biography literature

Hardcover. Albuquerque NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, 150 pages, b&w photo illustrations. Dust jacket present but badly worn, chipped. Book condition is very good. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Also INSCRIBED BY VAN VECHTEN on front fly leaf: "For Dannie with fond affection from Carlo/April 6 1955/New York". Laid-in: an original b&w photo/postcard embossed "Photograph by Carl Van Vechten", dark exposure with 3 unidentified individuals. With verso handwritten note signed Carlo with a mailing date of 12/30/1958. Also: 4-page mimeographed memorial (speech) by George S. Schuyler dated December 23 1964 and a similar one (5-page) by Lincoln Kirstein. Several clippings. obituaries on his passing at age 84.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 260 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York , Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages, illustrated throughout with b&w photographs by Bob Adelman. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans Publishing , 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 199 pages. A brief account of Williams' life and examination of his early poems, the criticism, biographies and plays, the novels, the Arthurian poems and his theological writings. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 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 he has today--far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a midlevel bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professional crisis set him down the road leading to The Canterbury Tales. Brought expertly to life by Paul Strohm, this is the eye-opening story of the birth one of the most celebrated literary creations of the English language. INSCRIBED BY STROHM on the title page.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st US, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 246 pages, b&w illustrations. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 606 pages. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes's full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships-sometimes uneasy-with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson's scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes's improbable life-his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson's biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York , HarperChildrens, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 240 pages. Clean, tight copy. As children, C.S. Lewis and his brother W.H. Lewis created the fantasy world of Boxen. This book collects stories and illustrations, history, geography etc of Boxen. Reproduced original illustrations by the authors. Introduction by Douglas Gresham. The History of Boxen by Walter Hooper.

Softcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 472 pages with index. The editor, Joanne Trautmann Banks, previously was co-editor of the six volume 'Letters of Virginia Woolf.' For this volume, Ms. Banks selected 'jewels' from the earlier compilation, and has provided explanatory footnotes throughout. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble Books, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Light edge wear, fading to dust jacket. Foxing to edges and end papers. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Jackson MS, University of Mississippi, 1st, 1987, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 178 pages. Gathers interviews with the Tennessee short story writer in which he discusses his career, writing, character development themes, settings, and growing older. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 171 pages. The author relates her experiences growing up in the Derbyshire countryside of central England during the late nineteenth century. Her `country' books, beginning with The Country Child and continuing with series of essays on country themes, such as Country Hoard were extremely popular, due to her uncanny ability to remember the smallest details of her Derbyshire childhood and express them with beautiful poeticism. This volume collects a number of her best essays. B&w illustrations by C.F. Tunnicliffe. Previous owner's notation on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 166 pages. Virtues's place in Spanish drama is partly as one of the few to attempt tragedy, partly as one of the precursors of the national comedia, but above all as a pivotal figure in an important transitional period of Spain's political and cultural history. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Shoemaker and Hoard, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 222 pages. INSCRIBED BY CASTRONOVO on the title page. Edmund Wilson, 20th century America's most direct and readable critic of literature and society, was a man of many loves. In his half century as a major force in American letters he had an outsize romantic career that reflected the complex depths of his personality. Each woman whom he came to love was an alluring interpretative problem, an erotic and analytic challenge, a presence that fired his imagination. They came from the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, from his own upper middle class world of privilege, from New York's working class, from the high reaches of literary New York as well as from the workaday world of Talcottville in upper New York State. Who were they? Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; actress Mary Blair; friends and drinking buddies Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and Elinor Wylie; poet Leonie Adams; writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy; Mamaine Paget, later the wife of Arthur Koestler; and screenwriter and journalist Penelope Gilliatt were the best known. They appear here as personalities in their own right as well as in the roles they play in Wilson's biography. His Rabelaisian appetites, ardors and vulnerabilities, and conceptions of love and sex are a story in themselves. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pegasus, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 338 pages, b&w illustrations. A remarkable literary hybrid--part biography, part detective story--about the enduring figure of Robinson Crusoe. January 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty,Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and mired in political controversy and legal threats. But for the moment he is preoccupied by a younger man on a barren shore--Robinson Crusoe. Several miles south, another old man, Robert Knox, sits bent over a heavy volume--published nearly forty years before.Knox's Historical Relation was a best seller when it was published in 1681, just a year after he escaped from Ceylon and returned to England. Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? Crusoe explores the intertwined lives of two real men, Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox, and the character and book that emerged from their peculiar conjunction. It is the biography of a book and its hero: the story of Defoe, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and of Robert Knox, the man who was Crusoe. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Putnam, 1st , 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. 259 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. With these interwoven autobiographical essays, Geoffrey Wolff, author of the acclaimed The Duke of Deception, recounts the moral (and immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father, as he offers his spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life: from wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases to a concupiscent career teaching literature in Istanbul; from a victory over the chaos of drink to a life-affirming surrender to the majesty of the Matterhorn; and from a foundering friendship to the transcending love of family.

Hardcover. London, The Grolier Society, 1st Thus, ND, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 2 Hardcover Volumes. Edition de Luxe - Limited to One Thousand Copies for England and America - this being No. 746. Gray cloth covers. Top edges gilt. Fading to spine labels. Full color and black & white illustrations. Clean, tight copies.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 344 pages. "Agricola" is Tacitus's biography of his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola, a Roman general who was governor of the province of Britain from 77 to 85 AD. This text is thus a key source of information on the Roman conquest and occupation of Britain in the first century AD. In the "Agricola", Tacitus is also keen to describe and commend the policies that Roman governors like Agricola employed to break the resistance of the ancient Britons and subjugate them to the Empire, but at the same time Tacitus presents the reader with a number of biting critiques of Rome's approach to imperial conquest. Some pencil notes in margins of about 20 pages. Name on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In these extraordinary letters, we see May Sarton in all her complexities and are privy to her tangled relationship with Juliette Huxley, whom May considered her muse and the greatest love of her life. May Sarton's love for Juliette Huxley, ignited that first moment she saw her in 1936, transcended sixty years of friendship, passion, rejection, silence, and reconciliation. The letters chart their meeting, May's affair with Juliette's husband Julian (brother of Aldous Huxley) before the war, her intense involvement with Juliette after the war, and the rich, ardent friendship that endured until Juliette's death. While May's intimate relationship with Julian was not a secret, May's more powerful romance with Juliette was. May's fiery passion was a seductive yet sometimes destructive force. Her feelings for and demands on Juliette were often overwhelming to them both. In fact, Juliette refused all contact with May for nearly twenty-five years. Their reconciliation, after Julian's death, wasn't so much a rekindling as it was a testament to the profound affinity between them. Theirs was a relationship rife with complications and misunderstandings but the deep love and compassion they shared for one another prevailed. Included in this book are Sarton's original drafts of an introduction to these letters. 400 pages including index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1st US, 1941, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 352 pages. Translated from Russian by Malcolm Burr. Cloth covers, blue stamped titles, 3 b&w illustrated maps, blue top edge stain. Rubbing and light soiling to covers, spine lightly cocked, previous owner's bookplate and signature to front endpapers, light foxing and discoloration to endpapers, discoloration to page block ends; otherwise, a neat, tight copy of a scare book.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Rare Bird Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 312 pages. The highlight of Desolation Peak is the journal Kerouac kept, starkly revealing the depth of his poverty, the extremity of his mood swings, and the ongoing arguments with himself over the future direction of his life, his writing, and faith. Along with the journal, he worked on a series of projects, including "Ozone Park," another installment of the Duluoz Legend beginning in 1943, after his discharge from the Navy; "The Martin Family," an intended sequel to The Town and the City, and "Desolation Adventure," a series of sketches that became part 1 of Desolation Angels. In writing it, Kerouac was re-committing himself to his more experimental, then-unpublishable style, declaring in the journal that "the form of the future is no-form." Also included in Collected Writings is "The Diamondcutter of Perfect Knowing," Kerouac's "transliteration" of the Diamond Sutra, his "Desolation Blues" and "Desolation Pops" poems, and assorted prose sketches and dreams. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ Press, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 351 pages including index. A list of writing relating to Charles Dickens and his works 1836-1944. A very useful bibliographic reference for Dickensiana.

Hardcover. NY, Rinehart & Co., 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 241 pages. The author Cook was an English professor at Middlebury College for many years, and involved with Bread Loaf Writer's Conference almost from its inception, as Robert Frost was. INSCRIBED by Robert Frost (the subject) to Cook (the author).