biography literature

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 521 pages. The fourth volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. Covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 401 pages. The first volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 395 pages. The third volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. This volume begins with the writer's return to Saint Petersburg after a ten-year Siberian exile and traces how his engagement in the cultural and social ferment of Russia in the early 1860s led to his discovery of the themes that would underlie his mature masterpieces. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 320 pages. The second volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st US, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket, 259 pages, photographic frontispiece, 4 leaves of plates; original blue cloth over blue boards, gilt lettering on spine, Autobiography of the English writer and founder of the Hogarth Press with his wife Virginia Woolf. The fourth volume of the autobiography. Remainder line to edge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 213 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York , Vanguard Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages. Light edgewear, tanning to dust jacket else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Urbana IL, University of Illinois, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket, 237 pages. An intellectual biography and assessment of the career of Edmund Wilson. Name. address on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Chicago, Chicago Review, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, literary journal with entire issue devoted to the poet. Fairly scarce. New and bright all around wraps. Poems by Dorn, plus an interview, correspondence to and from, LeRoi Jones and Tom Raworth, and Dale Smith, an interview with Eleni Sikelianos.

Hardcover. Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 432 pages. Biography of Edward Gibbon, who wrote arguably the most famous work of history ever, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789). Clean copy.

Hardcover. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 150 pages. Light edgewear and sunning to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Biography of the American Southern novelist which includes study of her later novels, when she was no longer content to imitate fashionable male novelists.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2nd pr., 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 671 pages. Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Chatto & Windus, 1st, 1893, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 288 pages + ads in rear. Green cloth with gilt lettering to spine. Some fading and soil to boards with small tear to upper edge of spine. Binding is slightly shaken and there is a previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf. Internally very clean and bright.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 638 pages. Dark gray covers, color illustrated dust jacket. Traces the life of the nineteenth-century American poet and analyzes all of her major poems. Light edge wear to dust jacket, pages crisp and unmarked, previous owner's signature to front end paper corner; overall, a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 480 pages. The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well--a virtual Who's Who of the twentieth century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Leonard Bernstein, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood. Also a generous helping of feuds with the likes of William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and TheNew York Times, among other adversaries. The life of Gore Vidal teemed with notable incidents, famous people, and lasting achievements that call out for careful evocation and examination. Jay Parini crafts Vidal's life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. Provided with unique access to Vidal's life and his papers, Parini excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal--novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, historian, wit, provocateur, and pioneer of gay rights--has long needed.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st BC Ed., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt titles, 687 pages, b&w photos. Has the A_3.69 (C), small embossed circle at bottom of rear cover indicating a book club printing. Bright, clean copy, missing the dust jacket.

Hardcover. Knoxville TN, University of Tennessee Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 235 pages. Evelyn Scott was a significant literary figure in American letters of the 1920s and 1930s, an important contributor in the experimental forms and techniques of the modernist movement. She wrote and published in many genres -- the novel, short fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism, and drama. Since that time, Scott's work has been forgotten by most readers and critics, and her reputation as an important writer of her day has been obscured. This collection, which features an introduction and thirteen critical essays, is the first volume to focus on Scott's work rather than her intriguing yet troubled life and initiates a long-needed examination of Scott's innovations in fiction, memoir, and other genres. The various essays take diverse critical approaches to Scott's canon, including her best-known works -- Escapade and The Wave -- and explore her views on topics such as women, politics, religion, art, and the South. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Co., 1st, 1993, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 298 pages. A late-life memoir by the notable fiction writer, biographer and critic. Covers a relatively short period of her life, with deeper reflections on a life spent in reading, writing, and observing the world around her. Clean copy.

NY, Paddington Press, reprint, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket, light fading to spine. Black & white illustrations, 569 pages.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd pr., 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with fading to spin, 530 pages. After the composition of the Decameron, and under the influence of Petrarch's humanism, Giovanni Boccaccio(1313-1375) devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is Famous Women, the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women. The 106 women whose life stories make up this volume range from the exemplary to the notorious, from historical and mythological figures to Renaissance contemporaries. In the hands of a master storyteller, these brief biographies afford a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential. Famous Women, which Boccaccio continued to revise and expand until the end of his life, became one of the most popular works in the last age of the manuscript book, and had a signal influence on many literary works, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Castiglione's Courtier. This edition presents the first English translation based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. After the composition of the Decameron, and under the influence of Petrarch's humanism, Giovanni Boccaccio(1313-1375) devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is Famous Women, the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women. The 106 women whose life stories make up this volume range from the exemplary to the notorious, from historical and mythological figures to Renaissance contemporaries. In the hands of a master storyteller, these brief biographies afford a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential. Famous Women, which Boccaccio continued to revise and expand until the end of his life, became one of the most popular works in the last age of the manuscript book, and had a signal influence on many literary works, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Castiglione's Courtier. This edition presents the first English translation based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 578 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Of all the biographies of Henry James, Sr., the father of William, James, Jr. and Alice, this is the first one that attempts to capture the bewildering complexities of the James father's public and private history -- his early engagement with a radically deviant Calvinism, his stunning embrace of both authoritarian and democratic systems of ruling, his rich humanity and comic gifts, and his dealing with the most interesting people of his time.

Hardcover. NY, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 274 pages, with b&w photographs. Very clean and tight copy. Unauthorized biography of Hunter Thompson. Perry takes us on a journey through Thompson's booze and drug fueled rise to fame. From a young yahoo in Louisville, Kentucky-drinking heavily and playing with his rifle, to the first hand secrets of Thompson's inventive and irreverent gonzo jounralism. A look at a man who was a horror to some, a hero to others.

Softcover. New York, Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 29 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR, number 289 of a limited edition of 350 copies, with photographs. Light edge wear, else, very clean and tight.