Literature Biography

Hardcover. Syracuse University Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Remainder line and foxing to top edge, light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, New York Review Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 448 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE. Black and white photos in center. Two pages wrinkled and stuck together in the middle of picture pages. Otherwise tight.

Hardcover. NY, Harper Collins, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 233 pages. Authors, illustrators, and poets describe their childhoods, approaches to creating children's books, and career paths.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Inc., 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Nobel Prize winning author Gunter Grass' autobiography causing controversy because of his admission of volunteering for the submarine corps at the age of 15 and then being drafted into the Waffen SS, the combat force of the SS, in 1944 when he was 17. Much of the German novelist's work has dealt with the idea of morally dealing with one's past, in this case Germany's collective conscious. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Longmans Green & Co., 1st US, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a chipped, worn dust jacket, 303 pages."Charles Pierre Peguy (1873- 1914) was a noted French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing but non-practicing Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works. From his earliest years, he was influenced by socialism. He joined the Socialist Party in 1895. From 1900 until his death in 1914, he was the main contributor to and the editor of the literary magazine Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which at first supported the Socialist Party director Jean Jaures. However, Peguy ultimately ended this support after he began viewing Jaures as a traitor to the nation and to socialism. In the Cahiers, Peguy published not only his own essays and poetry, but also works by important contemporary authors such as Romain Rolland. His free-verse poem, "Portico of the Mystery of the Second Virtue", has gone through more than 60 editions in France."Charles Pierre Peguy (1873- 1914) was a noted French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing but non-practicing Roman Catholic. From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works. From his earliest years, he was influenced by socialism. He joined the Socialist Party in 1895. From 1900 until his death in 1914, he was the main contributor to and the editor of the literary magazine Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which at first supported the Socialist Party director Jean Jaures. However, Peguy ultimately ended this support after he began viewing Jaures as a traitor to the nation and to socialism. In the Cahiers, Peguy published not only his own essays and poetry, but also works by important contemporary authors such as Romain Rolland. His free-verse poem, "Portico of the Mystery of the Second Virtue", has gone through more than 60 editions in France.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 512 pages, b&w illustrations. Penelope Fitzgerald was a great English writer whose career didn't begin until she was nearly sixty. She would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature--the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee, a master biographer and one of Fitzgerald's greatest champions, gives us this remarkable writer's story. Lee's critical expertise is on dazzling display on every page, as it illuminates this extraordinary English life. Fitzgerald, born into an accomplished intellectual family, the granddaughter of two bishops, led a life marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop's palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. We see Fitzgerald's very English childhood in the village of Hampstead; her Oxford years, when she was known as the "blonde bombshell"; her impoverished adulthood as a struggling wife, mother and schoolteacher, raising a family in difficult circumstances; and the long-delayed start to her literary career.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers , 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. 303 pages. Beach was a popular writer of adventure stories. Here he tells his own tale, more colorful, humorous and adventurous than his novels. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed, 1st, 1901, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 71 pages, number 410 of a 500. French hand-made paper, printed by D. B. Updike at the Merrymount Press. Illustrated with one plate and two facsimiles of Thoreau's journal. Gray-green boards with a beige cloth spine with a paper label. Spine and covers darkening, light shelf wear.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1944, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 262 pages. Scribner's colophon but no "A". Assumed Book Club Ed. with no price on flap. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Greenwood Press, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt lettering on spine, 477 pages, two b&w plates. A reprint of the 1913 revised Second Edition. A selection from his correspondence with Boccaccio and other friends, designed to illustrate the beginnings of the Renaissance. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 570 pages. Beneath his quiet, self-effacing persona as "archetypal librarian," English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) led a much more dramatic and troubled life than was commonly known. Raised by an arrogant father--a Nazi sympathizer who corresponded with Hitler's economics minister--and by an overprotective mother, Larkin harbored self-disgust and sexual confusion. He had a homosexual crush in college, avidly collected pornography and wrote two facetious would-be lesbian romances under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. His 30-volume diary was destroyed after his death by his indulgent companion Monica Jones. Drawing on unpublished papers and letters, Motion, Larkin's friend and fellow poet, has produced the first biography of a poet who some rank with Auden and Eliot. This revealing, disquieting portrait limns "a selfish man" who played off one lover against another, and a reactionary strongly prejudiced against immigrants, students, unions and socialists. Snippets of poems, interspersed with the narrative, remind us of Larkin's genius.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 898 pages, b&w illustrations. Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene. Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. Clean copy. (After sexual assault allegations about Bailey surfaced, Norton stopped shipping the book and pulverized the remaining copies.)

Hardcover. NY, The Viking Press, 1st, 1936, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bound in black cloth with design of a phoenix on the front cover. No dust jacket. First edition with Published in October 1936 on copyright page and no additional printings noted. Fading to the spine. 852 pages. A complete collection of D H Lawrence's unpublished essays. Discoloration to black cloth along bottom of front cover and spine, Interior is bright and clean.

Hardcover. New York, Viking, 1st thus, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 135 pages. Previous owners name at top right edge of front endpaper. Minor foxing to preliminary pages. Maroon cloth covers with narrow section of fade at top edge of front cover. Dust jacket with edgewear, light chipping and tiny holes along folds - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Books, 2nd pr., 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 625 pages, b&w illustrations. The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books. Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls-the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser-the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series-masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder's biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Mild wrinkle to page 243. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Garden City, Doubleday & Co., 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 570 pages, b&w illustrations and frontispiece. Black cloth covers w/ edgewear, chipping. Previous owner's signature inside front cover. Else clean and tight.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 410 pages, b&w illustrations. Best known as the author of "Windows for the Crown Prince, " an account of her years as English tutor to Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, Elizabeth Gray Vining now tells the full story of her life, including impressions of Japan that she omitted from her earlier book. Previous owner'e signature on Front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Arthur Baker, 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a poor, worn dust jacket with a large chunk gone from front panel. Book is bright and clean, 180 pages. Illustrated with color and b&w plates by John Leech. A biography of the novelist who wrote of country sports like hunting in a comical way.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket, 540 pages. A comprehensive collection of letters from Jarrell. Edited by his second wife Mary Jarrell with the assistance of Stuart Wright. Jarrell's letters span over fifty years and document his life, thoughts, and writing. The letters are insightful and often humorous, and provide a unique perspective on the author's life and work. Paper covered boards with a cloth spine, dust jacket with mild soil, stain. No markings.

Hardcover. New York, Scribner, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 578 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Pictures in center. Nice copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 371 pages, b&w photos. Irving Howe?s 1964 description of Roth?s Call It Sleep as "one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American" catapulted Roth to fame. Yet the author?s decades-long silence became legendary. In following Roth's tortured life from his childhood on the Jewish Lower East Side to his twilight years in New Mexico, literary critic Steven Kellman has uncovered FBI files, spoken with family members and friends, and gained access to the tape in which Roth discussed the long-buried incest of his youth. Redemption is the Shakespearean saga of a great writer doomed to a life of psychological torment, but saved in the end by his search for deliverance. Clean copy.

Softcover. Ft., Texas Christian University, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 435 pages. INSCRIBED BY BONAZZI on the title page. This authorized biography by Robert Bonazzi, is based on John Howard Griffin's Journals from 1950-1980. Griffin was blinded in the South Seas during WWII, but regained sight in 1957, after which he wrote the classic Black Like Me. Bonazzi follows Griffin year by year after 1961, when Griffin toured the globe as a lecturer on human rights.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 356 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY THE EDITOR EMILY BERNARD on the title page. Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What's less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic, writer, and photographer whose ardent support of black artists was peerless.Despite their differences a Van Vechten was forty-four to Hughes twenty-two when they met. Hughes and Van Vechten's shared interest in black culture lead to a deeply-felt, if unconventional friendship that would span some forty years. Between them they knew everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters, lovingly and expertly collected here for the first time, are filled with gossip about the antics of the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to the nightspots of Harlem, which they both loved to prowl. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 162 pages. The first full-length critical treatment of this significant and neglected figure in American realism. Arguing that raw naturalism and subtle craftsmanship - seemingly incompatible qualities join to make Yates one of the most accomplished writers of the post - World War II period, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of his life and work. An introductory chapter outlines the historical, literary, and social contexts important to Yates's writings, comparing him, for example, with his contemporaries Philip Roth and Mary McCarthy and articulating strong lines of continuity between his themes and the ideas of the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the Marxist-oriented socialist C. Wright Mills, and the social theoretician Erving Goffman. Next a thorough biographical portrait illuminates Yates's obsession with the American middle class and its dislocated, disordered, and psychologically stifled populace, followed by sharp readings of the novels and story collections, including unfinished and minor works. Clean copy.