Literature Biography

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 736 pages. The year 2010 marked the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone, Twain's uncensored autobiography is available in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsupressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended. Volume 1 ONLY ( of a planned 3 volume set). Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. NY, Bellevue Literary Press, 1st, 2007, Softcover, 236 pages. Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys from Russia to Italy to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2nd pr., 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 414 pages, b&w illustrations. Very good, clean, in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket. World famous at twenty-four, brilliant and reckless, hard-living and scandalous, Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage before he ever experienced war first-hand. So true was his portrait of a young man who runs from his first confrontation with battle that Civil War veterans argued about whose regiment Crane had been in. Considered by H.G. Wells as "beyond dispute, the best writer of our generation," Crane was also famous in his time as an unforgettable personality, an Adonis with tawny hair and gray-blue eyes that Willa Cather described as "full of luster and changing lights." A lover of women and truth at any cost, Crane, in his short life, paid dearly for both. He alienated the New York police when he testified against a policeman on behalf of a prostitute falsely accused of soliciting, forcing him to live the rest of his short life as an expatriate in England. Reporting on the Spanish American War, Crane described the Rough Riders blundering into a trap after arriving in Cuba, infuriating Roosevelt. He died tragically young, leaving behind a handful of fine short stories, including The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel, along with war reporting, novels, and poetry.

Hardcover. London, Peter Owen , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages. An acclaimed and most unusual biography of Baudelaire, showing him ensnared by his passions for poetry, prostitutes, and drugs.A crucial link between romanticism and modernism, Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal figure in European literature and thought. His influence on modern poetry is immense. In the English language, where his literary reputation is less well known, it is his link with drug culture that gives him contemporary resonance. It is commonly known that Baudelaire used opium. Many writers have described him as being addicted to the drug, but none of his biographers, Frank Hilton argues, has fully understood the effect of opiate addiction on the personality and, in the case of Baudelaire, the extent to which it damaged his life and work. In this original contribution to Baudelaire studies Hilton contends that the drug is at the root of all Baudelaire's problems and in particular--something that constantly tormented him--his chronic inability to apply himself to any prolonged creative work. Unquestionably, there is significantly more to Baudelaire than his opium addiction. But a proper awareness of what it did to the poet helps to illuminate those puzzling aspects of his life and behavior that were not previously understood. Written with the general reader in mind, Baudelaire in Chains will give those who know little or nothing about him a comprehensive picture of his life. To those who know a great deal it will present him in an unexpected light.

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1st US, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover un a bright dust jacket, 534 pages, b&w photos. Patricia Highsmith - author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley - had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the 'poet of apprehension'. Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith's life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death. Paper tanning slightly, clean copy.

Hardcover. Norfolk, Ct, New Directions, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 234 pages. Light foxing to end papers, top edge and dust jacket. Light sun-fade to spine, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 302 pages, many b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press , 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Weintraub's compilation of Shaw's diaries reveal the day to day life of one of Britain's most famous playwrights. 558 pages. Vol. 1 only of a two volume set. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 375 pages. B&W photographs and illustrations. Pictorial dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt title to spine. Erratum laid-in. Overall, a clean, tight copy. ohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman, published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye, from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Prentice Hall, 2nd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 258 pages, b&w photographs. The story of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan in the movies.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, March 27, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 190 pages, b&w illustrations throughout. Light edge wear to dust jacket; small tear on rear cover. Light foxing on top edge. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1st UK, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn , unclipped dust jacket. A biography of poet Harry Crosby, who inexplicably took the life of another man's bride of six months, and subsequently his own life, in 1929. INSCRIBED BY WOLFF on the blank prelim page: "To the yeoman of Chittenden, and to Steve, from the guy whose fat they pulled from the fire/Geoffrey Wolff/Repayment Day, 1977/Waitsfield, Vt".

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Foreword by Michael Connelly. 414 pages. In 2010, Ted Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biography. His health rapidly deteriorating, Crews told Geltner he was on board and would even sit for interviews and tell his stories one last time. Ask me anything you want, bud, Crews said. But you'd better do it quick. The result is Blood, Bone, and Marrow, the first full-length biography of one of the most unlikely figures in twentieth-century American literature, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction. With books such as Scar Lover, Body, and Naked in Garden Hills, Crews opened a new window into southern life, focusing his lenson the poor and disenfranchised, the people who skinned the hogs and tended the fields, the grits, as Crews affectionately called his characters and himself. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Macmillan Company, 1st US, 1944, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 631 pages. Green cloth, gilt lettering to spine. Dust jacket slightly worn and soiled with small tears to upper edge of spine, in clear brodart cover.

Hardcover. New York , E. P. Dutton, 2nd Printing, 1943, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 428 pages, illustrated by the author. Scarce in this edition. Dark gray cloth with gilt titles, no dust jacket. Light fade to spine, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st US, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 206 pages, with b&w illustrations. Very clean and tight copy. Remainder line bottom edge, otherwise unmarked.

Hardcover. Dallas TX, Spence Publishing Company, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with light fading to spine, 224 pages. One of the twentieth century's most widely read writers and its most influential Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis has nevertheless eluded the understanding of the numerous scholars who have approached him only as a religious thinker and man of letters. A new book by a leading Lewis authority explores the full range of his manifold genius and finds for the first time the surprising secret of Lewis's enduring literary and spiritual achievement. It will astonish Lewis's admirers and critics alike to learn that he was far from the settled convert he appeared to be. Yet this very unsettledness, which Lewis himself found alarming, was the source of the appealing tension in his work and of his unrelenting commitment to his apologetic vocation. It was in the service of this vocation that he exercised his overarching rhetorical genius-a dazzling adroitness at suiting word, voice, and argument to a particular purpose-always militant, compelling, and persuasive. As Professor Como explores Lewis's hitherto uncharted inner landscape-the core of both his spiritual insight and his intellectual greatness-there emerges a more complex and integrated figure than we have known before. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Metheun, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Illustrated in color and b&w. Clean, tight copy.

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.