Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Unquestionably Joseph Epstein. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. How easy it is today to forget the simple delight of reading for no intended purpose. Each of the 39 pieces in this book is a pure pleasure to read.
This authoritative Royal Economic Society edition of Essays in Biography contains some of Keyne's finest writing. It has been reissued with a new introduction by Donald Winch that appraises Keynes's achievement as biographer, character analyst, and intellectual historian.
What choices must a biographer make when stitching the pieces of a life into one coherent whole? How do we best create an accurate likeness of a private life from the few articles that linger after death? How do we choose what gets left out? This intriguing and witty collection of essays by an internationally acclaimed biographer looks at how biography deals with myths and legends, what goes missing and what can't be proved in the story of a life. Virginia Woolf's Nose presents a variety of case-studies, in which literary biographers are faced with gaps and absences, unprovable stories and ambiguities surrounding their subjects. By looking at stories about Percy Bysshe Shelley's shriveled, burnt heart found pressed between the pages of a book, Jane Austen's fainting spell, Samuel Pepys's lobsters, and the varied versions of Virginia Woolf's life and death, preeminent biographer Hermione Lee considers how biographers deal with and often utilize these missing body parts, myths, and contested data to "fill in the gaps" of a life story. In "Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters," an essay dealing with missing parts and biographical legends, Hermione Lee discusses one of the most complicated and emotionally charged examples of the contested use of biographical sources. "Jane Austen Faints" takes five competing versions of the same dramatic moment in the writer's life to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women. "Virginia Woolf's Nose" looks at the way this legendary author's life has been translated through successive transformations, from biography to fiction to film, and suggests there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life. Finally, "How to End It All" analyzes the changing treatment of deathbed scenes in biography to show how biographical conventions have shifted, and asks why the narrators and readers of life-stories feel the need to give special meaning and emphasis to endings. Virginia Woolf's Nose sheds new light on the way biographers bring their subjects to life as physical beings, and offers captivating new insights into the drama of "life-writing". Virginia Woolf's Nose is a witty, eloquent, and funny text by a renowned biographer whose sensitivity to the art of telling a story about a human life is unparalleled--and in creating it, Lee articulates and redefines the parameters of her craft.
These fifteen chapters comprise biographical sketches of notable but heretofore unknown (or lesser known) African Americans, among them General Daniel "Chappie" James, Jr. (the first African American four-star general in the U.S. Air Force); William Levi Dawson (a composer); Vinnette Carroll (a director and playwright); Elizabeth Ross Haynes (an early political speaker and activist); Richard Allen (founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church); Besse Head (a South African-born writer); Maria Stewart (a nineteenth-century African American writer); and a number of others.
Pioneers in Marketing: A Collection of Biographical Essays discusses eight historically important marketing scholars whose careers collectively spanned over 100 years. An introductory chapter describes the role of biography in the study of marketing thought, and introduces the eight subjects in this collection. Subsequent chapters describe the lives of Edward David Jones, Simon Litman, Henry Charles Taylor, Percival White, George Burton Hotchkiss, Theodore N. Beckman, David D. Monieson, and William R. Davidson, focusing on their intellectual and professional contributions to the marketing discipline. The biographies are based on rare archival materials, some personal interviews, and analysis of the subjects’ major works. The final chapter draws lessons from the collection for marketing students and teachers. Several important discoveries are reported that suggest opportunities for further research. These stories will inform and inspire students of marketing.
"Contains thirty-five sketches about Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Rousseau, Gibbon, Walpole, Boswell, Carlyle, Sarah Bernhardt, and a number of delightful eccentrics, including Lady Hester Stanhope."--Back cover
Unique among early modern artists, the Baroque painter, sculptor, and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini was the subject of two monographic biographies published shortly after his death in 1680: one by the Florentine connoisseur and writer Filippo Baldinucci (1682), and the second by Bernini's son, Domenico (1713). This interdisciplinary collection of essays by historians of art and literature marks the first sustained examination of the two biographies, first and foremost as texts. A substantial introductory essay considers each biography's author, genesis, and foundational role in the study of Bernini. Nine essays combining art-historical research with insights from philology, literary history, and art and literary theory offer major new insights into the multifarious connections between biography, art history, and aesthetics, inviting readers to rethink Bernini's life, art, and milieu. Contributors are Eraldo Bellini, Heiko Damm, John D. Lyons, Sarah McPhee, Tomaso Montanari, Rudolf Preimesberger, Robert Williams, and the editors.Maarten Delbeke is Assistant Professor of architectural history and theory at the universities of Ghent and Leiden. Formerly the Scott Opler Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College (Oxford), he is the author of several articles and a forthcoming book on Seicento art and theory.Evonne Levy is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Toronto. She is also the author of Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (2004).
The contributions in this book draw attention to the close, though sometimes ambiguous, relationship between biography, aesthetics, ideology, social critique and gender in Dos Passosâ (TM)s writings. Most of the essays are important additions to the ongoing scholarly critique on the authorâ (TM)s works, considered in terms of innovative literary techniques and the myriad of literary representations, as well as of core thematic issues that have helped define Dos Passos both as a towering figure of American Modernism, and outspoken political and social critic. Further to scrutinizing Dos Passosâ (TM)s biographic aspects and literary innovations, the book also offers invaluable insights into the historiographical, ideological and social dimensions of the American (and to some extent European) society of the time, dominated by unprecedented social and political instability that shattered the â ~American Dreamâ (TM) of liberty and egalitarianism, and by international warfare. The present collection of essays is a worthy contribution to the growing body of critical studies on John Dos Passosâ (TM)s writings, which indisputably endorse the status of his literary name.
Essays in Biography is a play on words conveying Carl Rollyson's attempt to explore the nature of biography in pieces about the history of the genre and in portrayals of biographers (Plutarch, Leon Edel, and W. A. Swanberg), literary figures (Lillian Hellman, Jack London), philosophers and critics (Leo Strauss and Hippolyte Taine), political figures (Winston Churchill and Napoleon), and artists (Rembrandt and Rubens). An essay in biography, Rollyson argues, is an effort to comprehend a life that is inherently incomplete and subject to revision. Many of the facts about a biographical subject's life that are blandly presented in reference books have been discovered by biographers at great cost to their reputations. With the history of biography as a censored genre in mind, he encourages readers of biography to look critically at the biographies they read-no matter whether those biographies are book-length narratives or short encyclopedia entries. Many of the pairings in Essays in Biography are meant to evoke Plutarch's presentation of "parallel lives." The biographical essay, Rollyson concludes, is a unique form of knowledge, one that modern critics have devalued by trying to separate the creator from his creation.
