Biography: Literary

The life of Charles Bukowski—laureate of lowlife Los Angeles—a novelist and poet who wrote as he lived. This is the only biography of Bukowski writ...

Widely regarded as one of America’s great authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald led a life of drama and extravagance that often overshadowed his writing car...

Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charle...

Barbara Bray (1924-2010) was an English woman of letters who translated some hundred novels, plays, and essays from French to English and was Margu...

The Blue Light is an autobiographical novel in chapters and vignettes that travels through memory, time, and language. Hussein Bargouthi tells his ...

Christmas in Shakespeare’s day was an extravagant festival that included a long season of merrymaking, feasting and, most important of all, masques...

Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. In his long ca...

The third installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of Robert Frost’s correspondence.The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the lat...

THE RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK'Gobsmacking' The Times'Luscious' Mail on Sunday'Delectable . . . ravishing' Sunday Times'A chocolate box full of delic...

Writers’ notebooks sometimes prove more revelatory than diaries or intimate journals. At first they might appear to be rag-and-bone shops of ideas,...

Should we assume that people who lived some time ago were quite similar to us or should we assume that they need to be thought of as alien beings w...

'An excellent anthology' Times Literary Supplement'Remarkable: combines her exceptional experience as a war correspondent with selected poetry in a...

The incredible story of the first director of the Morgan Library: a visionary Black woman who walked confidently in an early 20th-century man’s wor...

This is the story of a literary marriage. It tells of the partnership between Edwin and Willa Muir, two intellectuals from small town Scottish back...

When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the great minds of earl...

The Life of Robert Frost presents a unique and rich approach to the poet that includes original genealogical research concerning Frost's ancestors,...

An intimate and illuminating account of queer lives and migration, homemaking and community in the Gulf, from a brilliant new voice in narrative no...

A critical biography of a modern Japanese literary giant, whose brilliant career ended in a spectacular ritual suicide. Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was...

The ground-breaking work of the poet who paved the way for generations of women writers, in a new selection by her daugher and literary executor, L...

After arriving in London just before the Second World War as a penniless and friendless Austrian-Jewish refugee, George Weidenfeld went on to trans...

Frankie King was a precocious student and a promising basketball player at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School in the early 1950s. Sportswriters w...

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland.Part of th...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring In 1816, when eighteen-year old Mary Godwin began writing Frankenstein, the idea that a wom...

Ernest Hemingway is most often associated with Spain, Cuba and Florida, but Italy was equally important in his life and work. This book, the first ...