Résultats Éditeur "Tantor Audio" dans Auteurs

Based on extensive research and access to Alcott's journals and correspondence, Cheever chronicles all aspects of Alcott's life, beginning with the fateful meeting of her parents to her death, just two days after that of her dynamic and domineering father, Bronson. Cheever examines Alcott's role as a woman, a working writer, and a daughter at a time when Alcott's rejection of marriage in favor of independence - a decision to be no man's "little woman" - was seen as defying conventional wisdom.

Jonathan Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: How does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers on the one hand while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the two later novels, on which his reputation rests?

When 28-year-old San Francisco Daily Morning Call reporter Mark Twain met Tom Sawyer at a local bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first novel. As Twain steamed, played cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, customs inspector, and local hero responsible for having saved 90 lives at sea), he had second thoughts about Shirley Tempest, his proposed book about a local girl firefighter, and began to envision a novel of wider scope.

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and 1,800 pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the "king of 20th-century smut", with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s, when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height. With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon.

Almost 200 years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, and the current flare in the cultural zeitgeist echoes the continuous revival of her works, from the time of original publication through the 20th century. In Jane's Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography of the author and analyzes her lasting cultural influence, making this essential listening for anyone interested in Austen's life, works, and remarkably potent fame.

In 1940 Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning to him book reviews for the New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim. Their intimate friendship blossomed over a shared interest in all things Russian, ruffled a bit by political disagreements. But then came Lolita, and suddenly Nabokov was the big (and very rich) dog.

Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set on two continents, it tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international acclaim. Combining new evidence and gripping cultural history, Michele Mendelssohn dramatizes Wilde's rise, fall, and resurrection as part of a spectacular transatlantic pageant. With superb style and an instinct for storytelling, she brings to life the charming young Irishman who set out to captivate the US and Britain with his words.

Anya Seton was the best-selling author of ten historical novels, including the masterpieces Katherine and The Winthrop Woman, which are still widely beloved over 60 years after their publication; yet there has never before been a book-length biography about this great American writer. Ann Seton was born in 1904 the daughter of two celebrity writers: Ernest Thompson Seton and Grace Gallatin Seton. At age 36 and self-renamed Anya, she placed her first novel with a major publisher.

Famous authors, like everybody else, know that one day they will die. Final Chapters tells the fascinating stories of more than 100 writers' encounters with death - and their attitudes toward the Grim Reaper: fear, uncertainty, or acceptance.

Reading Backwards opens with the autobiographical "My Life in the Theater," a memoir of the younger Crowley's earliest ambitions, and closes with the moving and memorable "Practicing the Arts of Peace." In between, the author offers us more than 30 carefully crafted essays, each one notable for its insight, intelligence, and typically graceful prose.

The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious - and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of broke writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a rich and beguiling series of guidebooks to the 48 states. All this fell within the singular purview of the Federal Writers' Project - a division of the Works Progress Administration founded to employ jobless writers, from best-selling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified.

Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama's governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she became increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her.

Daniel Asa Rose was a successful novelist, memoirist, book critic, and columnist for the New York Times magazine, Esquire, and others, when the top blew off his domestic life. His wife of sixteen years wanted out. Before he could slip into depression, doubt, and self-loathing, Dan's lifelong friend Tony made an irresistible proposition: go back to the place where, forty years earlier, their college road trip had come to a crashing halt, T-boned by a woman in the decidedly oddball little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

The mercurial, self-mythologizing novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the twentieth-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was the finest observer and chronicler of his age. Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia, and he died an alcoholic.

Laursen's book relates the event-filled life of a brilliant and complex figure, including his victory over a possibly career-ending disability, his tumultuous second marriage, his struggles with the scientific establishment, and the fascinating story of the making of The Joy of Sex.

Quoting extensively from Eliot's poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews, archives, and previously undisclosed memoirs, Crawford shows how the poet's background in Missouri, Massachusetts, and Paris made him a lightning rod for modernity. Most impressively, Young Eliot reveals the way he accessed his inner life—his anguishes and his fears—and blended them with his omnivorous reading to create his masterpieces "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land.

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac's life they were—in Holmes's words—"Brother Souls." Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term "Beat Generation" to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes.