Literature Biography

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 537 pages. Slight edgewear, rubbing to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, First Edition, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 249 pages. Hardcover. Grey cloth covered boards with white titles to spine. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear, now protected with a plastic sleeve. Black & white illustrations, tight binding, clean & unmarked pages throughout.

Softcover. Merrick NY, Cross-Cultural Communications, 1st pbk, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 48 pages. Edited and translated from the Italian by Stanislao G. Pugliese. Ignazio Silone, anti-fascist and founding member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) offers a politically conscious and soul searching memoir which details his own PSI activities and the various factors engendering the "necessity for action on behalf of liberty and democracy among the working classes." Over the course of his political career, Silone wrote a number of fiction and non-fiction works, and was imprisoned in Italy, France, Spain, and finally in Switzerland where he composed this memoir in 1942. Often compared with Andre Malraux and Albert Camus, Silone was awarded an honorary degree by Yale University, was a recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. INSCRIBED BY PUGLIESE on the title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1st, 1854, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 385 pages. Embossed brown cloth covers w/ gilt lettering. Chips from top and bottom of spine. Rubbing to cover corners. Previous owner's signature inside front cover. Else a nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 430 pages. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Panjandrum/Aris Books, 1st, April 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 251 pages plus index, b&w photographs. Light edge wear, rubbing to dust jacket. Else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 530 pages. Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Clean, bright copy, as new.

Hardcover. NY, Brewer & Warren, 1st US, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, marbled boards with green cloth spine, 494 pages. A scholarly biography of the great French dramatist, b&w illustrations. Light shelf wear. Top of spine has some fading/sunning, no markings.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a price-clipped dust jacket with light wear, 408 pages. The circumstances surrounding Montaigne's writings are described in a review of his life and important personal relationships. Gutter crack after front fly leaf. A sound, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st US, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 266 pages. Stanislaus Joyce was more than his brother's keeper. He was at various times his brother's co-dependent, touchstone, conscience, and biggest fan. The two shared the same genius, the same childhood influences, and had the same literary instinct, but in Stanislaus it was channeled into sober academic pursuit, while in James it evolved into gaiety, wild whimsy, and at times sodden despair. Covering the first twenty-two years of James Joyce's life in Dublin and Trieste, My Brother's Keeper is a window onto the drama that was his youth. Thanks to Stanislaus's superb memory and sure hand, here we find the Dublin of the streets, neighbors, churches, and unforgettable eccentrics.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 336 pages. This single-volume selection of the letters of Margaret Fuller affords a unique opportunity for renewed acquaintance with a great American thinker of the Transcendentalist circle. The letters represent Fuller at all stages of her life and career, and show her engaged as literary critic, as translator and as champion of German literature and thought, as teacher, as travel writer, as literary editor, as journalist, as feminist, as revolutionary, as wife and mother. My Heart Is a Large Kingdom, unlike previous collections, includes only letters transcribed from Fuller's manuscripts and does not reproduce correspondence known only from printed sources and copies in hands other than Fuller's. Among the recipients of the letters in this generous selection are such literary and cultural figures as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (Fuller's husband), George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. Taken together, the letters serve as a chronicle of Fuller's lifetime and provide glimpses into her thoughts and feelings during the years of the "Conversations," Dial, and the revolution in Rome. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, The Cresset Press, 1st UK, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 189 pages. 3rd volume of the autobiography of this celebrated thinker and writer on philosophical and metaphysical matters. The greater part deals with the period he spent in England, in Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere, and his circle of brilliant friends and acquaintances.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1942, a timid, inexperienced twenty-one-year-old Lord reports to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to enlist in the US Army. This title tells the story of this young man's exposure to the terrors, dislocations, and horrors of armed conflict. Along the way he comes to terms with his own sexuality, experiences the thrill of first love and the chill of disillusionment with his fellow man, Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Chilton Book Company, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 383 pages. Hardcover. 8 pages of black & white photographs. Foxing to top edge. Light wear to dust jacket edges. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner , 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Novelist and critic Colm Toibin provides "a fascinating exploration of writers and their families" (Entertainment Weekly) and "an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires" (The Evening Standard) in this brilliant collection of essays that explore the relationships of writers to their families and their work. Colm Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind. Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Toibin examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 192 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy. Black and white pictures throughout. The author's memoir of the seven years spent in collaboration with

Hardcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 192 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy. Black and white pictures throughout. The author's memoir of the seven years spent in collaboration with Burroughs.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 391 pages. INSCRIBED BY PAYNE on the half-title page and also SIGNED on the title page. In Orion on the Dunes, the first biography of Beston, scholar Daniel Payne-granted unrestricted access to the writer's archives and drawing on interviews with friends and family-has crafted a scrupulously researched narrative; one presenting a masterful portrait that traces the intellectual growth and tumultuous life of a vital American writer whose work and thought have exerted a tremendous pull on poets, naturalists, and novelists alike. This is the story of a life, at once hidden and transparent, that is here finally revealed. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 391 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY PAYNE on half title page and SIGNED again on title page. The first biography of the writer/naturalist, and one of the leading founders of the modern environmental movement, Henry Beston. Scholar Daniel Payne-granted unrestricted access to the writer's archives and drawing on interviews with friends and family-has crafted a scrupulously researched narrative; one presenting a masterful portrait that traces the intellectual growth and tumultuous life of a vital American writer whose work and thought have exerted a tremendous pull on poets, naturalists, and novelists alike. This is the story of a life, at once hidden and transparent, that is here finally revealed. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean. "Once in a while a great book appears which through the author's strength of vision and freshness of language, allows is to see the world anew, OUT OF MY DEPTH--mixing memoir, sport, metaphysics, and playful contemption--is just a book. Several years ago noted author Paul West took a look at himself and saw a man who loved the water but couldn't swim." - dust jacket copy.

Hardcover. Lathem, New York, British American Publishing, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 269 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 347 pages. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written--or even read--a biography before. The next seven years comprised of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games. Battling an elusive Beckett and a string of jealous, misogynistic male writers, Bair persevered. She wrote Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other--and lived essentially on the same street. Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile and influencing Bair's own feminist beliefs.Parisian Lives draws on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes. This gripping memoir is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta -- traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta--traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.