She remained with him until his death thirty-seven years later, bearing him two children, governing a succession of unruly households in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich, holding him and the family together through the force of her own formidable pluck. Most importantly for Joyce's work, Nora served as his "portable Ireland," his living link to the homeland he used as the basis for his masterpieces.

    The two shared the same genius, the same childhood influences, and had the same literary instinct, but in Stanislaus it was channeled into sober academic pursuit, while in James it evolved into gaiety, wild whimsy, and at times sodden despair. Covering the first twenty-two years of James Joyce's life in Dublin and Trieste, My Brother's Keeper is a window onto the drama that was his youth. Thanks to Stanislaus's superb memory and sure hand, here we find the Dublin of Dubliners: the streets, neighbors, churches, and unforgettable eccentrics. Here we see the model for Ulysses' Simon Dedalus: James' father, a dour and violent figure when in his cups. Here are the Joyces in their own home, and the minor characters that pepper A Portrait of the Artist: Eileen, Leopold Bloom's comely daughter; Mrs. Riordan, the surly teacher; Mr. Casey, the political agitator. And finally, here is Trieste, a place of exile for Stanislaus but a retreat for James. Stanislaus Joyce has fashioned both an invaluable primary source for his brother's opaque masterpieces and a loving memoir of his brother's early life.

    To be fair, Ellmann does have some distinct advantages. For starters, there's his deep mastery of the Irish milieu--demonstrated not only in this volume but in his books on Yeats and Wilde. He's also an admirable stylist himself--graceful, witty, and happily unintimidated by his brilliant subjects. But in addition, Ellmann seems to have an uncanny grasp on Joyce's personality: his reverence for the Irishman's literary accomplishment is always balanced by a kind of bemused affection for his faults. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches on Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or talking dirty to his future wife via the postal service, Ellmann's account always shows us a genius and a human being--a daunting enough task for a fiction writer, let alone the poor, fact-fettered biographer. Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.

    The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke; the profundities are always expressed in good round Dublin terms; Joyce's heroes are humble men."--From the Foreword by Anthony Burgess.

    James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the minutiae of Leopold Bloom’s day, including its unspeakable details, unfold with careful precision in its pages. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately banned the novel as "obscene, lewd, and lascivious.” Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to its landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933.   Literary historian Kevin Birmingham follows Joyce’s years as a young writer, his feverish work on his literary masterpiece, and his ardent love affair with Nora Barnacle, the model for Molly Bloom. Joyce and Nora socialized with literary greats like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Beach. Their support helped Joyce fight an array of anti-vice crusaders while his book was disguised and smuggled, pirated and burned in the United States and Britain. The long struggle for publication added to the growing pressures of Joyce’s deteriorating eyesight, finances and home life.   Salvation finally came from the partnership of Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a dogged civil liberties lawyer and founder of the ACLU. With their stewardship, the case ultimately rested on the literary merit of Joyce’s master work. The sixty-year-old judicial practices governing obscenity in the United States were overturned because a federal judge could get inside Molly Bloom’s head.   Birmingham’s archival work brings to light new information about both Joyce and the story surrounding Ulysses. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say yes to Ulysses.

    From his bleak childhood - the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by 'sixteen hugless years' in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man - through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. Millions of readers are hungry to know the truth about him. Written with exclusive access to le Carré himself, to his private archive and to many of the people closest to him, this is a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.

    Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I’s passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew.Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare’s experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.

    One was a celebrity at twenty-three, the other virtually unknown until his dying days. One was right-wing and religious, the other a socialist and an atheist. Yet, as this ingenious and important new book reveals, at the heart of their lives and writing, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were essentially the same man. Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, Waugh for Brideshead Revisited and comic novels like Scoop and Vile Bodies. However different they may seem, these two towering figures of twentieth-century literature are linked for the first time in this engaging and unconventional biography, which goes beyond the story of their amazing lives to reach the core of their beliefs–a shared vision that was startlingly prescient about our own troubled times.Both Waugh and Orwell were born in 1903, into the same comfortable stratum of England’s class-obsessed society. But at first glance they seem to have lived opposite lives. Waugh married into the high aristocracy, writing hilarious novels that captured the amoral time between the wars. He converted to Catholicism after his wife’s infidelity and their divorce. Orwell married a moneyless student of Tolkien’s who followed him to Barcelona, where he fought in the Spanish Civil War. She saved his life there–twice–but her own fate was tragic.Waugh and Orwell would meet only once, as the latter lay dying of tuberculosis, yet as The Same Man brilliantly shows, in their life and work both writers rebelled against a modern world run by a privileged, sometimes brutal, few. Orwell and Waugh were almost alone among their peers in seeing what the future–our time–would bring, and they dedicated their lives to warning us against what was coming: a world of material wealth but few values, an existence without tradition or community or common purpose, where lives are measured in dollars, not sense. They explained why, despite prosperity, so many people feel that our society is headed in the wrong direction. David Lebedoff believes that we need both Orwell and Waugh now more than ever.Unique in its insights and filled with vivid scenes of these two fascinating men and their tumultuous times, The Same Man is an amazing story and an original work of literary biography.

    A monumental work of scholarship - arguably the most important book about Beckett ever published - SAMUEL BECKETT is also fascinating reading. Beckett's life has been as rich as his writing is spare, and Deirdre Bair tells his story superbly: the upper-middle-class Irish childhood; the early years in Paris and Beckett's complex relationship to Joyce; the psychological anguish of his apprenticeship, poured out by Beckett in more than 300 remarkable, heretofore-unknown letters to a confidant, Thomas McGreevy; Beckett's heroic service with the French Resistance, also unknown till now; "the siege in the room," that extraordinary period after the Second World War during which Beckett created the first masterpieces that would make him world famous; Beckett's increasing involvement with the theatre and his desperate attempts to guard his privacy against the encroachments of celebrity.SAMUEL BECKETT chronicles Beckett's tumultuous relationship with his family, recounts the psychosomatic illnesses that have often kept him from writing, and traces (where they exist) the autobiographical strains in his work. The book tells of his relationships with publishers, actors, directors, and friends. Above all, it portrays Beckett himself, the poet of despair, the angular, enigmatic artist who, in the words of his Nobel Prize citation, "has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation."When Deirdre Bair began the research for this book, Beckett said he would not authorize it nor would he read it before it was published. To friends he wrote, "I am sure Mrs. Bair is a serious scholar and is out to do a fine book. I will neither help nor hinder her." After literally hundreds of interviews and years of research in Ireland, England, France, Italy, Spain, Northern Ireland, Canada and the United States, after correspondence with people living on every continent, Deirdre Bair has produced a book that is everything a scholar or a reader could hope for: SAMUEL BECKETT is one of the remarkable literary biographies of our time.Deirdre Bair received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a journalist on newspapers and magazines before returning to academic life and taking a M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. She has taught at Trinity College (Connecticut) and Yale University, and teaches now in the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania. She is married, has two children, and lives in Connecticut. (Taken from the inside jacket material of the First Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Edition, 1978.)

    But beyond these familiar details, the Brontes' story has remained largely obscure. This landmark book is the first definitive history of this fascinating family. Based on eleven years of research among newly discovered letters by every member of the family, original manuscripts, and the newspapers of that time, it gives a new and fuller picture of the Brontes' lives from beginning to end and, in the process, demolishes many myths. The father, Patrick, was not, as commonly believed, the cold patriarch of a family of victims. Charlotte, ruthlessly self-willed, ran roughshod over her sisters and went so far as to alter or destroy their manuscripts when she disapproved. Emily was so psychologically and physically dependent on her fantasy life that she could not survive in the outside world. Anne, widely regarded as the gentlest of the sisters, had a core of steel and was a more daring and revolutionary author than Charlotte. Branwell, the adored brother, was a talented poet who provided much of Charlotte's inspiration.

    She was the wife of a landlord and member of Parliament who had been personally responsible for introducing measures that compounded the misery of the Irish peasantry during the Great Famine. Yet, Lady Gregory devoted much of her creative energy to idealizing that same peasantry, while never abandoning the aristocratic hauteur, the social connections, or the great house that her birth and marriage had bequeathed to her.    Lady Gregory’s capacity to occupy mutually contradictory positions was essential to her heroic work as a founder and director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin—nurturing Synge and O’Casey, her battles with rioters and censors, and to her central role in the career of W. B. Yeats. She was Yeats’s artistic collaborator (writing most of Cathleen Ní Houlihan, for example), his helpmeet, and his diplomatic wing. Tóibín’s account of Yeats’s attempts—by turns glorious and graceless—to memorialize Lady Gregory’s son Robert when he was killed in the First World War, and of Lady Gregory’s pain at her loss and at the poet’s appropriation of it, is a moving tour de force of literary history.    Tóibín also reveals a side of Lady Gregory that is at odds with the received image of a chilly dowager. Early in her marriage to Sir William Gregory, she had an affair with the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and wrote a series of torrid love sonnets that Blunt published under his own name. Much later in life, as she neared her sixtieth birthday, she fell in love with the great patron of the arts John Quinn, who was eighteen years her junior."It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t."—Lady Augusta Gregory writing to W.B. Yeats, referring to the riots at the Abbey Theatre over Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

    Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - no one wore their learning so playfully, nor inspired such passionate friendship.

    After all, both authors engaged in a profoundly ambivalent excoriation of their native Ireland. And while O'Brien's sexual politics can make Joyce seem like a fusty Edwardian by comparison, both novelists got a certain amount of flack for their erotic frankness. So this latest match from the Penguin Lives series seems like a good one--and largely lives up to its promise. O'Brien makes no pretense of competing with Richard Ellmann's immense, magisterial portrait. Instead she has concocted in James Joyce something that resembles one of her own novels: a spirited, lyrical, and acerbic narrative that just happens to feature the author of Ulysses in the starring role. Having experienced the constrictions of Irish life firsthand, O'Brien is particularly good on Joyce's downwardly mobile childhood. Was his resulting hatred of his native land exaggerated? Apparently not: No one who has not lived in such straitened and hideous circumstances can understand the battering of that upbringing. All the more because they had come down in the world, a tumble from semi-gentility, servants, a nicely laid table, cut glasses, a piano, the accoutrements of middle-class life, relegated to the near slums in Mountjoy Square, the gaunt spectral mansions in which children sat like mice in the gaping doorways. The author also gives a vivid sense of her subject's devotion to his art, an altar upon which he happily sacrificed his family, health, friends, and even his eyesight. She is stubborn in her defense of Joyce's sublime irresponsibility, which she ascribes to all writers: "It is a paradox that while wrestling with the language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glisteningly depict." O'Brien's own wrestling match in James Joyce has, to be honest, its share of pins and minor pratfalls: there are some embarrassing repetitions and punctuational oddities, and her occasional assimilation of Joyce's own language is an awkward (if heartfelt) form of homage. Still, when she sticks to her own inflections, her account of this "funnominal man" is an eminently readable and entertaining dose of Irish bitters. --James Marcus

    Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the émigré author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, Véra, and third for no one at all."Without my wife," he once noted, "I wouldn't have written a single novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form.

    As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell's story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell's treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject). Lowell's New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, his many hospitalizations, his vivid presence as both a teacher and a maker of poems--Jamison gives us the poet's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of his intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and she is the first biographer to have spoken with his daughter, Harriet Lowell. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was--both despite and because of mental illness--a passionate, original observer of the human condition.