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The national bestselling biography and the basis for the film Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in an Academy Award–winning turn. One of the strongest fiction writers of his generation, Truman Capote became a literary star while still in his teens. His most phenomenal successes include Breakfast at Tiffany's, In Cold Blood, and Other Voices, Other Rooms. Even while his literary achievements were setting the standards that other fiction and...
2) Oscar Wilde
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Wilde the writer is known to us from his plays and prose fiction, but apparently it was in his conversation that his genius reached its summit. His talk is lost and his autobiography was never written, but his letters reveal him at his spontaneous, sparkling best. Wilde the writer is known to us from his plays and prose fiction, yet it was in his conversation that his genius reached its summit. His talk is lost, his autobiography was never written,...
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"The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" is a one-of-a-kind autobiography. Up until its publication in 1782, only two autobiographies had ever been written, and both were written by devout religious saints. Highly scandalous yet witty in nature, calling Rousseau's work an "autobiography" is a loose categorization of the text, as many of the stories and tales have been proven false, yet Rousseau told the truth about the spirit of his life through...
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This mesmerizing story of playwright and author Joe Orton's brief and remarkable life was named book of the year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Patrick White Told with precision and extensive detail, Prick Up Your Ears is the engrossing biography of playwright and novelist Joe Orton. Orton's public career spanned only three years (1964–1967), but his work made a lasting mark on the international stage. From Entertaining Mr....
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Sarton writes of her early childhood in Belgium in the years before World War I, her time in Boston while her father taught at Harvard, and her schooling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she fell in love with poetry and theater. She describes her first meetings and fast friendships with such notable figures as Virginia Woolf, Julian Huxley, James Stephens, and S. S. Koteliansky, many of whom would later come to populate her critically acclaimed...
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A Memoir of Jane Austen is the Austen family's memoir of the beloved 19th century English novelist. Written and compiled by Austen's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen reveals the author as her family knew her, while at the same time protecting the author's privacy in keeping with the Victorian conventions of the time. A Memoir of Jane Austen did, however, reveal for the first time Austen's authorship of such classic stories...
7) Tono-Bungay
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A chemist's life is transformed by the wonders of selling snake oil in this satire of early–twentieth century capitalism by the author of The Time Machine.
As a young assistant chemist, George Ponderevo rode his uncle's coattails to a great fortune. His uncle Edward's meteoric rise was all thanks to a miraculous patent medicine, Tono-Bungay-which George knew to be nothing more than sugar water. Though it provided none of its promised curative...
8) Memoirs
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When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media-though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams's candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself. As it turns out, Williams's look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight"...
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Samuel Johnson is famously known for single-handedly creating the first recognized dictionary of the English language, just one of many his many renowned accomplishments. The biography of this remarkable writer, dramatist, poet, and moralist was penned by his friend, James Boswell, in 1791. An immediate success upon its publication, this work has come to be considered the greatest biography produced in the English language, and has earned Boswell...
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A witty, appealing, and often outrageous portrait of some of the twentieth century's most influential and creative minds.
Subtitled "An Education in the Twenties," Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to Cambridge dropout-at-large in London's bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Christopher Isherwood's contemporaries W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and...
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Personal recollections from André Gide on a man who profoundly influenced his work—Oscar Wilde André Gide, a towering figure in French letters, draws upon his friendship with Oscar Wilde to sketch a compelling portrait of the tragic, doomed author, both celebrated and shunned in his time. Rather than compile a complete biography, Gide invites us to discover Wilde as he did—from their first meeting in 1891 to their...
12) Mark Twain
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This vintage book (first published in 1948) contains a short biography of Mark Twain, with a wonderful selection of humourous and often aphoristic quotations taken from his writings. This concise and easy-to-digest text is full of interesting and entertaining information concerning Mr. Twain, and is highly recommended for those with an interest in his life and mind. A profusely illustrated antiquarian volume, this book is not to be missed by the discerning...
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This transcript from the film World of Light: A Portrait of May Sarton illuminates the life and writing of the poet while celebrating the joys of creativity, love, and solitude In June of 1979, May Sarton answered the questions of two filmmakers and read to them from her poetry. This four-day "jam session" ultimately became an acclaimed documentary about her life and work. For Sarton, the muse has always been female, and the writer says that her...
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This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides recounts their tour of Scotland in 1773. While Johnson focuses on Scotland itself, Boswell is even keener on presenting his friend to the notables of his homeland. Together they form a complete account of a fascinating journey, two intriguing personalities,...
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Almost one hundred years after the death of Jane Austen, William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh published Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. A Family Record (1913). The book lovingly details Jane's birth, childhood, adolescence, and maturity, the everyday minutiae of her life, the circumstances in which she wrote her juvenilia and her six novels, and her early death. Using Jane Austen's own letters, additional letters sent between a...
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Una obra de divulgación de uno de los escritores más influyentes en lengua castellana del siglo XX
En ella se recoge infinidad de datos acerca de la vida de Cortázar, desde Buenos Aires a París, a partir de un conocimiento completo de su obra. De carácter ameno, el lector descubrirá a la vez, de manera precisa y sorprendente, a la persona y al escritor. Cuenta, además, con un prólogo del escritor nicaragüense Sergio Ramírez, amigo personal...
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Una colección de historias cortas llenas de valores morales y valiosas lecciones de vida. Aunque se centra en las tradiciones y estilos de vida de la gente de una pequeña ciudad siciliana, este libro cubre una variedad de sensaciones basadas en creencias religiosas, mitos, leyendas tradicionales, devoción, fuerza y valor, todas las características que a menudo damos por sentadas o que son algo descuidado en las ciudades más modernas. Se trata...
18) Bacon
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This biography of philosopher, scientist, and writer Sir Francis Bacon (1561—1626), part of the “English Men of Letters” series, is an invaluable resource for students of history. Bacon, a highly influential figure in his era, is considered the father of scientific empiricism, and is also believed by some to have written some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
19) The Gambler
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First published in Russian in 1866, "The Gambler", by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is a gripping narrative of the dangers of gambling. As was common with Dostoyevsky's other writings, he draws upon his own life in a semi-autobiographical way. Dostoyevksy himself suffered from a compulsion to gambling and had to complete "The Gambler" under a strict deadline to pay off his own debts. These first-hand experiences bring a depth of realism to the novel and to...
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The New York Times bestselling writer Tracy Daugherty illuminates his most vital subject yet in this first biography of the Catch-22 author Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller was a Coney Island kid, the son of Russian immigrants, who went on to great fame and fortune. His most memorable novel took its inspiration from a mission he flew over France in WWII (his plane was filled with so much shrapnel it was a wonder it stayed in the air). Heller wrote seven...