biography

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st US, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 382 pages. A biography of Ivan Turgenev, 19th-century Russian writer. The book is not a critical examination of Turgenev's literary output, but, of the man himself - enigmatic and unknown - and the world in which he lived, and the people he knew and associated with. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 214 pages. A follow up of Truitt's journal "Daybook." The author continues the exploration of her life as an artist, a woman, and a mother, focusing on the constant interplay between daily activities and choices and the broader context of history and ideas. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1928, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 500 pages, with illustrations. Corner and edge wear and fade, scuff mark on spine, some red spots on back cover, two small watermarks on front cover and black ink stains on bottom edge. Overall in good condition with clean pages and tight binding.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 1991, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 254 pages. Red phono disc of Tuvan throat singing still attached. As a stamp-collecting boy always fascinated by remote places, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was particularly taken by the diamond-shaped stamps from a place called Tannu Tuva deep within Outer Mongolia. He hoped, someday, to travel there. In 1977, Feynman and his sidekick - fellow drummer and geography enthusiast Ralph Leighton - set out to make arrangements to visit Tuva, doing noble and hilarious battle with Soviet red tape, befriending quite a few Tuvans, and discovering the wonders of Tuvan throat-singing. Their Byzantine attempts to reach Tannu Tuva would span a decade, interrupted by Feynman's appointment to the committee investigating the Challenger disaster, and his tragic struggle with the cancer that finally killed him. Tuva or Bust! chronicles the deepening friendship of two zany, brilliant strategists whose love of the absurd will delight and instruct. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 60 pages. A facsimile reprint from the pages of the author's Miscellaneous Works (pages 285-348) published in 1751. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Praeger Publishers, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 225 pages, b&w photos. Cobb is pictured as an explosive personality, a shrewd realist, and a great base stealer in this account of his life and career. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 449 pages, b&w illustrations. Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don't tell half of Cobb's tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: "Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam," one columnist wrote. When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in.But Cobb was also one of the game's most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his day, even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to "create a mental hazard for the other man," he had his enemies, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, something strange happened: his reputation morphed into that of a monster--a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 478 pages, b&w illustrations. When the young, insignificant scion of an unremarkable German principality first came to England to serve as consort to the youthful Queen Victoria, no one could have guessed that he would grow to become one of Britain's great--if uncrowned--kings. Albert's life could not have been an easy one; a man of great intelligence, pride, and ambition, he was forced to move behind the scenes, playing major roles in running the Crimean War and working to keep Britain out of the Civil War being waged in the United States. He was interested in industry and technology, and worked to stage the Crystal Palace exhibition--the first World's Fair. Yet, while his wife adored him, his adopted people scorned him for his German accent, his foreign ways, and his covert activities as a surrogate ruler. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Woodstock, NY, WoodstockArts, 2nd, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Color and black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1st Edition, 1895, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 150 pages. Hardcover. B/w frontispiece with tissue guard. Fore and bottom edges rough cut, gilt top edge. Green decorated cover boards, gilt title on spine and front cover board. Binding very good. Spine straight. Pages have some tanning, but unmarked and clean. Tight first edition. A heartfelt reflection on life, family, and community beneath the towering elms of Newton, Massachusetts. Claflin's evocative prose paints a vivid picture of a bygone era, capturing moments of joy, sorrow, and timeless memories in the shade of ancient trees that stood as silent witnesses to generations of American history.

Softcover. NY, The Feminist Press, 1ST, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages, b&w illustrations. The memoir of a young Catholic women's affair with a pastor in Italy. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the half-title page. A few pages with light pencil underlining., otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 464 pages, b&w photographs. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy. This biography offers the most complete and accurate portrait to date of the writer Caroline Gordon (1895-1981). Viewing Gordon's life in the context of female literary tradition, Nancylee Novell Jonza reclaims Gordon's integrity, individuality, and artistic vision from beneath a self-effacing, sometimes detractive, public image carefully fostered by the artist herself. Gordon's nine novels and three short-story collections are a major contribution in their own right to the southern literary renaissance. Despite an enduring readership, however, she still remains in the shadow of her husband, Allen Tate, the Fugitive Poet and Agrarian critic, partially due to her contrived persona of a traditional southern lady turned artist under the tutelage of a gifted, benevolent male writer. Drawing on manuscript drafts, unpublished works, letters, and a significant body of her journalistic writing, Jonza investigates fully the causes and effects of Gordon's self-mythologizing and covers substantially more ground than the thirty years during which she was closest to Tate.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 208 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. This is the first career-spanning monograph from one of the foremost contemporary realist painters. New York-based artist Harvey Dinnerstein creates hauntingly penetrating portraits and allegorical street scenes. His work over the course of five decades remains fresh and apt for our time, depicting New York as a microcosm of our society's rich pluralism, struggle, and resilience.

Hardcover. Essex, VT, Battenkill River Press, 2nd printing, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 288 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Black and white images throughout. SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY AUTHORS ON TITLE PAGE.

Hardcover. Essex Junction VT, Battenkill River, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 278 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. An intimate look at the life of Norman Rockwell and his Arlington, Vermont neighbors, the Edgertons. Foreword by Dick Clark. Black-and-white photographs throughout. Bright and clean. A tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 287 pages, b&w illustrations. From the construction of the Berlin Wall through every major conflict of his adult lifetime up to the Syrian Civil War, photographer Don McCullin has left a trail of iconic images. Unreasonable Behavior traces the life and career of one of the top photojournalists of the twentieth century and beyond. Born in London in 1935, McCullin worked as a photographer's assistant in the RAF during the Suez Crisis. His early association with a North London gang led to the first publication of his pictures. As an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine beginning in 1966, McCullin soon became a new kind of hero, taking a generation of readers beyond the insularity of post-war domestic life through the lens of his Nikon camera. He captured the realities of war in Biafra, the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the human tragedy of famine and cholera on the Bangladesh border and later, the AIDs epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. McCullin now spends his days in a Somerset village, where he photographs the landscape and arranges still-lifes. Harrowing and poignant, Unreasonable Behavior is an extraordinary account of a witness who triumphed over the memories that could have destroyed him.

Softcover. London, Verso, 1st Thus, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 174 pages. Softcover. Light marginal wear to covers. Clean & unmarked.

NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Uphill with Archie is a beautifully written and deeply involving look at the life and the world of the great literary icon, poet Archibald MacLeish, by his youngest son. Partly an homage, partly an attempt to come to terms with the man (and the legend), Uphill with Archie speaks to all sons and daughters who have never completely resolved their feelings about powerful parents. Young William MacLeish grew up both captivated and cowed by the fame of a father who won Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and comparable honors for his work as a lawyer, playwright, teacher, and government official. William's mother, Ada, began her marriage as a successful concert singer in Paris but later felt compelled to give up her art for her family. When Archie was working for Henry Luce and Fortune magazine, his younger children, watched over by a governess, stayed with their grandfather in Connecticut. But it is of the time spent with his family at Uphill Farm, a beautiful old house above a Massachusetts hilltown, that MacLeish has his fondest and most telling memories: "Archie and Ada gave me great gifts: music, the sound of the language beautifully spoken, the draw of knowledge, the arts of humor," William writes. "I learned to perform for them, and in time found myself addicted to getting a nice tan from Archie's sun. And the more I bathed in his light, the harder I found it to go looking for my own."

Hardcover. Salt Lake City, Utah Historical Society, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 418 pages. Brown cloth cover, slightly oversized, gilt lettering, very little wear. Inside is bright and clean, with b&w photographs throughout. A nice copy.

Hardcover. Salt Lake City, Utah Historical Society, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 435 pages. Brown cloth cover, slightly oversized, gilt lettering, very little wear. Inside is bright and clean, with b&w photographs throughout. A nice copy.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 3rd Printing, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 426 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Sunfading to dust jacket. Light soiling to textblock edges. Otherwise a very clean, unmarked copy with only minor dust jacket wear. A tight copy. Black and white illustrations throughout.

Softcover. Munich, self-published, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 80 pages, bound in stiff paper wrappers illustrated by Edward Gorey. In an age-toned glassine wrapper. The paper spine has separated from the binding but sound and very repairable. Limited to 300 copies, this copy INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR to Nora and Roger(Roger Shattuck, literary historian and critic, and his wife).

Hardcover. Gainesville FL, University Press of Florida, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 267 pages, b&w photos. Biography of the Russian ballet dancer and teacher Agrippina Vaganova (1879-1951).

Hardcover. NY, George H. Doran, 1st, 1915, Hardcover, black cloth covers with gilt title, top edge gilt. 523 pages, b&w photos. The author wrote this book to depict and commemorate "leading representatives of the Stage". He writes about: William Warren, laura Keene, Matilda Heron, Lester Wallack, James W. Wallace, Mark Smith, Edward Adams, Henry J. Montague; Edwin Booth, Augustin Daly, Henry Irving, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe. Index. Clean, bright copy.