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Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
Donald Sturrock · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorIsak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller
Judith Thurman · 511 pages
Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
Elizabeth Winder · 265 pages
In May of 1953, a twenty-one-year-old Plath arrived in New York City, the guest editor of Mademoiselle's annual College Issue. She lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended the ballet, went to a Yankees game, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. She was supposed to be having the time of her life. But what would follow was, in Plath's words, twenty-six days of pain, parties, and work which, ultimat
Charles Dickens
Claire Tomalin · 600 pages
When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength o
Capote: A Biography
Gerald Clarke · 632 pages
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
D.T. Max · 356 pages
"The first biography of the most influential writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his era, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace's tormented, anguished and often triumphant battle to succee
JK Rowling: the wizard behind Harry Potter
Marc Shapiro · 127 pages
Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams
Nick Webb · 370 pages
"Douglas Adams possessed one of the twentieth century's great imaginations. He was clever, funny, prescient, child-like and - to the dismay of some contemporaries - a polymath who combined intellect with a sense of wonder. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was both intimate and cosmic, bleak and funny, frivolous yet philosophical. In 1978 it sneaked out on BBC radio, but news of it cascaded thr
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
Casey Cep · 314 pages
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
Quentin Bell · 314 pages
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Gaskell · 448 pages
Intertwining fact and story, The Life of Charlotte Bronte takes the reader by one hand and Charlotte Bronte by the other to run rampant through the making of one of the greatest authoresses of all time. Follow Charlotte from her birthplace of Thornton as she sets off for school and later returns to teach her sisters, and come to know the “characteristic kindness of the Brontes.” This unsentimental
Hemingway: a Life Story
Carlos Baker · 367 pages
Carlos Baker's thorough profile of Ernest Hemingway, the American Nobel Laureate, journalist, war correspondent, and general legend, is the first telling of the Hemingway life and still stands as one of the best (perhaps put to second or third place after the publication of Michael S. Reynolds' stunning five-volume work on his life and Kenneth Lynn's fine bio/analysis from 1995). Baker brings both
Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings
Mary Henley Rubio · 684 pages
J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth
Daniel Grotta · 197 pages
Surprisingly little is known about the personal life of the creator of Middle Earth. This man, who was embarrassed by success, lived most of his life as an Oxford scholar in the surrounds of a cloistered academic community. As a child in South Africa, Tolkien was kidnapped by a native and taken into the bush. As a youngster in the industrial city of Birmingham, England, Tolkien was raised by a Cat
Allen Ginsberg: A Biography
Barry Miles · 627 pages
Covering his life from his birth in 1926 to his career as a distinguished poet and professor, this is a biography of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Barry Miles draws on their long friendship and on Ginsberg's own journals and correspondence to give a full account of his life up to his death in 1997.
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
Humphrey Carpenter · 288 pages
Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic
Jim Derogatis · 341 pages
"Let It Blurt is the biography of Lester Bangs (1949-82) - the gonzo journalist, gutter poet, and romantic visionary of rock criticism. He lived the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, guzzling booze and Romilar like water, matching its energy in prose that erupted from the pages of Rolling Stone, Creem, and The Village Voice. Bangs agitated in the seventies for sounds that were harsher, louder, more electri
Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
Howard Sounes · 309 pages
Locked in The Arms of a Crazy Life is the acclaimed biography of Charles Bukowski, the hard-drinking barfly whose semi-autobiographical books about low-life America made him a cult figure across the globe. Extensive research and unique contributions from friends, family and associates - including Mickey Rourke, Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Crumb, Sean Penn, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg - as well
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick
Lawrence Sutin · 352 pages
"With thirty-eight books currently in print and seven of his novels and short stories adapted into blockbuster films, Philip K. Dick is recognized worldwide as one of our time's greatest and most influential novelists. Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions, acknowledged by the Dick family as the official Philip K. Dick biography, illuminates the life of the man who loosed the bonds of the science fict
Byron in Love
Edna O'Brien · 228 pages
Biographer Edna O'Brien has written an intimate biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of 24 on the publication of Childe Harold. With her prismatic eye and novelistic style, O'Brien captures the spir
Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert D. Richardson Jr. · 684 pages
Becoming Jane Austen
Jon Spence · 294 pages
"Becoming Jane Austen shows how Jane Austen's own personal experiences resonated throughout her work, from her juvenilia to Sanditon. Two people, above all, affected her life and caught her imagination. The first was her flirtatious and exotic cousin, Eliza de Feullide, married to a French count who was later guillotined. The second was the young Irish lawyer, Tom Lefroy, with whom Jane fell in lo
Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintences and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career
George Plimpton · 449 pages
Using oral biography, a technique that perfectly matches the style of his subject, George Plimpton blends the voices of Capote's lovers, haters, acquaintances, and colleagues into a highly readable narrative. Here we are present for the entire span of Capote's life: his Southern childhood and his early days in New York; his first literary success with the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms;