The World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon is one of the twentieth century's greatest icons and Jean Moorcroft Wilson is the leading authority on him. In Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, the second volume of her best-selling, authorized biography, Wilson completes her definitive analysis of his life and works, exploring Sassoon's experiences after the Great War. For many people, Sassoon exists primarily as a First World War poet and bold fighter, who earned the nickname 'Mad Jack' in the trenches and risked Court Martial, possibly the firing squad, with his public protest against the War. Much less is known about his life after the Armistice. Wilson uncovers a series of love affairs with such larger-than-life characters as Queen Victoria's great-grandson, Prince Phillip of Hess, the flamboyant Ivor Novello and the exotic and bejeweled Hon. Stephen Tennant. This period also sees Sassoon establishing close friendships with some of the greatest literary figures of the age, Hardy, Beerbohm, E. M. Forster and T. E.Lawrence among them. Sassoon himself said that most people thought he had died in 1919. But Wilson shows that his poetry is, if anything, more powerful in the second half of his life. Based on a decade of meticulous research and interviews with many who knew Sassoon well, much of the material is published here for the first time. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches completes a fascinating story that is beautifully told.
Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year Excerpted in The New Yorker Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times). Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?” Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.
Essential for understanding Patricia Highsmith’s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also “one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City” (Dwight Garner,—New York Times). Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith? Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith’s monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals “Pat” at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native’s adventurous twenties,?The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life—rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers—with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader’s edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal).
Camus's 1st vol. of Notebooks (1935-1942) ; translated from the French, and with a pref. and notes, by P. Thody. (His 2nd vol. included 1942-1951, translated from the French and annotated by J. O'Brien).
The 1980s saw constant reports of an information revolution. This book, first published in 1986, challenges this view. It argues that the information revolution is an illusion, a rhetorical gambit, an expression of profound historical ignorance, and a movement dedicated to purveying misunderstanding and disseminating disinformation. In this historically based attack on the information revolution, Professor Winston takes a had look at the four central information technologies – telephones, television, computers and satellites. He describes how these technologies were created and diffused, showing that instead of revolution we just have ‘business as usual’. He formulates a ‘law’ of the suppression of radical potential – a law which states that new telecommunication technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is contained. Despite the so-called information revolution, the major institutions of society remain unchanged, and most of us remain in total ignorance of the history of technology.
This bibliography describes all John Betjeman's known writings, including his own books, contributions to periodicals and to books by others, lectures, and radio and television programs. Other categories include editorships and interviews, as well as a section devoted to writings about him. Manuscripts and drafts of his works are described in detail.
"The Great William" is the first book-length study to examine how writers wrestled with Shakespeare on the very pages from which they read, at the time they were reading. Theodore Leinwand reveals the remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters unnoticed in familiar Shakespeare influence studies. Each of the writers discussed here read Shakespeare over the course of decades, and each of them focused on surprising and intensely felt aspects of Shakespeare s poetic practice. Marginalia, reading notes, lectures, and journals show us, for example, how Keats arrived at his famous diagnosis of Shakespearean negative capability; why Virginia Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby; what Allen Ginsberg meant by the mouth feel of Shakespeare s verse; and how Ted Hughes stumbled onto the dark matter that provided him with what he called the skeleton key to all of the Shakespeare s plays. Leinwand shows that Shakespeare "did" something to these writers well in excess of his influence on their writing. He thereby speaks to the connection "any" reader of Shakespeare may feel with Coleridge, Keats, Woolf, Olson, Berryman, Ginsberg, or Hughes. We know as well as Keats that Shakespeare overwhelms us. Like him, our awe competes with our pleasure in reading The Great William. "
Following the Front is a compilation of WWII dispatches written by Sidney A. Olson for TIME and LIFE magazines, 1944-1945. Olson, who joined Time Inc. in 1939 and served as a senior editor there, asked to be assigned overseas as a war correspondent. In mid-December, 1944, he received his accreditation from the War Department and sailed for London. Attached to the European Theater of Operations (ETO), Olson followed the Allied Forces as they pushed the Nazis back into Germany. He typed up his reports and cabled them to his editors in New York. Following the front meant being on the move constantly. In late January, Olson made his way to Paris, flew to Brussels, then drove to the battlefront in Holland. From that time forward, he never really stopped moving. He would race ahead and circle back, hopping from one military division to the next, gradually making his way across Germany and into Austria. His dispatches illustrate--line by line, battle by battle--the extraordinary Allied effort to defeat Hitler.
In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here for the first time in English, Notebooks for an Ethics is Sartre's attempt to articulate a moral philosophy. In the Notebooks he addresses any number of themes and topics relevant to an effort to formulate a concrete and revolutionary socialist ethics, among them the differences between force and violence, the relationship of means and ends, and the relationship of oppression and alienation. Most important, he tries to show that there can be an authentic mutual recognition among free individuals where no one steals another's freedom. While remaining committed to the basic principles of Being and Nothingness, Sartre here seeks to locate the foundation for action in history and society. The Notebooks thus form an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre grapples anew with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. In dealing with fundamental modes of relating to the Other, among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt, he highlights the notions of conversion and creation as they figure in the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two appendixes, one on "the good and subjectivity", the other on the problem of blacks in theUnited States as a case study of oppression.
