Literature Biography

Hardcover. London, Cassell, 2nd pr., 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 246 pages, b&w illustrations. Biography of the author, editor and nineteenth century literary tycoon. "Short of stature, he wore two-inch heels on his shoes to increase his height, and compensated for other inferiorities with a voice like thunder and a Napoleonic vehemence. He clothed his barrel-chested body in carefully tailored clothes, butterfly collar, spats and gold watch chain, and his mustaches swung twelve inches apart like those of a cinema villain"[wrapper blurb]. Light soil to rear of dj, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 145 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. The renown Frank Norris attained in his brief lifetime sprang from his compelling--and to many Americans startling--novels about people whose lives have escaped their control and have become grotesquely warped by the confluent forces of hereditary and environment.In "revisiting" Frank Norris, Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. takes as a starting point Warren French's 1962 volume in this series and provides a complementary portrait of the artist. McElrath assesses the spate of relatively recent "historical reconstructions" of Norris's canon and finds a writer who, though at times transcendent in the Naturalistic vein, was pragmatic in his choice of subject matter and "not always grandly serious." It is in part the delight Norris took in parody, McElrath argues, that makes him still so readable. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st UK, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 251 pages. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim.(London): Faber and Faber, (1982). First edition in English, first printing. "First published in 1982" statement to the copyright page. In this in-depth study of his life and his works, Robert explores Kafka's loneliness, his omission of the words 'lonely' and 'Jew' in his writings, compares his life with his allegories, and more. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abbeville Press, 1st thus, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Illustrated with drawings. Index. Bibliography. 487 pages. Remington, a prolific letter writer, was also an inveterate doodler. Many of these previously unpublished drawings are a part of this collection. Correspondence includes notes to his family and correspondence with President Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Poultney Bigelow, Francis Parkman, Elizabeth Custer and others. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Portland OR, Amedeus Press, 1st, March 1, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 453 pages, b&w photographs and frontispiece, sheet music end paper. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Hutchinson & Co, 1st, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 128 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Brick cloth covered boards with gilt titles to spine. Light foxing to endpapers. Frontis illustration, Eden Phillpotts, in black & white. Toning throughout, tight binding with clean pages throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Da Capo Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Fug You is Ed Sanders's unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture," to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs. Fug You traces the flowering years of New York's downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground's scrutiny, and leading to Sanders's arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs -- formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called "the world's oldest living hippie" by Allen Ginsberg) -- as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 589 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom text block. Tight copy. Light rubbing to dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Beaufort Books, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 375 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. Peacham VT, The Perpetua Press, 1st, 2002, Hardcover in the publisher's cream-colored linen over boards with spine and upper board gilt-stamped black leather labels. No dust jacket, as issued. 88 pages, only 500 copies printed. A collection of interviews done with Shaw from 1924 - 1945. Bright and clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 146 pages. Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, W. H. Allen & Co., 1st, 1883, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to spine and gilt titles and gilt rules to front board. Prefatory note by Bertha Thomas plus 247 pages plus four-page publisher's advertisements for titles in the Eminent Women Series to the rear. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 249 pages. Light edgewear and tanning to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Shoemaker & Hoard, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray boards with blue cloth spine, 150 pages, b&w illustrations. A singular life often circles around a singular moment, an occasion when one's life in the world is defined forever and the emotional vocabulary set. For the extraordinary writer James Salter, this moment was contained in the fighter planes over Korea where, during his young manhood, he flew more than one hundred missions. James Salter is considered one of America's greatest prose stylists. The Arm of Flesh (later revised and retitled Cassada ) and his first novel, The Hunters, are legendary in military circles for their descriptions of flying and aerial combat. A former Air Force pilot who flew F-86 fighters in Korea, Salter writes with matchless insight about the terror and exhilaration of the pilot's life. This book collects passages from two other books he wrote about his military flight career and entries from his personal journal kept during his tours of military flying duty through flight training in late WWII, into combat duty in Korea in 1952, and through his post war flying up into the early 1960s. Masterfully edited by Jessica and William Benton, it has been organized chronologically and simply is wonderful. You can read from the journal entry, and then it is followed by fiction he created using that experience. No dust jacket, clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Ammo, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 240 pages, many b&w and color photographs. A visual biography accompanied by excerpts from Thompson's work. Introduction by Johnny Depp, edited by Steve Crist and Paul Norton. Illustrated boards, no dust jacket issued.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 321 pages with an index. Gore Vidal, known for such best-sellers as The City and the Pillar, Burr, Lincoln, and Myra Breckinridge, is a household name. The controversial Vidal ran for Congress in 1960, and set sparks flying with his public debates challenging William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Although one of America's most admired and prolific writers, Vidal has been steadfastly ignored or impugned by many critics. This is partly owing to the vast scope of his writings, which include more than twenty novels, half a dozen plays, dozens of screenplays, countless essays and book reviews, political commentary, and short stories; how do the critics approach such a writer? There has also been backlash against Vidal, whose radical polemics and undisguised contempt for those whom he has called "the hacks and hicks of academe" have hardly endeared him to the critical establishment. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain is the first collection of critical essays to approach this important American writer in an attempt to rectify the unwarranted underestimation of his work. Jay Parini has drawn from the best of previously published criticism and commissioned fresh articles by leading contemporary critics to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's multifaceted and memorable career. Writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Stephen Spender, Catharine R. Stimpson, Richard Poirier, and Italo Calvino examine Vidal's work in their own highly individual ways, and each finds a different Vidal to celebrate, chide, recollect, or view close up. Also included is a recent interview with Parini in which Vidal discusses his career and his troubled relationship with the reviewers. The Vidal that finally emerges from these essays is a writer of undeniable weight and importance. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 376 pages. Light scratch top rear cover, else a clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Softcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 137 pages, light blue wrappers. An uncorrected proof. The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.

Hardcover. London, Vision Press Limited, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and soiled dust jacket, 240 pages. A full critical analysis of Grass' plays, poems and novels and viewed in the context of 20th century German literature. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 572 pages. The author as written an admirable book that pulls no punches in recounting Hellman and Hammett's flaboyant lives and compulsions. like new in a protective brodart.

Softcover. Sarasota FL, Pineapple Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 260 pages. Follow Ernest Hemingway's exploits on the Bahamian island of Bimini from 1935 to 1937, the very moment in time when the International Game Fish Association (under the author's co-leadership) was emerging. Covers Hemingway's role in the formation of the IGFA, his underappreciated seminal writing about competitive saltwater angling when the sport was still in its infancy, the amazing fishing he enjoyed on the island, and the way all of these experiences translated into the composition of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. This is the only book on this period in Hemingway's life and reveals unexpected dimensions to the Hemingway portrait that deserve attention, including his surprising humor, his advanced conservationist views several decades before the environmental movement even began, and his egalitarian ideas about his contemporary female counterparts in the big-game fishing world--challenging the usual portrait of Hemingway as a chauvinist with no personal rules, boundaries, or conscience. Includes beautiful vintage photographs of 1930s Bimini that have never been published in book form.

Softcover. Waitsfield VT, Vermont Crossroads Press, reprint, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages, b&w illustrations. Originally published in hardcover in 1966. Harbor Springs in northern Michigan was where the Hemingway family vacationed from Chicago as early as 1900, when Ernest was age 1. Trips there followed during his youth and into his early years as a professional writer. The setting of Walloon Lake and the region and characters of Little Traverse Bay found their way into some of his stories. Includes three of Hemingway's short stories originally published in the Oak Park (Ill. ) High School Tabula, here reprinted for the first time. Mild wear, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Berkeley , University of California Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 455 pages. This biography of Henry Thoreau offers insight into his social activism, his interest in fine arts, William Gilpin and John Ruskin's influence on his nature writing, and his involvement in, and influence by, the Agassiz-Darwin debate over "The Origin of Species." Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott , 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 251 pages. Hal Borland writes about his boyhood as part of a homesteading family in Eastern Colorado. A nice copy of the first edition, as stated on the copyright page. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.