn Harkup · 305 pages

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties

Marion Meade · 340 pages

In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s. Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, tr

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Brenda Wineapple · 416 pages

White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldie

The Invisible Woman

Claire Tomalin · 352 pages

A portrait of nineteenth-century actress Ellen Ternan, the woman who was the mistress of Charles Dickens, describing her secret relationship with the author.

Virginia Woolf: A Biography

Quentin Bell · 314 pages

The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

Kevin Birmingham · 424 pages

For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. James Joyce's big blue book, "Ulysses, " ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of "Ulysses "was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the

Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Bill Bryson · 208 pages

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected a

The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

Les Standiford · 241 pages

As uplifting as the tale of Scrooge itself, this is the story of how one writer and one book revived the signal holiday of the Western world.Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

Charlotte Gordon · 649 pages

"Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and her daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) have each been the subject of numerous biographies by top tier writers, yet no author has ever examined their lives in tandem. Perhaps this is because these two amazing women never knew each other--Wollstonecraft died of infection at the age of 38, a week after giving birth to her daughter. Nevertheless their lives were clo

Shakespeare: The Biography

Peter Ackroyd · 572 pages

Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape--the industry, the animals, even the flow

Byron: Life and Legend

Fiona MacCarthy · 681 pages

"This is the first biography of Byron to originate from John Murray, Byron's own publisher, since Leslie Marchand's 3-volume biography, published in 1957. It makes a breakthrough in reinterpreting Byron's life and poetry for a new generation, drawing on John Murray's world-famous archive."--BOOK JACKET.