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At Swim-Two-Birds At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction. The novel's title derives from "Snám dá Én" (Middle Ir.: "The narrow water of the two birds"; Modern Irish: Snámh Dá Éan), an ancient ford on the River Shannon, between Clonmacnoise and Shannonbridge, reportedly visited by the legendary King Sweeney, a character in the novel. The novel was included in "TIME" magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was also included in a list, published by "The Guardian", of the 100 best English-language novels of all time. Plot summary. "At Swim-Two-Birds" presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student believes that "one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with", and he accordingly sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the Pooka MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class". The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student's creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns. The third consists of the student's adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney. In the autobiographical frame story, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinking stout with his college friends, lying in bed, and working on his book than he does going to class. The stories that the student is writing soon become intertwined with each other. John Furriskey meets and befriends two of Trellis's other characters, Antony Lamont and Paul Shanahan. They each become resentful of Trellis's control over their destinies, and manage to drug him so that he will spend more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives rather than be ruled by the lurid plots of his novels. Meanwhile, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont (Antony Lamont's sister) in order that Furriskey might seduce and betray her, but "blinded by her beauty" Trellis "so far forgets himself as to assault her himself." Sheila, in due course, gives birth to a child named Orlick, who is born as a polite and articulate young man with a gift for writing fiction. The entire group of Trellis's characters, by now including Finn, Sweeney, the urbane Pooka and an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy who lives in the Pooka's pocket, convenes in Trellis's fictional Red Swan Hotel where they devise a way to overthrow their author. Encouraged by the others, Orlick starts writing a novel about his father in which Trellis is tried by his own creations, found guilty and viciously tortured. Just as Orlick's novel is about to climax with Trellis' death, the college student passes his exams and reconciles with his uncle. He completes his story by having Trellis's maid accidentally burn the papers sustaining the existence of Furriskey and his friends, freeing Trellis. Genesis and composition. The idea of interaction between the author and his characters is not new, and one earlier example is Miguel de Unamuno's 1914 novel "Niebla". An even earlier example is "A Sensation Novel" (1871), a comic musical play in three acts (or volumes) written by W.S. Gilbert before he began collaborating with Arthur Sullivan. (Details of "A Sensation Novel" reappear in Gilbert and Sullivan's musical "Ruddigore".) The story of "A Sensation Novel" concerns an author suffering from writer's block who finds that the characters in his novel are dissatisfied. O'Nolan first explored the idea of fictional characters rebelling against their creator in a short story titled "Scenes in a novel", published in the UCD literary magazine "Comhthrom Féinne" (Ir., "Fair Play") in 1934. The story was a first-person narrative ostensibly written by a novelist called Brother Barnabas, whose characters become tired of doing his bidding and who eventually conspire to murder him:The book is seething with conspiracy and there have been at least two whispered consultations between all the characters, including two who have not yet been officially created. [...] Candidly, reader, I fear my number's up. The mythological content of "At Swim" was inspired by O'Nolan's affection for Early Irish literature. He grew up in an Irish-speaking home and although he claimed in later life that he had attended few of his college lectures, he studied the late medieval Irish literary tradition as part of the syllabus and acquired enough Old Irish to be able to compose in the language with reasonable fluency. His M.A. thesis was entitled "Nature Poetry in Irish" ("Nádúirfhilíocht na Gaedhilge"), although his examiner Agnes O'Farrelly rejected the initial draft and he was obliged to rewrite it. "At Swim-Two-Birds" contains references to no less than fourteen different sources in early and medieval Irish literature. Most of the poetry recited by King Sweeney was taken directly from the Middle Irish romance "Buile Suibhne", O'Nolan slightly modifying the translations for comic effect. For example, the original "an clog náomh re náomhaibh", translated by J. G. O'Keeffe in the standard edition as "the bell of saints before saints", is rendered by O'Nolan as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints". "At Swim-Two-Birds" has been classified as a Menippean satire. O'Brien was exposed to the Menippean tradition through the modern literature he is known to have admired, including works by James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Søren Kierkegaard and James Branch Cabell, but he may also have encountered it in the course of his study of medieval Irish literature; the Middle Irish satire "Aislinge Meic Con Glinne" has been described as "the best major work of parody in the Irish language". O'Nolan composed the novel on an Underwood portable typewriter in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother Micheál. The typewriter rested on a table constructed by O'Nolan from the offcuts of a modified trellis that had stood in the O'Nolan family's back garden. O'Brien's biographer believes that it was the unusual material that the writing table was made of that inspired the name of the character "Dermot Trellis", although there is no reference to where this information was found. O'Nolan used various found texts in the novel; a letter from a horseracing tipster was given to him by a college friend, while the painter Cecil Salkeld gave O'Nolan the original "Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences". Before submitting the manuscript for publication O'Nolan gave it to friends to read. A friend wrote him a letter which included suggestions about how to end the novel and O'Nolan incorporated the salient part of the letter into the text itself, although he later cut it. The sudden death in 1937 of O'Nolan's father Michael O'Nolan may have influenced the episode in which the student narrator regrets his unkind thoughts about his previously despised uncle. Publication history. "At Swim-Two-Birds" was accepted for publication by Longman's on the recommendation of Graham Greene, who was a reader for them at the time. It was published under the pseudonym of Flann O'Brien, a name O'Nolan had already used to write hoax letters to the "Irish Times". O'Nolan had suggested using "Flann O'Brien" as a pen-name during negotiation with Longman's:I have been thinking over the question of a pen-name and would suggest Flann O'Brien. I think this invention has the advantage that it contains an unusual name and one that is quite ordinary. "Flann" is an old Irish name now rarely heard. The book was published on 13 March 1939, but did not sell well: by the outbreak of World War II it had sold scarcely more than 240 copies. In 1940, Longman's London premises were destroyed during a bombing raid by the Luftwaffe and almost all the unsold copies were incinerated. The novel was republished by Pantheon Books in New York City in 1950, on the recommendation of James Johnson Sweeney, but sales remained low. In May 1959 Timothy O'Keeffe, while editorial director of the London publishing house MacGibbon & Kee, persuaded O'Nolan to allow him to republish "At Swim-Two-Birds." More recently, the novel was republished in the United States by Dalkey Archive Press. Literary significance and criticism. The initial reviews for "At Swim-Two-Birds" were not enthusiastic. "The Times Literary Supplement" said that the book's only notable feature was a "schoolboy brand of mild vulgarity"; the "New Statesman" complained that "long passages in imitation of the Joycean parody of the early Irish epic are devastatingly dull" and the Irish novelist Seán Ó Faoláin commented in "John O'London's Weekly" that although the book had its moments, it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it." However, most of the support for "At Swim-Two-Birds" came not from newspaper reviewers but from writers. Dylan Thomas, in a remark that would be quoted on dust-jackets in later editions of the book, said "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl". Anthony Burgess considered it one of the ninety-nine greatest novels written between 1939 and 1984. Graham Greene's enthusiastic reader's report was instrumental in getting the book published in the first place:It is in the line of "Tristram Shandy" and "Ulysses": its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland. [...] We have had books inside books before now, and characters who are given life outside their fiction, but O'Nolan takes Pirandello and Gide a long way further. O'Nolan's friend Niall Sheridan gave James Joyce an inscribed copy of the book. Joyce declared it the work of a "real writer" who had "the true comic spirit" and attempted to get the book reviewed in French periodicals, although without success. It is thought to have been the last novel Joyce ever read. Anthony Cronin has written of the effect the novel had on him as a seventeen-year-old in 1940s Dublin, praising its "umistakable sheen of the "avant-garde"", describing it "breathtakingly funny" and noting "the deadly accuracy of the ear for lower middle class Dublin speech". Most academic criticism of the book has sought to appropriate it one way or the other; critics like Bernard Benstock, who argued that O'Brien's embrace of myth and refusal of realism "ensnare[d] him with the second rank", have been in the minority. Vivian Mercier described it in "The Irish Comic Tradition" as "the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century – with the doubtful exception of "Finnegans Wake"." Rüdiger Imhof has noted how works by B. S. Johnson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Alasdair Gray and John Fowles carry explicit references to "At Swim-Two-Birds". Michael Cronin draws attention to the metafictional and game-playing elements of the book, comparing it to the fictions of Raymond Queneau, and responds to criticism that the book is insufficiently respectful of realist conventions:Contrary to what Benstock argues, what post-independence Ireland needed was not less but more of the type of playful, self-aware writing being proposed by Flann O'Brien in "At Swim-Two-Birds"... We would all be very much poorer without Mad O'Brien's narrative chessmen.Keith Hopper has argued that, contrary to the common tendency to favour "At Swim-Two-Birds" as "the primary defining text of the O'Brien oeuvre", the novel is in fact less, not more, experimental than O'Brien's second novel, the posthumously published "The Third Policeman":"At Swim-Two-Birds" is best considered as a late-modernist, transitional text which critiques both realism and modernism in an openly deconstructive manner, and in the process comes to the brink of an exciting new aesthetic. I will argue that the metafictional techniques developed publicly in [the book] ... are imbricated and embedded within the texture of "The Third Policeman". In a long essay published in 2000, Declan Kiberd analysed "At Swim-Two-Birds" from a postcolonial perspective, seeing it as a complex imaginative response to the economic and social stagnation of 1930s Ireland and arguing that the fragmented and polyphonic texture of the book is the work of an author who is "less anxious to say something new than to find a self that is capable of saying anything at all." Kiberd suggests that the one element of the book which is not seriously ironised or satirised is Sweeney's poetry, and that this is related to O'Nolan's genuine if complex respect for Irish-language literature:What saved O'Brien from lapsing into postmodern nihilism was not his Catholicism which held that the world was a doomed and hopeless place, but his respect for the prose of "An tOileánach" or the poetry of "Buile Suibhne", where language still did its appointed work. [...] He was an experimentalist who was way ahead of his time: only after his death did his readers learn how to become his contemporaries. In a 1939 essay titled "When Fiction Lives in Fiction", Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges described Flann O'Brien's masterpiece as follows, I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien, "At Swim-Two-Birds". A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student. "At Swim-Two-Birds" is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness. Stephen Fry has declared "At Swim-Two-Birds" one of his favourite books. In 2011, the book was placed on "Time Magazine"’s top 100 fiction books written in English since 1923. Translations. "At Swim-Two-Birds" has been translated into several languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian. The first French translation, "Kermesse irlandaise", was written by Henri Morisset and published in 1964; another, "Swim-Two-Birds", was published in 2002. The Spanish translation, "En Nadar-dos-pájaros," was published in 1989 by Edhasa. The Dutch translation "Tegengif" was made by Bob den Uyl and first published by Meulenhoff in 1974. It was published again in 2010 by Atlas as "Op Twee-Vogel-Wad". The book has been translated into German twice, once in 1966 by Lore Fiedler and subsequently in 2005 by Harry Rowohlt. The book has also been adapted as a German-language film by Austrian director Kurt Palm. The Romanian version is by Adrian Oțoiu and was published in 2005, as ' La Doi Lebădoi'. The Bulgarian translation "Plavashtite Chavki" by Filipina Filipova was published in 2008 by www.famapublishers.com Into other media. Film. The Austrian director Kurt Palm made a film from the book in 1997. The title of the film is "In Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel". Actor Brendan Gleeson has long planned to make his directorial debut in a movie adaptation of the book. The Irish production company Parallel Pictures announced that it would produce the film with a budget of $11 million. Michael Fassbender, Colin Farrell, Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Cillian Murphy have at various times been attached to star in the film. Gleeson confirmed in July 2011 that he had secured funding for the project. He described the writing of the script as torturous and that it had taken 14 drafts so far. As of April 2014, the film was still in development. Stage. The book has been adapted for the stage on at least four occasions. The first stage version was commissioned in 1971 by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and written by Audrey Welsh. The British theatre company Ridiculusmus toured a three-man adaptation of it in 1994–1995 and there was a 1998 version by Alex Johnston for the Abbey Theatre. A more recent stage version was directed by Niall Henry and performed by the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo in November 2009. Radio. The novel was adapted for radio by Eric Ewens and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 26 August 1979, repeated 2 November 1980. The director was Ronald Mason. Epigraph. The Greek phrase found in the front-matter of the novel is from Euripides's "Herakles": (existatai gar pant' ap' allêlôn dikha), English "for all things change, making way for each other".

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In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time (), also translated as Remembrance of Things Past, is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust (1871–1922). It is his most prominent work, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory; the most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume. It gained fame in English in translations by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin as "Remembrance of Things Past", but the title "In Search of Lost Time", a literal rendering of the French, became ascendant after D. J. Enright adopted it for his revised translation published in 1992. "In Search of Lost Time" follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in the late 19th century and early 20th century high society France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning to the world. The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished he kept adding new material and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages, as they existed only in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert. The work was published in France between 1913 and 1927. Proust paid for the publication of the first volume (by the Grasset publishing house) after it had been turned down by leading editors who had been offered the manuscript in longhand. Many of its ideas, motifs and scenes were anticipated in Proust's unfinished novel "Jean Santeuil" (1896–99), though the perspective and treatment there are different, and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, "Contre Sainte-Beuve" (1908–09). The novel had great influence on twentieth-century literature; some writers have sought to emulate it, others to parody it. In the centenary year of the novel's first volume, Edmund White pronounced "À la recherche du temps perdu" "the most respected novel of the twentieth century." Initial publication. The novel was initially published in seven volumes: Synopsis. The novel recounts the experiences of the Narrator (who is never definitively named) while he is growing up, learning about art, participating in society, and falling in love. Volume One: "Swann's Way". The Narrator begins by noting, "For a long time, I went to bed early." He comments on the way sleep seems to alter one's surroundings, and the way habit makes one indifferent to them. He remembers being in his room in the family's country home in Combray, while downstairs his parents entertain their friend Charles Swann, an elegant man of Jewish origin with strong ties to society. Due to Swann's visit, the Narrator is deprived of his mother's goodnight kiss, but he gets her to spend the night reading to him. This memory is the only one he has of Combray until years later the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea inspires a nostalgic incident of involuntary memory. He remembers having a similar snack as a child with his invalid aunt Léonie, and it leads to more memories of Combray. He describes their servant Françoise, who is uneducated but possesses an earthy wisdom and a strong sense of both duty and tradition. He meets an elegant "lady in pink" while visiting his uncle Adolphe. He develops a love of the theater, especially the actress Berma, and his awkward Jewish friend Bloch introduces him to the works of the writer Bergotte. He learns Swann made an unsuitable marriage but has social ambitions for his beautiful daughter Gilberte. Legrandin, a snobbish friend of the family, tries to avoid introducing the boy to his well-to-do sister. The Narrator describes two routes for country walks the child and his parents often enjoyed: the way past Swann's home (the Méséglise way), and the Guermantes way, both containing scenes of natural beauty. Taking the Méséglise way, he sees Gilberte Swann standing in her yard with a lady in white, Mme. Swann, and her supposed lover: Baron de Charlus, a friend of Swann's. Gilberte makes a gesture that the Narrator interprets as a rude dismissal. During another walk, he spies a lesbian scene involving Mlle. Vinteuil, daughter of a composer, and her friend. The Guermantes way is symbolic of the Guermantes family, the nobility of the area. The Narrator is awed by the magic of their name and is captivated when he first sees Mme. de Guermantes. He discovers how appearances conceal the true nature of things and tries writing a description of some nearby steeples. Lying in bed, he seems transported back to these places until he awakens. Mme. Verdurin is an autocratic hostess who, aided by her husband, demands total obedience from the guests in her "little clan". One guest is Odette de Crécy, a former courtesan, who has met Swann and invites him to the group. Swann is too refined for such company, but Odette gradually intrigues him with her unusual style. A sonata by Vinteuil, which features a "little phrase", becomes the motif for their deepening relationship. The Verdurins host M. de Forcheville; their guests include Cottard, a doctor; Brichot, an academic; Saniette, the object of scorn; and a painter, M. Biche. Swann grows jealous of Odette, who now keeps him at arm's length, and suspects an affair between her and Forcheville, aided by the Verdurins. Swann seeks respite by attending a society concert that includes Legrandin's sister and a young Mme. de Guermantes; the "little phrase" is played and Swann realizes Odette's love for him is gone. He tortures himself wondering about her true relationships with others, but his love for her, despite renewals, gradually diminishes. He moves on and marvels that he ever loved a woman who was not his type. At home in Paris, the Narrator dreams of visiting Venice or the church in Balbec, a resort, but he is too unwell and instead takes walks in the Champs-Élysées, where he meets and befriends Gilberte. He holds her father, now married to Odette, in the highest esteem, and is awed by the beautiful sight of Mme. Swann strolling in public. Years later, the old sights of the area are long gone, and he laments the fleeting nature of places. Volume Two: "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower". The Narrator's parents invite M. de Norpois, a diplomat colleague of the Narrator's father, to dinner. With Norpois's intervention, the Narrator is finally allowed to go see the Berma perform in a play, but is disappointed by her acting. Afterwards, at dinner, he watches Norpois, who is extremely diplomatic and correct at all times, expound on society and art. The Narrator gives him a draft of his writing, but Norpois gently indicates it is not good. The Narrator continues to go to the Champs-Élysées and play with Gilberte. Her parents distrust him, so he writes to them in protest. He and Gilberte wrestle and he has an orgasm. Gilberte invites him to tea, and he becomes a regular at her house. He observes Mme. Swann's inferior social status, Swann's lowered standards and indifference towards his wife, and Gilberte's affection for her father. The Narrator contemplates how he has attained his wish to know the Swanns, and savors their unique style. At one of their parties he meets and befriends Bergotte, who gives his impressions of society figures and artists. But the Narrator is still unable to start writing seriously. His friend Bloch takes him to a brothel, where there is a Jewish prostitute named Rachel. He showers Mme. Swann with flowers, being almost on better terms with her than with Gilberte. One day, he and Gilberte quarrel and he decides never to see her again. However, he continues to visit Mme. Swann, who has become a popular hostess, with her guests including Mme. Bontemps, who has a niece named Albertine. The Narrator hopes for a letter from Gilberte repairing their friendship, but gradually feels himself losing interest. He breaks down and plans to reconcile with her, but spies from afar someone resembling her walking with a boy and gives her up for good. He stops visiting her mother also, who is now a celebrated beauty admired by passersby, and years later he can recall the glamour she displayed then. Two years later, the Narrator, his grandmother, and Françoise set out for the seaside town of Balbec. The Narrator is almost totally indifferent to Gilberte now. During the train ride, his grandmother, who only believes in proper books, lends him her favorite: the "Letters" of Mme. de Sévigné. At Balbec, the Narrator is disappointed with the church and uncomfortable in his unfamiliar hotel room, but his grandmother comforts him. He admires the seascape, and learns about the colorful staff and customers around the hotel: Aimé, the discreet headwaiter; the lift operator; M. de Stermaria and his beautiful young daughter; and M. de Cambremer and his wife, Legrandin's sister. His grandmother encounters an old friend, the blue-blooded Mme. de Villeparisis, and they renew their friendship. The three of them go for rides in the country, openly discussing art and politics. The Narrator longs for the country girls he sees alongside the roads, and has a strange feeling—possibly memory, possibly something else—while admiring a row of three trees. Mme. de Villeparisis is joined by her glamorous great-nephew Robert de Saint-Loup, who is involved with an unsuitable woman. Despite initial awkwardness, the Narrator and his grandmother become good friends with him. Bloch, the childhood friend from Combray, turns up with his family, and acts in typically inappropriate fashion. Saint-Loup's ultra-aristocratic and extremely rude uncle the Baron de Charlus arrives. The Narrator discovers Mme. de Villeparisis, her nephew M. de Charlus, and his nephew Saint-Loup are all of the Guermantes family. Charlus ignores the Narrator, but later visits him in his room and lends him a book. The next day, the Baron speaks shockingly informally to him, then demands the book back. The Narrator ponders Saint-Loup's attitude towards his aristocratic roots, and his relationship with his mistress, a mere actress whose recital bombed horribly with his family. One day, the Narrator sees a "little band" of teenage girls strolling beside the sea, and becomes infatuated with them, along with an unseen hotel guest named Mlle Simonet. He joins Saint-Loup for dinner and reflects on how drunkenness affects his perceptions. Later they meet the painter Elstir, and the Narrator visits his studio. The Narrator marvels at Elstir's method of renewing impressions of ordinary things, as well as his connections with the Verdurins (he is "M. Biche") and Mme. Swann. He discovers the painter knows the teenage girls, particularly one dark-haired beauty who is Albertine Simonet. Elstir arranges an introduction, and the Narrator becomes friends with her, as well as her friends Andrée, Rosemonde, and Gisele. The group goes for picnics and tours the countryside, as well as playing games, while the Narrator reflects on the nature of love as he becomes attracted to Albertine. Despite her rejection, they become close, although he still feels attracted to the whole group. At summer's end, the town closes up, and the Narrator is left with his image of first seeing the girls walking beside the sea. Volume Three: "The Guermantes Way". The Narrator's family has moved to an apartment connected with the Guermantes residence. Françoise befriends a fellow tenant, the tailor Jupien and his niece. The Narrator is fascinated by the Guermantes and their life, and is awed by their social circle while attending another Berma performance. He begins staking out the street where Mme. de Guermantes walks every day, to her evident annoyance. He decides to visit her nephew Saint-Loup at his military base, to ask to be introduced to her. After noting the landscape and his state of mind while sleeping, the Narrator meets and attends dinners with Saint-Loup's fellow officers, where they discuss the Dreyfus Affair and the art of military strategy. But the Narrator returns home after receiving a call from his aging grandmother. Mme. de Guermantes declines to see him, and he also finds he is still unable to begin writing. Saint-Loup visits on leave, and they have lunch and attend a recital with his actress mistress: Rachel, the Jewish prostitute, toward whom the unsuspecting Saint-Loup is crazed with jealousy. The Narrator then goes to Mme. de Villeparisis's salon, which is considered second-rate despite its public reputation. Legrandin attends and displays his social climbing. Bloch stridently interrogates M. de Norpois about the Dreyfus Affair, which has ripped all of society asunder, but Norpois diplomatically avoids answering. The Narrator observes Mme. de Guermantes and her aristocratic bearing, as she makes caustic remarks about friends and family, including the mistresses of her husband, who is M. de Charlus's brother. Mme. Swann arrives, and the Narrator remembers a visit from Morel, the son of his uncle Adolphe's valet, who revealed that the "lady in pink" was Mme. Swann. Charlus asks the Narrator to leave with him, and offers to make him his protégé. At home, the Narrator's grandmother has worsened, and while walking with him she suffers a stroke. The family seeks out the best medical help, and she is often visited by Bergotte, himself unwell, but she dies, her face reverting to its youthful appearance. Several months later, Saint-Loup, now single, convinces the Narrator to ask out the Stermaria daughter, newly divorced. Albertine visits; she has matured and they share a kiss. The Narrator then goes to see Mme. de Villeparisis, where Mme. de Guermantes, whom he has stopped following, invites him to dinner. The Narrator daydreams of Mme. de Stermaria, but she abruptly cancels, although Saint-Loup rescues him from despair by taking him to dine with his aristocratic friends, who engage in petty gossip. Saint-Loup passes on an invitation from Charlus to come visit him. The next day, at the Guermantes's dinner party, the Narrator admires their Elstir paintings, then meets the cream of society, including the Princess of Parma, who is an amiable simpleton. He learns more about the Guermantes: their hereditary features; their less-refined cousins the Courvoisiers; and Mme. de Guermantes's celebrated humor, artistic tastes, and exalted diction (although she does not live up to the enchantment of her name). The discussion turns to gossip about society, including Charlus and his late wife; the affair between Norpois and Mme. de Villeparisis; and aristocratic lineages. Leaving, the Narrator visits Charlus, who falsely accuses him of slandering him. The Narrator stomps on Charlus's hat and storms out, but Charlus is strangely unperturbed and gives him a ride home. Months later, the Narrator is invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's party. He tries to verify the invitation with M. and Mme. de Guermantes, but first sees something he will describe later. They will be attending the party but do not help him, and while they are chatting, Swann arrives. Now a committed Dreyfusard, he is very sick and nearing death, but the Guermantes assure him he will outlive them. Volume Four: "Sodom and Gomorrah". The Narrator describes what he had seen earlier: while waiting for the Guermantes to return so he could ask about his invitation, he saw Charlus encounter Jupien in their courtyard. The two then went into Jupien's shop and had intercourse. The Narrator reflects on the nature of "inverts", and how they are like a secret society, never able to live in the open. He compares them to flowers, whose reproduction through the aid of insects depends solely on happenstance. Arriving at the Princesse's party, his invitation seems valid as he is greeted warmly by her. He sees Charlus exchanging knowing looks with the diplomat Vaugoubert, a fellow invert. After several tries, the Narrator manages to be introduced to the Prince de Guermantes, who then walks off with Swann, causing speculation on the topic of their conversation. Mme. de Saint-Euverte tries to recruit guests for her party the next day, but is subjected to scorn from some of the Guermantes. Charlus is captivated by the two young sons of M. de Guermantes's newest mistress. Saint-Loup arrives and mentions the names of several promiscuous women to the Narrator. Swann takes the Narrator aside and reveals the Prince wanted to admit his and his wife's pro-Dreyfus leanings. Swann is aware of his old friend Charlus's behavior, then urges the Narrator to visit Gilberte, and departs. The Narrator leaves with M. and Mme. de Guermantes, and heads home for a late-night meeting with Albertine. He grows frantic when first she is late and then calls to cancel, but he convinces her to come. He writes an indifferent letter to Gilberte, and reviews the changing social scene, which now includes Mme. Swann's salon centered on Bergotte. He decides to return to Balbec, after learning the women mentioned by Saint-Loup will be there. At Balbec, grief at his grandmother's suffering, which was worse than he knew, overwhelms him. He ponders the intermittencies of the heart and the ways of dealing with sad memories. His mother, even sadder, has become more like his grandmother in homage. Albertine is nearby and they begin spending time together, but he starts to suspect her of lesbianism and of lying to him about her activities. He fakes a preference for her friend Andrée to make her become more trustworthy, and it works, but he soon suspects her of knowing several scandalous women at the hotel, including Lea, an actress. On the way to visit Saint-Loup, they meet Morel, the valet's son who is now an excellent violinist, and then the aging Charlus, who falsely claims to know Morel and goes to speak to him. The Narrator visits the Verdurins, who are renting a house from the Cambremers. On the train with him is the little clan: Brichot, who explains at length the derivation of the local place-names; Cottard, now a celebrated doctor; Saniette, still the butt of everyone's ridicule; and a new member, Ski. The Verdurins are still haughty and dictatorial toward their guests, who are as pedantic as ever. Charlus and Morel arrive together, and Charlus's true nature is barely concealed. The Cambremers arrive, and the Verdurins barely tolerate them. Back at the hotel, the Narrator ruminates on sleep and time, and observes the amusing mannerisms of the staff, who are mostly aware of Charlus's proclivities. The Narrator and Albertine hire a chauffeur and take rides in the country, leading to observations about new forms of travel as well as country life. The Narrator is unaware that the chauffeur and Morel are acquainted, and he reviews Morel's amoral character and plans towards Jupien's niece. The Narrator is jealously suspicious of Albertine but grows tired of her. She and the Narrator attend evening dinners at the Verdurins, taking the train with the other guests; Charlus is now a regular, despite his obliviousness to the clan's mockery. He and Morel try to maintain the secret of their relationship, and the Narrator recounts a ploy involving a fake duel that Charlus used to control Morel. The passing station stops remind the Narrator of various people and incidents, including two failed attempts by the Prince de Guermantes to arrange liaisons with Morel; a final break between the Verdurins and Cambremers; and a misunderstanding between the Narrator, Charlus, and Bloch. The Narrator has grown weary of the area and prefers others over Albertine. But she reveals to him as they leave the train that she has plans with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend (the lesbians from Combray) which plunges him into despair. He invents a story about a broken engagement of his, to convince her to go to Paris with him, and after hesitating she suddenly agrees to go immediately. The Narrator tells his mother: he must marry Albertine. Volume Five: "The Prisoner". The Narrator is living with Albertine in his family's apartment, to Françoise's distrust and his absent mother's chagrin. He marvels that he has come to possess her, but has grown bored with her. He mostly stays home, but has enlisted Andrée to report on Albertine's whereabouts, as his jealousy remains. The Narrator gets advice on fashion from Mme. de Guermantes, and encounters Charlus and Morel visiting Jupien and her niece, who is being married off to Morel despite his cruelty towards her. One day, the Narrator returns from the Guermantes and finds Andrée just leaving, claiming to dislike the smell of their flowers. Albertine, who is more guarded to avoid provoking his jealousy, is maturing into an intelligent and elegant young lady. The Narrator is entranced by her beauty as she sleeps, and is only content when she is not out with others. She mentions wanting to go to the Verdurins, but the Narrator suspects an ulterior motive and analyzes her conversation for hints. He suggests she go instead to the Trocadéro with Andrée, and she reluctantly agrees. The Narrator compares dreams to wakefulness, and listens to the street vendors with Albertine, then she departs. He remembers trips she took with the chauffeur, then learns Lea the notorious actress will be at the Trocadero too. He sends Françoise to retrieve Albertine, and while waiting, he muses on music and Morel. When she returns, they go for a drive, while he pines for Venice and realizes she feels captive. He learns of Bergotte's final illness. That evening, he sneaks off to the Verdurins to try to discover the reason for Albertine's interest in them. He encounters Brichot on the way, and they discuss Swann, who has died. Charlus arrives and the Narrator reviews the Baron's struggles with Morel, then learns Mlle Vinteuil and her friend are expected (although they do not come). Morel joins in performing a septet by Vinteuil, which evokes commonalities with his sonata that only the composer could create. Mme. Verdurin is furious that Charlus has taken control of her party; in revenge the Verdurins persuade Morel to repudiate him, and Charlus falls temporarily ill from the shock. Returning home, the Narrator and Albertine fight about his solo visit to the Verdurins, and she denies having affairs with Lea or Mlle Vinteuil, but admits she lied on occasion to avoid arguments. He threatens to break it off, but they reconcile. He appreciates art and fashion with her, and ponders her mysteriousness. But his suspicion of her and Andrée is renewed, and they quarrel. After two awkward days and a restless night, he resolves to end the affair, but in the morning Françoise informs him: Albertine has asked for her boxes and left. Volume Six: "The Fugitive". The Narrator is anguished at Albertine's departure and absence. He dispatches Saint-Loup to convince her aunt Mme. Bontemps to send her back, but Albertine insists the Narrator should ask, and she will gladly return. The Narrator lies and replies he is done with her, but she just agrees with him. He writes to her that he will marry Andrée, then hears from Saint-Loup of the failure of his mission to the aunt. Desperate, he begs Albertine to return, but receives word: she has died in a riding accident. He receives two last letters from her: one wishing him and Andrée well, and one asking if she can return. The Narrator plunges into suffering amid the many different memories of Albertine, intimately linked to all of his everyday sensations. He recalls a suspicious incident she told him of at Balbec, and asks Aime, the headwaiter, to investigate. He recalls their history together and his regrets, as well as love's randomness. Aime reports back: Albertine often engaged in affairs with girls at Balbec. The Narrator sends him to learn more, and he reports other liaisons with girls. The Narrator wishes he could have known the true Albertine, whom he would have accepted. He begins to grow accustomed to the idea of her death, despite constant reminders that renew his grief. Andrée admits her own lesbianism but denies being with Albertine. The Narrator knows he will forget Albertine, just as he has forgotten Gilberte. He happens to meet Gilberte again; her mother Mme. Swann became Mme. de Forcheville and Gilberte is now part of high society, received by the Guermantes. The Narrator finally publishes an article in "Le Figaro". Andrée visits him and confesses relations with Albertine and also explains the truth behind her departure: her aunt wanted her to marry another man. The Narrator finally visits Venice with his mother, which enthralls him in every aspect. They happen to see Norpois and Mme. de Villeparisis there. A telegram signed from Albertine arrives, but the Narrator is indifferent and it is only a misprint anyway. Returning home, the Narrator and his mother receive surprising news: Gilberte will marry Saint-Loup, and Jupien's niece will be adopted by Charlus and then married to Legrandin's nephew, an invert. There is much discussion of these marriages among society. The Narrator visits Gilberte in her new home, and is shocked to learn of Saint-Loup's affair with Morel, among others. He despairs for their friendship. Volume Seven: "Time Regained". The Narrator is staying with Gilberte at her home near Combray. They go for walks, on one of which he is stunned to learn the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way are actually linked. Gilberte also tells him she was attracted to him when young, and had made a suggestive gesture to him as he watched her. Also, it was Lea she was walking with the evening he had planned to reconcile with her. He considers Saint-Loup's nature and reads an account of the Verdurins' salon, deciding he has no talent for writing. The scene shifts to a night in 1916, during World War I, when the Narrator has returned to Paris from a stay in a sanatorium and is walking the streets during a blackout. He reflects on the changed norms of art and society, with the Verdurins now highly esteemed. He recounts a 1914 visit from Saint-Loup, who was trying to enlist secretly. He recalls descriptions of the fighting he subsequently received from Saint-Loup and Gilberte, whose home was threatened. He describes a call paid on him a few days previously by Saint-Loup; they discussed military strategy. Now on the dark street, the Narrator encounters Charlus, who has completely surrendered to his impulses. Charlus reviews Morel's betrayals and his own temptation to seek vengeance; critiques Brichot's new fame as a writer, which has ostracized him from the Verdurins; and admits his general sympathy with Germany. The last part of the conversation draws a crowd of suspicious onlookers. After parting the Narrator seeks refuge in what appears to be a hotel, where he sees someone who looks familiar leaving. Inside, he discovers it to be a male brothel, and spies Charlus using the services. The proprietor turns out to be Jupien, who expresses a perverse pride in his business. A few days later, news comes that Saint-Loup has been killed in combat. The Narrator pieces together that Saint-Loup had visited Jupien's brothel, and ponders what might have been had he lived. Years later, again in Paris, the Narrator goes to a party at the house of the Prince de Guermantes. On the way he sees Charlus, now a mere shell of his former self, being helped by Jupien. The paving stones at the Guermantes house inspire another incident of involuntary memory for the Narrator, quickly followed by two more. Inside, while waiting in the library, he discerns their meaning: by putting him in contact with both the past and present, the impressions allow him to gain a vantage point outside time, affording a glimpse of the true nature of things. He realizes his whole life has prepared him for the mission of describing events as fully revealed, and (finally) resolves to begin writing. Entering the party, he is shocked at the disguises old age has given to the people he knew, and at the changes in society. Legrandin is now an invert, but is no longer a snob. Bloch is a respected writer and vital figure in society. Morel has reformed and become a respected citizen. Mme. de Forcheville is the mistress of M. de Guermantes. Mme. Verdurin has married the Prince de Guermantes after both their spouses died. Rachel is the star of the party, abetted by Mme. de Guermantes, whose social position has been eroded by her affinity for theater. Gilberte introduces her daughter to the Narrator; he is struck by the way the daughter encapsulates both the Méséglise and Guermantes ways within herself. He is spurred to writing, with help from Françoise and despite signs of approaching death. He realizes that every person carries within them the accumulated baggage of their past, and concludes that to be accurate he must describe how everyone occupies an immense range "in Time". Themes. "À la recherche" made a decisive break with the 19th-century realist and plot-driven novel, populated by people of action and people representing social and cultural groups or morals. Although parts of the novel could be read as an exploration of snobbery, deceit, jealousy and suffering and although it contains a multitude of realistic details, the focus is not on the development of a tight plot or of a coherent evolution but on a multiplicity of perspectives and on the formation of experience. The protagonists of the first volume (the narrator as a boy and Swann) are, by the standards of 19th century novels, remarkably introspective and passive, nor do they trigger action from other leading characters; to contemporary readers, reared on Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy, they would not function as centers of a plot. While there is an array of symbolism in the work, it is rarely defined through explicit "keys" leading to moral, romantic or philosophical ideas. The significance of what is happening is often placed within the memory or in the inner contemplation of what is described. This focus on the relationship between experience, memory and writing and the radical de-emphasizing of the outward plot, have become staples of the modern novel but were almost unheard of in 1913. Roger Shattuck elucidates an underlying principle in understanding Proust and the various themes present in his novel: Thus the novel embodies and manifests the principle of intermittence: to live means to perceive different and often conflicting aspects of reality. This iridescence never resolves itself completely into a unitive point of view. Accordingly, it is possible to project out of the "Search" itself a series of putative and intermittent authors... The portraitist of an expiring society, the artist of romantic reminiscence, the narrator of the laminated "I," the classicist of formal structure—all these figures are to be found in Proust... Memory. The role of memory is central to the novel, introduced with the famous madeleine episode in the first section of the novel and in the last volume, "Time Regained", a flashback similar to that caused by the madeleine is the beginning of the resolution of the story. Throughout the work many similar instances of involuntary memory, triggered by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells conjure important memories for the narrator and sometimes return attention to an earlier episode of the novel. Although Proust wrote contemporaneously with Sigmund Freud, with there being many points of similarity between their thought on the structures and mechanisms of the human mind, neither author read the other. The madeleine episode reads: No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea. Gilles Deleuze believed that the focus of Proust was not memory and the past but the narrator's learning the use of "signs" to understand and communicate ultimate reality, thereby becoming an artist. While Proust was bitterly aware of the experience of loss and exclusion—loss of loved ones, loss of affection, friendship and innocent joy, which are dramatized in the novel through recurrent jealousy, betrayal and the death of loved ones—his response to this, formulated after he had discovered Ruskin, was that the work of art can recapture the lost and thus save it from destruction, at least in our minds. Art triumphs over the destructive power of time. This element of his artistic thought is clearly inherited from romantic platonism, but Proust crosses it with a new intensity in describing jealousy, desire and self-doubt. (Note the last quatrain of Baudelaire's poem "Une Charogne": "Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will / Devour you with kisses, / That I have kept the form and the divine essence / Of my decomposed love!"). Separation anxiety. Proust begins his novel with the statement, "For a long time I used to go to bed early." This leads to lengthy discussion of his anxiety at leaving his mother at night and his attempts to force her to come and kiss him goodnight, even on nights when the family has company, culminating in a spectacular success, when his father suggests that his mother stay the night with him after he has waylaid her in the hall when she is going to bed. His anxiety leads to manipulation, much like the manipulation employed by his invalid aunt Leonie and all the lovers in the entire book, who use the same methods of petty tyranny to manipulate and possess their loved ones. Nature of art. The nature of art is a motif in the novel and is often explored at great length. Proust sets forth a theory of art in which we are all capable of producing art, if by this we mean taking the experiences of life and transforming them in a way that shows understanding and maturity. Writing, painting, and music are also discussed at great length. Morel the violinist is examined to give an example of a certain type of "artistic" character, along with other fictional artists like the novelist Bergotte, the composer Vinteuil, and the painter Elstir. As early as the "Combray" section of "Swann's Way", the narrator is concerned with his ability to write, since he desires to pursue a writing career. The transmutation of the experience of a scene in one of the family's usual walks into a short descriptive passage is described and the sample passage given. The narrator presents this passage as an early sample of his own writing, in which he has only had to alter a few words. The question of his own genius relates to all the passages in which genius is recognized or misunderstood because it presents itself in the guise of a humble friend, rather than a passionate "artiste". The question of taste or judgement in art is also an important theme, as exemplified by Swann's exquisite taste in art, which is often hidden from his friends who do not share it or subordinated to his love interests. Homosexuality. Questions pertaining to homosexuality appear throughout the novel, particularly in the later volumes. The first arrival of this theme comes in the "Combray" section of "Swann's Way", where the daughter of the piano teacher and composer Vinteuil is seduced, and the narrator observes her having lesbian relations in front of the portrait of her recently deceased father. The narrator invariably suspects his lovers of liaisons with other women, a repetition of the suspicions held by Charles Swann about his mistress and eventual wife, Odette, in "Swann's Way". The first chapter of "Cities of the Plain" ("Sodom and Gomorrah") includes a detailed account of a sexual encounter between M. de Charlus, the novel's most prominent male homosexual, and his tailor. Critics have often observed that while the character of the narrator is ostensibly heterosexual, Proust intimates that the narrator is a closeted homosexual. The narrator's manner towards male homosexuality is consistently aloof, yet the narrator is unaccountably knowledgeable. This strategy enables Proust to pursue themes related to male homosexuality—in particular the nature of closetedness—from both within and without a homosexual perspective. Proust does not designate Charlus' homosexuality until the middle of the novel, in "Cities"; afterwards the Baron's ostentatiousness and flamboyance, of which he is blithely unaware, completely absorb the narrator's perception. Lesbianism, on the other hand, tortures Swann and the narrator because it presents an inaccessible world. Whereas male homosexual desire is recognizable, insofar as it encompasses male sexuality, Odette's and Albertine's lesbian trysts represent Swann and the narrator's painful exclusion from characters they desire. There is much debate as to how great a bearing Proust's sexuality has on understanding these aspects of the novel. Although many of Proust's close family and friends suspected that he was homosexual, Proust never admitted this. It was only after his death that André Gide, in his publication of correspondence with Proust, made public Proust's homosexuality. In response to Gide's criticism that he hid his actual sexuality within his novel, Proust told Gide that "one can say anything so long as one does not say 'I'." Proust's intimate relations with such individuals as Alfred Agostinelli and Reynaldo Hahn are well-documented, though Proust was not "out and proud", except perhaps in close-knit social circles. In 1949, the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's lovers—Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée—and one has their masculine counterpart. This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in "Epistemology of the Closet" (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and in "Proust's Lesbianism" (1999) by Elisabeth Ladenson. Feminized forms of masculine names were and are commonplace in French. Critical reception. "In Search of Lost Time" is considered, by many scholars and critics, to be the definitive modern novel. It has had a profound effect on subsequent writers such as the Bloomsbury Group. "Oh if I could write like that!" marvelled Virginia Woolf in 1922. Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that "In Search of Lost Time" is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century". Vladimir Nabokov, in a 1965 interview, named the greatest prose works of the 20th century as, in order, "Joyce's "Ulysses", Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", Bely's "Petersburg", and the first half of Proust's fairy tale "In Search of Lost Time"". J. Peder Zane's book "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books", collates 125 "top 10 greatest books of all time" lists by prominent living writers; "In Search of Lost Time" is placed eighth. In the 1960s, Swedish literary critic Bengt Holmqvist described the novel as "at once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the 'nouveau roman'", indicating the sixties vogue of new, experimental French prose but also, by extension, other post-war attempts to fuse different planes of location, temporality and fragmented consciousness within the same novel. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has called it his favorite book. Proust's influence (in parody) is seen in Evelyn Waugh's "A Handful of Dust" (1934), in which Chapter 1 is entitled "Du Côté de Chez Beaver" and Chapter 6 "Du Côté de Chez Tod". Waugh did not like Proust: in letters to Nancy Mitford in 1948, he wrote, "I am reading Proust for the first time ...and am surprised to find him a mental defective" and later, "I still think [Proust] insane...the structure must be sane & that is raving." Another critic is Kazuo Ishiguro who said in an interview: "To be absolutely honest, apart from the opening volume of Proust, I find him crushingly dull." Since the publication in 1992 of a revised English translation by The Modern Library, based on a new definitive French edition (1987–89), interest in Proust's novel in the English-speaking world has increased. Two substantial new biographies have appeared in English, by Edmund White and William C. Carter, and at least two books about the experience of reading Proust have appeared by Alain de Botton and Phyllis Rose. The Proust Society of America, founded in 1997, has three chapters: at The New York Mercantile Library, the Mechanic's Institute Library in San Francisco, and the Boston Athenæum Library. Publication in English. The first six volumes were first translated into English by the Scotsman C. K. Scott Moncrieff under the title "Remembrance of Things Past", a phrase taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30; this was the first translation of the "Recherche" into another language. The individual volumes were "Swann's Way" (1922), "Within a Budding Grove" (1924), "The Guermantes Way" (1925), "Cities of the Plain" (1927), "The Captive" (1929), and "The Sweet Cheat Gone" (1930). The final volume, "Le Temps retrouvé", was initially published in English in the UK as "Time Regained" (1931), translated by Stephen Hudson (a pseudonym of Sydney Schiff), and in the US as "The Past Recaptured" (1932) in a translation by Frederick Blossom. Although cordial with Scott Moncrieff, Proust grudgingly remarked in a letter that "Remembrance" eliminated the correspondence between "Temps perdu" and "Temps retrouvé" (Painter, 352). Terence Kilmartin revised the Scott Moncrieff translation in 1981, using the new French edition of 1954. An additional revision by D.J. Enright—that is, a revision of a revision—was published by the Modern Library in 1992. It is based on the "La Pléiade" edition of the French text (1987–89), and rendered the title of the novel more literally as "In Search of Lost Time". In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation based on the "La Pléiade" French text (published in 1987–89) of "In Search of Lost Time" by a team of seven different translators overseen by editor Christopher Prendergast. The six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002, each volume under the name of a separate translator, the first volume being American writer Lydia Davis, and the others under English translators and one Australian, James Grieve. The first four volumes were published in the US under the Viking imprint as hardcover editions in 2003–2004, while the entire set is available in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint. Both the Modern Library and Penguin translations provide a detailed plot synopsis at the end of each volume. The last volume of the Modern Library edition, "Time Regained", also includes Kilmartin's "A Guide to Proust", an index of the novel's characters, persons, places, and themes. The Modern Library volumes include a handful of endnotes, and alternative versions of some of the novel's famous episodes. The Penguin volumes each provide an extensive set of brief, non-scholarly endnotes that help identify cultural references perhaps unfamiliar to contemporary English readers. Reviews which discuss the merits of both translations can be found online at the "Observer", the "Telegraph", "The New York Review of Books", "The New York Times", "TempsPerdu.com", and Reading Proust. Most recently, Yale University Press has begun to issue "In Search of Lost Time" at the rate of one volume every two or three years. They are based on the public domain translations of C. K. Scott Moncrieff (and probably Stephen Hudson), modernized and corrected, with extensive annotations. "Swann's Way" was published in the centenary year of 2013; "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" in 2015; "The Guermantes Way" in 2018. English-language translations in print. Partial Translations. Volume 1 Volumes 2-5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Terence Kilmartin compiled an index/concordance to the novel which was published in 1983 as the "Reader's Guide to the Remembrance of Things Past". The guide contains four indices: fictional characters from the novels; actual persons; places; and themes. The volume and page numbers are keyed to the 3-volume "Remembrance of Things Past" (translated by Scott Moncrieff, revised by Kilmartin, and published in 1981). Adaptations. Print Film Television Stage Radio Notes and references. Notes Bibliography

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Breakfast of Champions Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. His seventh novel, it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio and focuses on two characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Midland resident, Pontiac dealer and affluent figure in the city and Kilgore Trout, a widely published but mostly unknown science fiction author. "Breakfast of Champions" has themes of free will, suicide, and race relations among others. Plot. Breakfast of Champions tells the story of the events that lead up to the meeting of Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, the meeting itself, and the immediate aftermath. Trout is a struggling science fiction writer who, after their fateful meeting, becomes successful and wins a Nobel Prize; Hoover is a wealthy businessman who is going insane, sent over the brink by his encounter with Trout. Trout, who believes himself to be completely unknown as a writer, receives an invitation to the Midland City arts festival, and Trout travels to Midland City. First he goes to New York City, where he is abducted and beaten up by the only anonymous, faceless characters in the book, who through the media gain the moniker "The Pluto Gang." He hitches a ride first with a truck driver whose truck says PYRAMID on its side, with whom he discusses everything from politics to sex to the destruction of the planet. Then he hops a ride with the only clearly happy character in the book, the driver of a Galaxie who works for himself as a traveling salesman. Dwayne Hoover gets more and more insane as the book progresses. He terrifies his employee at the Pontiac agency, Harry LeSabre, by criticizing his clothes. LeSabre is afraid Hoover has discovered that he is a closet transexual. Then he gets in a fight with his mistress and secretary, Francine Pefko because he accuses her of asking him to buy her a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Trout and Hoover meet in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn, where Hoover's homosexual and estranged son, Bunny, plays the piano. When the bartender turns on the black lights and Trout's white shirt glows brilliantly, Hoover is entranced by it. He accosts Trout and reads his novel, Now It Can Be Told. The premise of the novel is that there is only one creature with free will in the universe (the reader of the novel) and everyone else is a robot. Hoover interprets its message as addressed to him from the Creator of the Universe, and goes on a violent rampage, injuring many people around him and ending up in a mental hospital. In the Epilogue, Trout is released from the hospital with a partially severed finger (Hoover has bitten it off in his rampage), and is wandering back to the arts festival, which has unbeknownst to him been canceled. The narrator, who has become an interactive character in the universe of his own creation, watches Trout and then chases him down. He proves that he is the Creator of the Universe by sending Trout all around the world, through time and back. Then he returns to his own universe, presumably, through the "void," while Trout yells after him, "Make me young!" Themes. Suicide, free will, mental illness, and social and economic cruelty are dealt with throughout the novel. In the preface, Vonnegut states that he tends "to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside." As with "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969) and "The Sirens of Titan" (1959), the nature of free will is called into question, in this case by considering mankind as biological machines, and physical measurements of characters are often given when they are introduced. He attributes the mental illness of Dwayne Hoover and society at large to an abundance of "bad chemicals" in the brain which, when combined with bad ideas, formed "the Yin and Yang of madness." This idea, that humans are no more than machines, is contained within the novel Kilgore Trout gives to Dwayne Hoover. Both Trout and Vonnegut realize the power of bad ideas, with Vonnegut remarking how "natural it was for [people] to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: it was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books." The view of humans as biological machines, initially accepted by Vonnegut, is counteracted by Rabo Karabekian, the abstract artist who suggests "Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery." The novel is critical of American society and its treatment of its citizens, many of which Vonnegut writes "were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country." He focuses largely on race, the poor, and the destruction of the environment, criticizing the hypocrisy of a land that claims to be based on the principles of freedom having been founded by people who "used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines." The incidents in the life of Wayne Hoobler, a black resident of Midland City, are frequently contrasted with those of the similarly named Dwayne Hoover, emphasizing the aforementioned impact of race. Style. The novel is simple in syntax and sentence structure, part of Vonnegut's signature style. Likewise, irony, sentimentality, black humor, and didacticism, are prevalent throughout the work. Like much of his oeuvre, "Breakfast of Champions" is broken into very small pieces, in this case separated by three dots. Vonnegut himself has claimed that his books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips...and each chip is a joke." Characteristically, he makes heavy use of repetition, in this case starting many sections with "Listen" and ending many with "And so on." The novel is full of drawings by the author, intending to illustrate various aspects of life on Earth, are sometimes pertinent to the story line and sometimes tangential. They include renderings of an anus, flags, the date 1492, a beaver, a vulva, a flamingo, little girls' underpants, a torch, headstones, the yin-yang symbol, guns, trucks, cows and the hamburgers that are made from them, chickens and the Kentucky Fried Chicken that is made from them, an electric chair, the letters ETC, Christmas cards, a right hand that has a severed ring finger, the chemical structure of a plastic molecule, an apple, pi, zero, infinity, and the sunglasses the author himself wears as he enters the storyline. "Breakfast of Champions" makes heavy use of metafiction, with Vonnegut appearing as the narrator/creator of the work, explaining why and how he makes this world as it is, changing things when and as he sees fit, and even being surprised by events. The novel also makes use of intertextuality with Vonnegut's other works. In addition to Kilgore Trout, characters from other Vonnegut books which appear here include Eliot Rosewater and Rabo Karabekian. Rosewater was the main character in "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" (1965) and a minor character in "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969), while Karabekian later became the main character in "Bluebeard" (1988). Hoover's secretary, Francine Pefko, previously appeared in "Cat's Cradle" (1963), where she performed secretarial duties at General Forge and Foundry, in Ilium, New York. (Pefko also appears in "Fubar," a story released posthumously in "Look at the Birdie".) Vonnegut uses the name "Khashdrahr Miasma" for a minor character, in reference to a character in "Player Piano". The vicious guard dog, Kazak, was Winston Niles Rumfoord's pet in "The Sirens of Titan" (1959) and Selena MacIntosh's guide dog in "Galápagos" (1985). Many of Midland City's inhabitants reappear in "Deadeye Dick" (1982), which locates the city in Ohio. Background. Title. The title, taken from the well-known slogan for Wheaties breakfast cereal, crops up in a key scene late in the novel when a waitress, apparently ironically, says "Breakfast of Champions" each time she serves a customer a martini. Vonnegut, in his typical ironic manner, mocks the legal and copyright systems as he notes meticulously that "Breakfast of Champions" is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc. for its breakfast cereal products, and that his use of the term is not "intended to disparage their fine products." Vonnegut refers to himself as "Philboyd Studge" in the preface, a name which he claims his friend Knox Burger associated with cumbersome writing. The name appears to have been borrowed from a short story by Edwardian satirist Saki. ("", describes the success of the eponymous breakfast food through bizarrely counter-intuitive advertising.) Doubts about publication. According to a January 1971 article in "The New York Times Magazine", "Vonnegut says repeatedly he is through writing novels... After "Slaughterhouse-Five", Vonnegut began work on a novel called "Breakfast of Champions", about a world in which everyone but a single man, the narrator, is a robot. He gave it up, however, and it remains unfinished. I asked him why, and he said, 'Because it was a piece of ----." This view persisted, with Harlan Ellison claiming that Vonnegut's submission in the 1972 short-story anthology "Again, Dangerous Visions", would be "the last new piece of fiction you will ever read by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." After the publication of "Breakfast of Champions", Vonnegut stopped publishing short stories, and many believed he had given up writing altogether, with the "New York Times" book review stating Vonnegut's persona gives up fiction before our very eyes. . . . When he self-destructs himself as a novelist by first warning us in the middle of his book that 'Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun story-telling.' In the preface, Vonnegut states that as he reached his fiftieth birthday he felt a need to "clear his head of all the junk in there"—which includes the various subjects of his drawings, and the characters from his past novels and stories. To this end, he sprinkles plot descriptions for Trout's stories throughout the novel, illustrates the book with his own simple felt-tip pen drawings, and includes a number of characters from his other novels and short stories. Reception. "Breakfast of Champions" spent a total of 56 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, 28 weeks for the hardcover edition and 28 for the paperback. The novel received a negative review from the "New York Times", as opposed to positive reviews from "TIME" and "Publishers Weekly". Vonnegut himself was unhappy with the novel, and gave it a C grade on a report card of his published work. However, it remains one of Vonnegut's best-known and most-influential works. Adaptation. In 1999, the novel was made into a film of the same name, starring Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte and Omar Epps. The movie was widely panned by critics and never went into wide release.

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The Dark Tower (series) The Dark Tower is a series of eight books and one short story written by American author Stephen King. Incorporating themes from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror, and Western, it describes a "gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower, the nature of which is both physical and metaphorical. The series, and its use of the Dark Tower, expands upon Stephen King's multiverse and in doing so, links together many of his other novels. In addition to the eight novels of the series proper that comprise 4,250 pages, many of King's other books relate to the story, introducing concepts and characters that come into play as the series progresses. The series was chiefly inspired by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning, whose full text was included in the final volume's appendix. In the preface to the revised 2003 edition of "", King also identifies "The Lord of the Rings", Arthurian Legend, and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" as inspirations. He identifies Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" character as one of the major inspirations for the protagonist, Roland Deschain. King's style of location names in the series, such as Mid-World, and his development of a unique language abstract to our own (High Speech), are also influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien's work. A film serving as a sequel to the events of "" was released in August 2017. Stephen King saw "The Dark Tower" series as a first draft, initially planning to rewrite it to eliminate continuity errors. However, after revising "The Gunslinger", "he is trying to decide how much he can rewrite." The series is considered as King's magnum opus. Overview. Plot summary. In the story, Roland Deschain is the last living member of a knightly order known as "gunslingers" and the last of the line of "Arthur Eld", his world's analogue of King Arthur. Politically organized along the lines of a feudal society, it shares technological and social characteristics with the American Old West but is also magical. Many of the magical aspects have vanished from Mid-World, but traces remain as do relics from a technologically advanced society. Roland's quest is to find the Dark Tower, a fabled building said to be the nexus of all universes. Roland's world is said to have "moved on", and it appears to be coming apart at the seams. Mighty nations have been torn apart by war, entire cities and regions vanish without a trace and time does not flow in an orderly fashion. Sometimes, even the sun rises in the north and sets in the east. As the series opens, Roland's motives, goals, and age are unclear, though later installments shed light on these mysteries. For a detailed synopsis of the novels, see the relevant article for each book. Connections to King's other works. The series has become a linchpin that is interwoven with, and ties together, much of King's body of work. The worlds of "The Dark Tower" are in part composed of locations, characters, events and other various elements from many of King's novels and short stories. Some of the principal books that are tied to this series, or that this series references, include "It", "The Stand", "'Salem's Lot", "Insomnia", "Hearts in Atlantis", "The Eyes of the Dragon", "The Shining", and "Cell". The TV miniseries "Kingdom Hospital" takes place in a world in which Nozz-A-La is the most popular beverage in the world, possibly meaning those events take place in the same universe as books 4 and 5 are set. Characters. Along his journey to the Dark Tower, Roland meets a great number of friends and enemies. For most of the way, he is accompanied by a group of people who, together with him, form the Ka-tet of the Nineteen and Ninety-nine, consisting of Jake Chambers, Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, and Oy. Among his many enemies on the way are The Man in Black, Mordred, and The Crimson King. Language. King created a language for his characters, known as the High Speech. Examples of this language include the phrases "Thankee, Sai" ("Thank you, Sir/Ma'am.") and "Dan-Tete" ("Little Savior"). In addition, King uses the term "Ka", which is the approximate equivalent of destiny, or fate, in the fictional language High Speech (and similarly, "Ka-tet," a group of people bound together by fate/destiny). This term originated in Egyptian mythology and storytelling, and has figured in several other novels and screenplays since 1976. The term also appears in King's short story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats", in which Ted describes its meaning to Bobby. Main series. Continuation. While the series was declared finished with the publication of the seventh volume in 2004, Stephen King described in an interview in March 2009 an idea for a new short story he'd recently had: "And then I thought, 'Well, why don't I find three more like this and do a book that would be almost like modern fairy tales?' Then this thing started to add on bits and pieces so I guess it will be a novel." According to King, the idea was a new "Dark Tower" novel. King said, regarding "The Dark Tower", "It's not really done yet. Those seven books are really sections of one long über-novel." King confirmed this during his TimesTalk event at The Times Center in New York City on November 10, 2009, and the next day King's official site posted that King would begin working on this novel in about eight months, with a tentative title being "The Wind Through the Keyhole". King noted that this novel would likely be set between the fourth and the fifth books of the series. The book, titled "", was announced on Stephen King's official site on March 10, 2011, and was published on April 24, 2012. Illustrations. Each book in the series was originally published in hardcover format with a number of full-color illustrations spread throughout. Each book contained works by a single illustrator only. Subsequent printings of each book in trade paperback format usually preserve the illustrations in full, except for books I and IV. Pocket-sized paperback reprints contain only black-and-white chapter or section header illustrations. The illustrators who worked on each book are: Reception. Bill Sheehan of "The Washington Post" called the series "a humane, visionary epic and a true magnum opus" that stands as an "imposing example of pure storytelling," "filled with brilliantly rendered set pieces... cataclysmic encounters and moments of desolating tragedy." Erica Noonan of the "Boston Globe" said, "There's a fascinating world to be discovered in the series" but noted that its epic nature keeps it from being user-friendly. Allen Johnston of "The New York Times" was disappointed with how the series progressed; while he marveled at the "sheer absurdity of [the books'] existence" and complimented King's writing style, he said preparation would have improved the series, stating "King doesn't have the writerly finesse for these sorts of games, and the voices let him down." Michael Berry of the "San Francisco Chronicle", however, called the series' early installments "highfalutin hodgepodge" but the ending "a valediction" that "more than delivers on what has been promised." Joshua Rothman of "The New Yorker" praised the series, feeling that "the novels were better and weirder than [he'd] hoped." Because it features several of his classic tropes, Rothman claimed, "If you really like Stephen King, you owe it to yourself to give the series a shot." Other media. Tie-in books. The series has prompted related non-fiction books by authors besides King. Robin Furth has published the two-volume "Stephen King's The Dark Tower: A Concordance", an encyclopedia-style companion to the series that she originally wrote for King's personal use. Bev Vincent has published "The Road to The Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King's Magnum Opus", a book containing back story, summary and analysis and "The Dark Tower Companion", which includes interviews and coverage of the Marvel graphic novels. Stephen King has endorsed these books. "Charlie the Choo-Choo" is a "children's book" by Stephen King released in 2016, published under the pseudonym Beryl Evans. It is adapted from a section of King's previous novel "The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands". It was illustrated by Ned Dameron. Comics. Several "Dark Tower" series arcs were published by Marvel Comics. A prequel, "" is plotted by Robin Furth, scripted by Peter David, and illustrated by Jae Lee and Richard Isanove, and is set around the time of the flashbacks in "The Gunslinger" and "Wizard and Glass". The first issue of this first arc was released on February 7, 2007. A hardcover volume containing all seven issues was released on November 7, 2007. The second arc in the series, ", began publication on March 5, 2008. A hardcover volume containing all five issues was released on October 15, 2008. The third arc, ", began publication on September 10, 2008. A hardcover volume containing all 6 issues was released on April 21, 2009. Following the completion of the third arc a one-shot issue titled " was released April 8, 2009. The story focuses on the history of the villainous wizard Marten Broadcloak. The fourth arc, ", began publication on May 13, 2009. A hardcover volume containing all 6 issues, as well as the Sorcerer One-Shot was released on February 2, 2010. The fifth arc, "", began publication on December 3, 2009. A hardcover volume containing all 5 issues was released on August 17, 2010. Marvel Comics has also published three supplemental books to date that expand upon characters and locations first introduced in the novels. "The Dark Tower: Gunslingers' Guidebook" was released in 2007, "The Dark Tower: End-World Almanac" was released in 2008, and "The Dark Tower: Guide to Gilead" was released in 2009. All three books were written by Anthony Flamini, with Furth serving as creative consultant. "End-World Almanac" and "Guide to Gilead" feature illustrations by David Yardin. A five-issue adaptation of King's novel ', titled ', began publication on May 19, 2010. The collected hardback edition was released on January 26, 2011. An adaptation of King's novella "The Little Sisters of Eluria", titled "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - The Little Sisters of Eluria", began publication on December 8, 2010. The collected hardback edition was released on June 8, 2011. A second adaptation of King's novel "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger", titled "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - The Battle of Tull", began publication on June 1, 2011. The collected hardback edition was released on January 25, 2012. A third adaptation of King's novel "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger", titled "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - The Way Station", began publication on December 14, 2011. The collected hardback edition was released on June 27, 2012. Games. December 7, 2009 saw the release of a spin-off online game titled "Discordia",<ref name="Stephenking.com/discordia"></ref> available to play free of charge on the official Stephen King website. The game is a continuation of the original "Dark Tower" story, following the war between the Tet Corporation and Sombra/NCP in New York, and it has been supervised by both Stephen King and Robin Furth. From the website: "Exploring the behind-the-scenes conflict between the two companies, "Discordia" introduces long-time "Dark Tower" fans to new characters and numerous mechanical/magical items developed by Mid-World's Old Ones. Over the course of our adventure we will visit many locations, both those familiar to "Dark Tower" fans and others which we only glimpsed in the "Dark Tower" novels. While we may not see Roland and his ka-tet in this adventure, the development team has remembered the faces of its fathers. We have done our best to honor the original "Dark Tower" series while simultaneously mapping new and exciting "Dark Tower" territory." Film. Sony Pictures and Media Rights Capital adapted the series for film. The film is directed by Nikolaj Arcel, and stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, cast respectively as Roland Deschain and Walter O'Dim. The film was released on August 4, 2017. Critics panned the film with it receiving a score of 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film combines elements from several novels in "The Dark Tower" series, serving as a canonical sequel to the novel series, which concluded with the revelation that Roland's quest was a cyclical time loop; the presence of the Horn of Eld, which Roland carries in the film, indicates that this is the next cycle. Stephen King has indicated that "The Dark Tower" film and television series will follow Roland's "last time round" to the titular Dark Tower. In July 2016, director Nikolaj Arcel confirmed that "The Dark Tower" film would be a sequel to the novels as well as a direct adaptation, with Roland in the next cycle of his journey to the Tower. In an interview with Collider, Stephen King expressed hope for a sequel film in addition to the upcoming television series, suggesting that it should be R-rated, with Roland wearing a hat, and that it would include the "lobstrosities" from "". In an interview with ComingSoon.net, Nikolaj Arcel confirmed that "The Drawing of the Three" would form the basis for the sequel, and that yet-to-be-cast actors who will play Eddie and Susannah Dean would appear alongside Elba, McConaughey, Taylor, and Haley reprising their roles as Roland, Walter, Jake and Sayre respectively. Television. In February 2018, Amazon bought the rights to "The Dark Tower" books for a series adaptation, though it was not made clear at first if anyone from the film would be involved. It was later confirmed that the series would serve as a reboot, with Sam Strike and Jasper Pääkkönen being cast as Roland Deschain and The Man in Black, respectively. In June 2019, Michael Rooker, Jerome Flynn and Joana Ribeiro were also believed to be cast members. In January 2020, Amazon decided not to move forward with the pilot, but production company MRC is shopping the pilot scripts elsewhere. Audiobooks. Currently there exist five audio versions of The Dark Tower series – in English, Polish, German, French and Russian. The audio book in English published by Hodder & Stoughton features voices of George Guidall and Frank Muller and has neither music nor sound effects. The audio book in German published by introduces and as the narrators. In French audiobooks published by Éditions Gallimard and narrated by Jacques Frantz. In Russian, "", as narrated by Igor Knyazev, does not have any music or sound effects The first two novels in the series, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, were produced on audio cassette by New Audio Library (NAL) in 1988 and 1989 respectively. The Waste Lands, The Dark Tower Part III, was produced on audio cassette by Penguin Highbridge Audio in 1991. Each of these early editions was narrated by the author. The Waste Lands includes musical accompaniment throughout. All of these editions were subsequently re-recorded in 1997 with Frank Muller as the narrator for continuity. Muller narrates the fourth book in the series, The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass. Stephen King selected Muller as his voice for all audio narrations at this time. Frank Muller suffered a catastrophic brain injury in a motorcycle accident in 2001. The narration task then fell to George Guidall, who recorded the final three books in the series in quick succession in 2003 and 2004. George Guidall was also called upon to re-record The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, the first book in the series, in 2003, as the author made significant changes to that story to better match what came later.

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Dying, In Other Words Dying, in Other Words is the debut novel of English author Maggie Gee, variously described as surrealist and modern gothic. It garnered "rave reviews" in "The Observer" and "The Times". According to the OUP's "Good Fiction Guide", a "vividly written experimental novel" it made a "strong impression" when it was published in 1981. Containing "postmodernist gimmicks" and self-refexive structures it concerns a supposedly dead woman rewriting the story of her own death. The novel led to Gee appearing in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list for 1983. Although in a 2012 interview Maggie Gee says that 'I see it as partly luck – the novel came out in July when nothing much was published then, the first review was a rave in "The Observer", then "The Times" ran an extract and everyone fell into line, because critics are easily influenced. In a 1997 interview Gee admits: "I was 25 when I wrote that book, and I suppose I had more of an exhibitionist streak at that age. I had such fun with the playfulness. As I got older I realised that being categorized as experimental, although it gets you lots of review space, is death; also that you can frighten a lot of readers off." Plot introduction. The novel concerns the death of Moira Penny, a postgraduate literature student in Oxford, whose naked body is found outside her apartment. But Moira Penny is also writing a novel about the death of an author. The narrative is circular in nature and "snakes through the minds of assorted people as they react to Moira's demise". Reception. "Kirkus Reviews" concludes that "Some of this material is - even if read as partial parody - stale and stagey. It certainly doesn't add up satisfyingly, with or without reference to the metafictional framework. But, page by page, Gee demonstrates promise as an ironic observer and darkly lyrical maker of vignettes - talents which would show up far better in a more straightforward, less cutely 'literary' novel'." Publication history. The novel has appeared in several editions:

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And Then There Was No One And Then There Was No One is a novel by Gilbert Adair first published in 2009. After "The Act of Roger Murgatroyd" and "A Mysterious Affair of Style", it is the third book in the Evadne Mount trilogy. However, rather than being yet another more or less straightforward whodunit, albeit with postmodern overtones, "And Then There Was No One" thoroughly blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction; or rather, reality, fiction, and metafiction. The book is presented in the form of a (fictional) memoir written by a British author called Gilbert Adair who has recently published two successful whodunits featuring mystery writer turned amateur sleuth Evadne Mount entitled "The Act of Roger Murgatroyd" and "A Mysterious Affair of Style". In September 2011, he travels to Meiringen, Switzerland to participate in the town's Sherlock Holmes conference. While he is staying there, two unexpected things happen: firstly, Anglo-Bulgarian novelist and essayist Gustav Slavorigin, the star of the festival, is murdered; and secondly, to his great surprise, Adair discovers Evadne Mount, the inspiration for his protagonist and the sharer of royalties from the two novels, sitting among the audience. As with the first two books in the trilogy, the title is again a variation on an Agatha Christie novel, "And Then There Were None". Major themes. As opposed to the other novels in the trilogy, in "And Then There Was No One" there is a definitive shift away from the murder mystery and its solution toward "self-referentiality", toward the author and his or her problems. One aspect is plagiarism, which at one point is even discussed as a possible motive for Slavorigin's murder; another is the author's choice of subject. In the years before his violent death, Slavorigin had been in hiding as he had published several essays critical of the United States and had therefore become, like Rushdie in reverse, the target of a fatwā-like edict pronounced by some obscure Texan multi-millionaire. A third aspect is the author's wish to distance himself from his own creations if not to get rid of them once and for all, to "murder" them—the way Arthur Conan Doyle tried to rid himself of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls and Adair is struggling to dispose of Evadne Mount.

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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also known as just Tristram Shandy, is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years (vols. 3 and 4, 1761; vols. 5 and 6, 1762; vols. 7 and 8, 1765; vol. 9, 1767). It purports to be a biography of the eponymous character. Its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices. Sterne had read widely, which is reflected in "Tristram Shandy". Many of his similes, for instance, are reminiscent of the works of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, and the novel as a whole, with its focus on the problems of language, has constant regard for John Locke's theories in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding". Arthur Schopenhauer called "Tristram Shandy" one of "the four immortal romances." Synopsis and style. As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not even reached until Volume III. Consequently, apart from Tristram as narrator, the most familiar and important characters in the book are his father Walter, his mother, his Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, and a supporting cast of popular minor characters, including the chambermaid Susannah, Doctor Slop and the parson Yorick, who later became Sterne's favourite "nom de plume" and a very successful publicity stunt. Yorick is also the protagonist of Sterne's second work of fiction, "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy". Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or misunderstandings, which find humour in the opposing temperaments of Walter—splenetic, rational, and somewhat sarcastic—and Uncle Toby, who is gentle, uncomplicated, and a lover of his fellow man. In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name and noses, as well as explorations of obstetrics, siege warfare and philosophy, as he struggles to marshal his material and finish the story of his life. Though Tristram is always present as narrator and commentator, the book contains little of his life, only the story of a trip through France and accounts of the four comical mishaps which shaped the course of his life from an early age. Firstly, while still only a homunculus, Tristram's implantation within his mother's uterus was disturbed. At the very moment of procreation, his mother asked his father if he had remembered to wind the clock. The distraction and annoyance led to the disruption of the proper balance of humours necessary to conceive a well-favoured child. Secondly, one of his father's pet theories was that a large and attractive nose was important to a man making his way in life. In a difficult birth, Tristram's nose was crushed by Dr. Slop's forceps. Thirdly, another of his father's theories was that a person's name exerted enormous influence over that person's nature and fortunes, with the worst possible name being Tristram. In view of the previous accidents, Tristram's father decreed that the boy would receive an especially auspicious name, Trismegistus. Susannah mangled the name in conveying it to the curate, and the child was christened Tristram. According to his father's theory, his name, being a conflation of "Trismegistus" (after the esoteric mystic Hermes Trismegistus) and "Tristan" (whose connotation bore the influence through folk etymology of Latin "tristis", "sorrowful"), doomed him to a life of woe and cursed him with the inability to comprehend the causes of his misfortune. Finally, as a toddler, Tristram suffered an accidental circumcision when Susannah let a window sash fall as he urinated out of the window because his chamberpot was missing. Narrative structure and reader involvement. Sterne's presence inside the narrative changed the course of traditional novelistic interpretations as his narrative structure digresses through many jumbled and fragmentary events into a non-traditional, dual overlapping plot. These digressive methods reflect his inability to simply explain each event as it occurs, as he frequently interrupts these events with commentary about how the reader should understand and follow each event. He relies heavily on his reader's close involvement to the text and their interpretations of the non-traditional plot. Tristram's presence inside of the narrative as the narrator engages the imagination and his use of visual strategies, such as the marbled and blank pages, reflects the importance of the reader's participation in the novel. Techniques and influences. Artistic incorporation and accusations of plagiarism. Sterne incorporated into "Tristram Shandy" many passages taken almost word for word from Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy", Francis Bacon's "Of Death", Rabelais and many more, and rearranged them to serve the new meaning intended in "Tristram Shandy". "Tristram Shandy" was highly praised for its originality, and nobody noticed these borrowings until years after Sterne's death. The first to note them was physician and poet John Ferriar, who did not see them negatively and commented: Ferriar believed that Sterne was ridiculing Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy", mocking its solemn tone and endeavours to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations. Victorian critics of the 19th century, who were hostile to Sterne for the alleged obscenity of his prose, used Ferriar's findings to defame Sterne, and claimed that he was artistically dishonest, and almost unanimously accused him of mindless plagiarism. Scholar Graham Petrie closely analysed the alleged passages in 1970; he observed that while more recent commentators now agree that Sterne "rearranged what he took to make it more humorous, or more sentimental, or more rhythmical", none of them "seems to have wondered whether Sterne had any further, more purely artistic, purpose". Studying a passage in Volume V, chapter 3, Petrie observes: "such passage...reveals that Sterne's copying was far from purely mechanical, and that his rearrangements go far beyond what would be necessary for merely stylistic ends". Rabelais. A major influence on "Tristram Shandy" is Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel". Rabelais was by far Sterne's favourite author, and in his correspondence he made clear that he considered himself Rabelais's successor in humorous writing. One passage Sterne incorporated pertains to "the length and goodness of the nose". Sterne had written an earlier piece called "A Rabelaisian Fragment" that indicates his familiarity with the work of the French monk and doctor. Ridiculing solemnity. Sterne was no friend of gravitas, a quality which excited his disgust. "Tristram Shandy" gives a ludicrous turn to solemn passages from respected authors that it incorporates, as well as to the "consolatio" literary genre. Among the subjects of such ridicule were some of the opinions contained in Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy", a book that mentions sermons as the most respectable type of writing, and one that was favoured by the learned. Burton's attitude was to try to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations. His book consists mostly of a collection of the opinions of a multitude of writers (he modestly refrains from adding his own) divided into quaint and old-fashioned categories. It discusses everything, from the doctrines of religion to military discipline, from inland navigation to the morality of dancing schools. Much of the singularity of "Tristram Shandy"s characters is drawn from Burton. Burton indulges himself in a Utopian sketch of a perfect government in his introductory address to the reader, and this forms the basis of the notions of "Tristram Shandy" on the subject. And Sterne parodies Burton's use of weighty quotations. The first four chapters of "Tristram Shandy" are founded on some passages in Burton. In Chapter 3, Volume 5, Sterne parodies the genre of "consolatio", mixing and reworking passages from three "widely separated sections" of Burton's "Anatomy", including a parody of Burton's "grave and sober account" of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia. Other techniques and influences. His text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were major influences on Sterne and "Tristram Shandy". Satires of Pope and Swift formed much of the humour of "Tristram Shandy", but Swift's sermons and Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" also contributed ideas and frameworks Sterne explored throughout the novel. Other major influences are Cervantes and Montaigne's "Essays", as well as the significant inter-textual debt to "The Anatomy of Melancholy", Swift's "Battle of the Books", and the Scriblerian collaborative work "The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus". The shade of Cervantes is present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to Rocinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote in many ways) and Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humour", along with the genre-defying structure of "Tristram Shandy", which owes much to the second part of Cervantes' novel, all demonstrate the influence of Cervantes. The novel also makes use of John Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas" that come to us from our five senses. Sterne is by turns respectful and satirical of Locke's theories, using the association of ideas to construct characters' "hobby-horses", or whimsical obsessions, that both order and disorder their lives in different ways. Sterne borrows from and argues against Locke's language theories (on the imprecision and arbitrariness of words and usage), and consequently spends much time discussing the very words he uses in his own narrative—with "digressions, gestures, piling up of apparent trivia in the effort to get at the truth". There is a significant body of critical opinion that argues that "Tristram Shandy" is better understood as an example of an obsolescent literary tradition of "Learned Wit", partly following the contribution of D. W. Jefferson. Reception and influence. Some of Sterne's contemporaries did not hold the novel in high esteem, but its bawdy humour was popular with London society. Through time, it has come to be seen as one of the greatest comic novels in English. Arthur Schopenhauer called "Tristram Shandy" one of "the four immortal romances." Samuel Johnson in 1776 commented, "Nothing odd will do long. "Tristram Shandy" did not last." Schopenhauer privately rebutted Samuel Johnson, saying: "The man Sterne is worth 1,000 Pedants and commonplace-fellows like Dr. J." The young Karl Marx was a devotee of "Tristram Shandy", and wrote a still-unpublished short humorous novel, "Scorpion and Felix", that was obviously influenced by Sterne's work. Goethe praised Sterne in "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years", which in turn influenced Nietzsche. Writing in The Times in January 2021, critic Michael Henderson said the novel "…honks like John Coltrane, and is not nearly so funny." "Tristram Shandy" has also been seen by formalists and other literary critics as a forerunner of many narrative devices and styles used by modernist and postmodernist authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie. Novelist Javier Marías cites "Tristram Shandy" as the book that changed his life when he translated it into Spanish at 25, claiming that from it he "learned almost everything about novel writing, and that a novel may contain anything and still be a novel." The success of Sterne's novel got him an appointment by Lord Fauconberg as curate of St Michael's Church in Coxwold, Yorkshire, which included living at Sterne's model for Shandy Hall. The medieval structure still stands today, and is under the care of the Laurence Sterne Trust since its acquisition in the 1960s. The gardens, which Sterne tended during his time there, are daily open to visitors. The novel's success has resulted in permanent additions to the English lexicon; within the text of "Tristram Shandy" Sterne describes the novel as "Shandean", coining a term which still carries the meaning that Sterne originally attached to it when he wrote, "I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good humoured "Shandean" book..." Strongly influenced by Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" also gave rise to the term "cervantic" (which Sterne at the time spelled "cervantick"). Abolitionists. In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Ignatius Sancho wrote to Sterne encouraging the writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade. "That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many—but if only one—Gracious God!—what a feast to a benevolent heart!" he wrote. In July 1766 Sancho's letter was received by Sterne shortly after he had just finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in "Tristram Shandy", wherein Tom described the oppression of a black servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon, which he had visited. Sterne's widely publicised 27 July 1766 response to Sancho's letter became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature. Adaptations. In 2005, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation by Graham White in ten 15-minute episodes directed by Mary Peate, with Neil Dudgeon as Tristram, Julia Ford as Mother, David Troughton as Father, Adrian Scarborough as Toby, Paul Ritter as Trim, Tony Rohr as Dr Slop, Stephen Hogan as Obadiah, Helen Longworth as Susannah, Ndidi Del Fatti as Great-Grandmother, Stuart McLoughlin as Great-Grandfather/Pontificating Man and Hugh Dickson as Bishop Hall. "Tristram Shandy" has been adapted as a graphic novel by cartoonist Martin Rowson. Michael Nyman has worked sporadically on "Tristram Shandy" as an opera since 1981. At least five portions of the opera have been publicly performed and one, "Nose-List Song", was recorded in 1985 on the album "The Kiss and Other Movements". The book was adapted on film in 2006 as "A Cock and Bull Story", directed by Michael Winterbottom, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce (credited as Martin Hardy, in a complicated metafictional twist), and starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Kelly Macdonald, Naomie Harris, and Gillian Anderson. The movie plays with metatextual levels, showing both scenes from the novel itself and fictionalised behind-the-scenes footage of the adaptation process, even employing some of the actors to play themselves. In February 2014, a theatrical adaptation by Callum Hale was presented at the Tabard Theatre in Chiswick. "Tristram Shandy" has been translated into many languages, including German (repeatedly, beginning in 1769), Dutch (repeatedly, by Munnikhuisen, 1779; Lindo, 1852 and Jan & Gertrude Starink, 1990), French (repeatedly, beginning in 1785; by Guy Jouvet, 2004), Russian (repeatedly, beginning 1804–1807; by Adrian Antonovich Frankovsky, 1949), Hungarian (by Győző Határ, 1956), Italian (by Antonio Meo, 1958), Czech (by Aloys Skoumal, 1963), Spanish (by José Antonio López de Letona, 1975; Ana María Aznar, 1976 and Javier Marías, 1978), Portuguese (by José Paulo Paes, 1984), Catalan (by Joaquim Mallafré, 1993), Norwegian (by Bjørn Herrman, 1995–96), Finnish (by Kersti Juva, 1998). "Tristram Shandy" was adapted by Martin Pearlman in 2018 as a comic chamber opera, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy". References to "Tristram Shandy". Well known in philosophy and mathematics, the so-called "paradox of Tristram Shandy" was introduced by Bertrand Russell in his book "The Principles of Mathematics" to evidentiate the inner contradictions that arise from the assumption that infinite sets can have the same cardinality—as would be the case with a gentleman who spends one year to write the story of one day of his life, if he were able to write for an infinite length of time. The paradox depends upon the fact that "the number of days in all time is no greater than the number of years". Heinrich Heine (1796–1856) mentioned the book in his writings. "The author of Tristram Shandy reveals to us the profoundest depths of the human soul; he opens, as it were, a crevice of the soul; permits us to take one glance into its abysses, into its paradise and into its filthiest recesses; then quickly lets the curtain fall over it. We have had a front view of that marvellous theatre, the soul; the arrangements of lights and the perspective have not failed in their effects, and while we imagined that we were gazing upon the infinite, our own hearts have been exalted with a sense of infinity and poetry." A historic site in Geneva, Ohio, called Shandy Hall, is part of the Western Reserve Historical Society. The home was named after the house described in "Tristram Shandy". The "Perry Mason" episode "The Case of the Bogus Books" involves a bookseller selling stolen copies of rare books, in particular a first edition of "Tristram Shandy". In Anthony Trollope's novel "Barchester Towers", the narrator speculates that the scheming clergyman, Mr Slope, is descended from Dr Slop in "Tristram Shandy" (the extra letter having been added for the sake of appearances). Slope is also called "Obadiah", a reference to another character in Sterne's novel. Russian writer Alexander Zhitinsky made multiple references to "Tristram Shandy" in his novel "The Flying House, or Conversations with Milord" (the "milord" of the title being Sterne). In "Surprised by Joy", C. S. Lewis refers to "Tristram Shandy" in the context of trying to describe his interactions with his own father: Christopher Morley, Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, wrote a preface to the Limited Editions Club issue of Sterne's classic. That preface appears in Morley's book "Streamlines" published by Doubleday, Doran, in 1932, and is titled "Tristram Shandy". In the Hermann Hesse novel "Journey to the East", Tristram Shandy is listed as one of the co-founders of The League. A short story, "Oh Most Cursed Addition Engine", by H. S. Donnelly, was published in the Canadian science fiction magazine "On Spec" #86. In it, Walter Shandy attempts to build an addition engine, while Toby and Corporal Trim re-enact in miniature Wellington's great victory at Vitoria. Trim was the adventurous ship's cat of the explorer Matthew Flinders, named after Corporal Trim, and a minor (yet titular) character in Bryce Courtenay's novel "Matthew Flinders' Cat". In the 1976 film "The Missouri Breaks", with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, Braxton, a rancher, has just hanged an alleged cattle rustler without a trial and is defending himself to his daughter who vehemently disapproves of the hanging. Finishing his justification he prepares to relax in his library and asks his daughter to fetch him his copy of "Tristram Shandy". In the 2019 film "The Professor and the Madman", Muncie gives Dr. Minor a gift for saving another guard's life. It's a book and is later revealed by Dr. Minor to be "Tristram Shandy". External links. Editions Misc

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A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view. The novel can be seen as an epilogue to the possibly unfinished work "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", and also as an answer to Tobias Smollett's decidedly unsentimental "Travels Through France and Italy". Sterne had met Smollett during his travels in Europe, and strongly objected to his spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. He modelled the character of Smelfungus on him. The novel was extremely popular and influential and helped establish travel writing as the dominant genre of the second half of the 18th century. Unlike prior travel accounts which stressed classical learning and objective non-personal points of view, "A Sentimental Journey" emphasized the subjective discussions of personal taste and sentiments, of manners and morals over classical learning. Throughout the 1770s female travel writers began publishing significant numbers of sentimental travel accounts. Sentiment also became a favourite style among those expressing non-mainstream views, including political radicalism. The narrator is the Reverend Mr. Yorick, who is slyly represented to guileless readers as Sterne's barely disguised alter ego. The book recounts his various adventures, usually of the amorous type, in a series of self-contained episodes. The book is less eccentric and more elegant in style than "Tristram Shandy" and was better received by contemporary critics. It was published on 27 February, and on 18 March Sterne died. Plot summary. Yorick's journey starts in Calais, where he meets a monk who begs for donations to his convent. Yorick initially refuses to give him anything, but later regrets his decision. He and the monk exchange their snuff-boxes. He buys a chaise to continue his journey. The next town he visits is Montreuil, where he hires a servant to accompany him on his journey, a young man named La Fleur. During his stay in Paris, Yorick is informed that the police inquired for his passport at his hotel. Without a passport at a time when England is at war with France (Sterne travelled to Paris in January 1762, before the Seven Years' War ended), he risks imprisonment in the Bastille. Yorick decides to travel to Versailles, where he visits the Count de B**** to acquire a passport. When Yorick notices the count reads "Hamlet", he points with his finger at Yorick's name, mentioning that he is Yorick. The count mistakes him for the king's jester and quickly procures him a passport. Yorick fails in his attempt to correct the count, and remains satisfied with receiving his passport so quickly. Yorick returns to Paris, and continues his voyage to Italy after staying in Paris for a few more days. Along the way he decides to visit Maria—who was introduced in Sterne's previous novel, "Tristram Shandy"—in Moulins. Maria's mother tells Yorick that Maria has been struck with grief since her husband died. Yorick consoles Maria, and then leaves. After having passed Lyon during his journey, Yorick spends the night in a roadside inn. Because there is only one bedroom, he is forced to share the room with a lady and her chamber-maid ("fille de chambre"). When Yorick can't sleep and accidentally breaks his promise to remain silent during the night, an altercation with the lady ensues. During the confusion, Yorick accidentally grabs hold of something belonging to the chamber-maid. The last line is: "when I stretch'd out my hand I caught hold of the fille de chambre's...End of vol II". The sentence is open to interpretation. You can say the last word is omitted, or that he stretched out "his" hand, and caught "hers" (this would be grammatically correct). Another interpretation is to incorporate 'End of Vol. II' into the sentence, so that he grabs the Fille de Chambre's 'End'. Sequel. Because Sterne died before he could finish the novel, his long-time friend John Hall-Stevenson (identified with "Eugenius" in the novel) wrote a continuation. It is titled "Yorick's Sentimental Journey Continued: To Which Is Prefixed Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Sterne". Legacy. In the 1880s, American writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell and her artist husband Joseph Pennell undertook a journey following Sterne's route. Their travels by tandem bicycle were turned into the book "Our sentimental journey through France and Italy" (1888). Viktor Shklovsky considered Sterne one of his most important precursors as a writer, and his own "A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922" was indebted to both Sterne's own "Sentimental Journey" and "Tristram Shandy".

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A Hero of Our Time A Hero of Our Time () is a novel by Mikhail Lermontov, written in 1839, published in 1840, and revised in 1841. It is an example of the superfluous man novel, noted for its compelling Byronic hero (or antihero) Pechorin and for the beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus. There are several English translations, including one by Vladimir Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov in 1958. Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin. Pechorin is the embodiment of the Byronic hero. Byron's works were of international repute and Lermontov mentions his name several times throughout the novel. According to the Byronic tradition, Pechorin is a character of contradiction. He is both sensitive and cynical. He is possessed of extreme arrogance, yet has a deep insight into his own character and epitomizes the melancholy of the Romantic hero who broods on the futility of existence and the certainty of death. Pechorin's whole philosophy concerning existence is oriented towards the nihilistic, creating in him somewhat of a distanced, alienated personality. The name Pechorin is drawn from that of the Pechora River, in the far north, as a homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, named after the Onega River. Pechorin treats women as an incentive for endless conquests and does not consider them worthy of any particular respect. He considers women such as Princess Mary to be little more than pawns in his games of romantic conquest, which in effect hold no meaning in his listless pursuit of pleasure. This is shown in his comment on Princess Mary: "I often wonder why I'm trying so hard to win the love of a girl I have no desire to seduce and whom I'd never marry." The only contradiction in Pechorin's attitude to women are his genuine feelings for Vera, who loves him despite, and perhaps due to, all his faults. At the end of "Princess Mary" one is presented with a moment of hope as Pechorin gallops after Vera. The reader almost assumes that a meaning to his existence may be attained and that Pechorin can finally realize that true feelings are possible. Yet a lifetime of superficiality and cynicism cannot be so easily eradicated and when fate intervenes and Pechorin's horse collapses, he undertakes no further effort to reach his one hope of redemption: "I saw how futile and senseless it was to pursue lost happiness. What more did I want? To see her again? For what?” Pechorin's chronologically last adventure was first described in the book, showing the events that explain his upcoming fall into depression and retreat from society, resulting in his self-predicted death. The narrator is Maxim Maximytch telling the story of a beautiful Circassian princess, "Bela", whom Azamat abducts for Pechorin in exchange for Kazbich's horse. Maxim describes Pechorin's exemplary persistence to convince Bela to give herself sexually to him, in which she with time reciprocates. After living with Bela for some time, Pechorin starts explicating his need for freedom, which Bela starts noticing, fearing he might leave her. Though Bela is completely devoted to Pechorin, she says she's not his slave, rather a daughter of a Circassian tribal chieftain, also showing the intention of leaving if he "doesn't love her". Maxim's sympathy for Bela makes him question Pechorin's intentions. Pechorin admits he loves her and is ready to die for her, but "he has a restless fancy and insatiable heart, and that his life is emptier day by day". He thinks his only remedy is to travel, to keep his spirit alive. However, Pechorin's behavior soon changes after Bela gets kidnapped by his enemy Kazbich, and becomes mortally wounded. After 2 days of suffering in delirium Bela spoke of her inner fears and her feelings for Pechorin, who listened without once leaving her side. After her death, Pechorin becomes physically ill, loses weight and becomes unsociable. After meeting with Maxim again, he acts coldly and antisocial, explicating deep depression and disinterest in interaction. He soon dies on his way back from Persia, admitting before that he is sure to never return. Pechorin described his own personality as self-destructive, admitting he himself doesn't understand his purpose in the world of men. His boredom with life, feeling of emptiness, forces him to indulge in all possible pleasures and experiences, which soon, cause the downfall of those closest to him. He starts to realize this with Vera and Grushnitsky, while the tragedy with Bela soon leads to his complete emotional collapse. His crushed spirit after this and after the duel with Grushnitsky can be interpreted that he is not the detached character that he makes himself out to be. Rather, it shows that he suffers from his actions. Yet many of his actions are described both by himself and appear to the reader to be arbitrary. Yet this is strange as Pechorin's intelligence is very high (typical of a Byronic hero). Pechorin's explanation as to why his actions are arbitrary can be found in the last chapter where he speculates about fate. He sees his arbitrary behaviour not as being a subconscious reflex to past moments in his life but rather as fate. Pechorin grows dissatisfied with his life as each of his arbitrary actions lead him through more emotional suffering which he represses from the view of others. Cultural references. Albert Camus' novel "The Fall" begins with an excerpt from Lermontov's foreword to "A Hero of Our Time": "Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a model such an immoral character as "A Hero of Our Time"; others shrewdly noticed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances. "A Hero of Our Time", gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression." In Ian Fleming's "From Russia with Love" the plot revolves upon Soviet agent Tatiana Romanova feigning an infatuation with MI6's James Bond and offering to defect to the West provided he'll be sent to pick her up in Istanbul, Turkey. The Soviets elaborate a complex backstory about how she spotted the file about the English spy during her clerical work at SMERSH headquarters and became smitten with him, making her state that his picture made her think of Lermontov's Pechorin. The fact that Pechorin was anything but a 'hero' or even a positive character at all in Lermontov's narration stands to indicate Fleming's wry self-deprecating wit about his most famous creation; the irony is lost, however, on western readers not familiar with Lermontov's work. In Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film "The Silence", the young son is seen reading the book in bed. In the opening sequence of Bergman's next film, "Persona" (1966), the same child actor is seen waking in what appears to be a mortuary and reaching for the same book. Claude Sautet's film "A Heart in Winter" ("Un cœur en hiver") was said to be based on "his memories of" the Princess Mary section. The relationship with Lermontov's work is quite loose – the film takes place in contemporary Paris, where a young violin repairer (played by Daniel Auteuil) seeks to seduce his business partner's girlfriend, a gifted violinist named Camille, into falling for his carefully contrived charms. He does this purely for the satisfaction of gaining control of her emotionally, while never loving her sincerely. He is a modern-day Pechorin. Stage adaptation. In 2011 Alex Mcsweeney adapted the novel into an English-language playscript. Previewed at the International Youth Arts Festival in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, UK in July, it subsequently premiered in August of the same year at Zoo Venues in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Critics received it positively, generally giving 4- and 5-star reviews. In 2014, German stage director Kateryna Sokolova adapted the novel focusing on its longest novella, "Princess Mary". The play, directed by Kateryna Sokolova, premiered at the Schauspielhaus Zürich on 28 May. The production received universal acclaim, especially praising it for not having lost "neither the linguistic finesse nor the social paralysis of Lermontov’s Zeitgeist", both of which constitute the novel's Byronic character. On July 22, 2015, The Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow premiered a ballet adaptation of "Hero of Our Time". The ballet was choreographed by San Francisco Ballet's Choreographer in Residence, Yuri Possokhov, and directed by Kirill Serebrennikov - who is also the author of the libretto. The score was commissioned purposefully for this production and composed by Ilya Demutsky. This production focuses on three novellas from Lermontov's novel - Bela, Taman, and Princess Mary. Bibliography of English translations. Translations:

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The Stone Gods (novel) The Stone Gods is a 2007 novel by Jeanette Winterson. It is mainly a post apocalyptic love story concerned with corporate control of government, the harshness of war, and the dehumanization that technology brings, among other themes. The novel is self-referential, where later characters in the story find and read earlier sections of the book itself, and where certain sets of characters’ story arcs repeat, particularly those of a Robo "sapiens" named Spike and her reluctant human companion, Billie. This technique sets the book in the postmodernist genre, though it is mainly used to warn against history’s tendency to repeat itself, as well as humanity’s inability to learn from past mistakes, even when these mistakes repeat across history, planets, and their respective evolutionary timelines. Ursula Le Guin, while criticizing exposition and sentimentality, thought the novel a worthwhile and cautionary tale. Andrew Milner, a literary critic and author of "Science Fiction and Climate Change", notes that this book is an early example of 'doomer' climate fiction.

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Dead Romance Dead Romance is an original novel by Lawrence Miles, originally published as part of the Virgin New Adventures series. The New Adventures were a spin-off from the long-running British science fiction television series "Doctor Who". Though part of the sequence of stories that featured the fictional archaeologist Bernice Summerfield, this was released as something of a standalone, and she is not in it. The main character and narrator Christine Summerfield are not connected to her in any way. A former New Adventures Seventh Doctor companion, Chris Cwej, does appear. The Seventh Doctor briefly appears as "the Evil Renegade" in Chris's tampered memories. Almost the entirety of the book is set within a bottle universe. This concept is most fully explored in Miles's two-book cycle "", and it is implied that this bottle universe is the one which appears in "Interference". Christine Summerfield reappears as Cousin Eliza in the Faction Paradox audio plays (also by Miles), voiced by Emma Kilbey. A second edition of "Dead Romance" was published by Mad Norwegian Press in 2004. This contained some minor alterations which made the book more consistent with Miles's later Faction Paradox mythos. The novel is partly an exploration of Miles's "bottle universe" concept that places Virgin Publishing's Virgin New Adventures series within a bottle universe inside the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures universe (and by extension these bottles are within a larger one containing all televised serials). This concept is most fully explored in Miles's two-book cycle "". This idea was never followed up on in any future novels and was abandoned. The idea of the book series' being in bottle universes inside each other was retconned in the Mad Norwegian Press reprint edition, with Miles himself stating in a foreword that this was a bad idea and was rightfully ignored.

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The BFG The BFG (short for The Big Friendly Giant) is a 1982 children's book written by British novelist Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake. It is an expansion of a short story from Dahl's 1975 book "Danny, the Champion of the World". The book is dedicated to Dahl's late daughter, Olivia, who died of measles encephalitis at the age of seven in 1962. As of 2009, the novel has sold 37 million copies in UK editions alone, with more than 1 million copies sold around the world every year. An animated adaptation was shown on television in 1989 with David Jason providing the voice of the BFG and Amanda Root as the voice of Sophie. It has also been adapted as a theatre performance. A theatrical Disney live-action adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg was released in 2016. Plot. The start of the book begins with an eight-year-old orphan girl named Sophie lying in bed in an orphanage run by Mrs. Clonkers. She cannot sleep, and sees a strange sight in the street; a giant man, carrying a bag and an odd trumpet. He sees Sophie, who tries to hide in bed, but the giant picks her up through the window. Then he runs quickly to a large cave, which he enters. When he sets Sophie down, she begins to plead for her life, believing that the giant will eat her. The giant laughs and explains that most giants do eat human beings (which he pronounces as "human beans"), and that the people's origins affect their taste. For example, people from Greece taste greasy while people from Panama taste of hats. The giant then says that he will not eat her as he is the Big Friendly Giant, or BFG for short. The BFG explains that she must stay with him forever so that no one can know of his existence. He warns her of the dangers of leaving his cave as his nine neighbours are sure to eat her if they catch her. He also explains what he was doing with the trumpet and suitcase. He catches dreams, stores them in the cave, and then gives the good ones to children all around the world. He destroys the bad ones. The BFG then explains that he eats the only edible plant that will grow in the giants' homeland: snozzcumbers, which are disgusting striped cucumber-like vegetables with wart-like growths that taste like frog skins and rotten fish to Sophie and cockroaches and slime wanglers to the BFG. Another giant called the Bloodbottler then storms in. Sophie hides in a snozzcumber and is nearly accidentally eaten by the Bloodbottler. Bloodbottler luckily spits her out and then leaves in disgust. When Sophie announces she is thirsty, the BFG treats her to a fizzy soda pop drink called "frobscottle" which causes noisy flatulence, which the BFG calls "Whizzpopping", because of the bubbles sinking downwards, rather than floating upwards. The next morning, the BFG takes Sophie to Dream Country to catch more dreams, but is tormented by the man-eating giants along the way, notably by their leader the Fleshlumpeater, the largest and most fearsome of the giants. In Dream Country, the BFG demonstrates his dream-catching skills to Sophie; but the BFG mistakenly captures a nightmare and uses it to start a fight among the other giants when Fleshlumpeater has a nightmare about a giant killer named Jack. Sophie later persuades him to approach the Queen of England about imprisoning the other giants. To this end, she uses her knowledge of London to navigate the BFG to Buckingham Palace and the BFG creates a nightmare for the Queen which describes the man-eating giants and leaves Sophie in the Queen's bedroom to confirm it. Because the dream included the knowledge of Sophie's presence, the Queen believes her and speaks with the BFG. A fleet of helicopters then follows Sophie and the BFG to the giants' homeland where the giants are tied up as they sleep and the helicopters carry them back to London where they are imprisoned in a deep pit with sheer walls and a high safety fence. The BFG is lowered in to untie them. Untying Fleshlumpeater last, he explains why they are being imprisoned. Outraged, Fleshlumpeater roars that they will devour the BFG instead, but he is hoisted out to safety. The man-eating giants find themselves being only fed snozzcumbers. On one occasion though, there is an incident where three drunken men climb over the fence surrounding the pit, fall in, and are eaten by the giants. Meanwhile, the orphanage is closed down and sold to become a teacherage. Afterwards, a huge castle is built as the BFG's new house, with a little cottage next door for Sophie. While they are living happily in England, gifts come from the governments of every country ever targeted by the giants (notably England, Sweden, Arabia, India, Panama, Tibet, Jersey, Chile, and New Zealand). After Sophie teaches the BFG how to read and write proper English, he writes a book of their adventures identified as the novel itself—under the name "Roald Dahl". References in other Roald Dahl books. The BFG first appears as a story told to Danny by his father in "Danny, the Champion of the World". The ending is almost the same as "James and the Giant Peach", when he writes a story about himself, by himself. Also, Mr. Tibbs relates to Mrs. Tibbs, the friend of Mr. Gilligrass, the U.S. president in "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator". Awards and recognition. "The BFG" has won numerous awards including the 1985 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis as the year's best children's book, in its German translation "Sophiechen und der Riese" and the 1991 Read Alone and Read Aloud BILBY Awards. In 2003 it was ranked number 56 in The Big Read, a two-stage survey of the British public by the BBC to determine the "Nation's Best-loved Novel". The U.S. National Education Association listed "The BFG" among the "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children" based on a 2007 online poll. In 2012, it was ranked number 88 among all-time children's novels in a survey published by "School Library Journal", a monthly with primarily U.S. audience. It was the fourth of four books by Dahl among the Top 100, more than any other writer. Adaptations. Comic strip. Between 1986 and 1998, the novel was adapted into a newspaper comic by journalist Brian Lee and artist Bill Asprey. It was published in the "Mail on Sunday" and originally a straight adaptation, with scripts accepted by Roald Dahl himself. After a while the comic started following its own storylines and continued long after Dahl's death in 1990. Stage play. The play was adapted for the stage by David Wood and premiered at the Wimbledon Theatre in 1991. Films. 1989 film. On 25 December 1989, ITV broadcast an animated film based on the book and produced by Cosgrove Hall Films on television, with David Jason providing the voice of the BFG and Amanda Root as the voice of Sophie. The film was dedicated to animator George Jackson who worked on numerous Cosgrove Hall productions. 2016 film. A theatrical film adaptation was produced by Walt Disney Pictures, directed by Steven Spielberg, and starring Mark Rylance as the BFG, as well as Ruby Barnhill, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement, Rebecca Hall, Rafe Spall, and Bill Hader. The film was released on 1 July 2016, to positive critical reception. TV series. A TV series based on "The BFG" is being developed as part of Netflix's "animated series event", based on Roald Dahl's books.

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The Tremor of Forgery The Tremor of Forgery (1969) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith. It was the thirteenth of her 22 novels. Synopsis. American writer Howard Ingham arrives in the sweltering heat of Tunisia in search of inspiration for a new movie script he has been commissioned to write. The director with whom he is collaborating fails to appear and hears reports from home in the U.S. about infidelity and suicide. Rather than abandon the project, Howard stays and starts work on a novel. He gets to know Francis J. Adams, an aging American propagandist, and Anders Jensen, a Danish homosexual painter. While waiting for a letter from his New York girlfriend, he settled on a plot for his projected novel, the story of a banker who forges documents to steal money he then gives to the poor. One night, Ingham finds someone breaking into his apartment. He throws his typewriter at the intruder, possibly killing him. The body is dragged away by the intruder's accomplices. Ingham struggles to keep this incident secret from his acquaintances while at the same time questioning Western morality, in particular the application of its principles in a country where he lives as a stranger. Themes. Like many of Highsmith's other novels, "The Tremor of Forgery" is ultimately a morality tale. Highsmith reveals that like most people, the novel's protagonist Ingham sees himself as ultimately a good person who cares about the welfare of people and loves his fiancé. However, as the novel progresses, Ingham's actions reveal that human morality is more often dictated by circumstances, and that self-interest and preservation is humanity's underlying ethos. Human emotions that drive our behavior, such as love, are by the end of the novel, portrayed as artificial constructs of society, rather than emotions that are deeply felt. This is confusing to Ingham, as he laments that the world, including his own feelings, are incomprehensible to him. Reception. "Highsmith has produced work as serious in its implications and as subtle in its approach as anything being done in the novel today." - Julian Symons "Miss Highsmith's finest novel to my mind is The Tremor of Forgery, and if I were to be asked what it is about I would reply, 'Apprehension'." - Graham Greene

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The Anatomy of Criticism The Anatomy of Criticism: A Trialogue (1933) is a book by Henry Hazlitt on literary criticism.

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The Hollow Crown (anthology) The Hollow Crown is an anthology, devised by John Barton in 1961, which presents in dramatic form speeches, documents, gossip and music, associated with the British monarchy from William the Conqueror to Queen Victoria. A videotape of a broadcast can be seen at The Paley Center for Media in New York City. The work has also been produced for the stage several times. According to Ian Richardson "every member of the Royal Shakespeare Company - present, past, or passed-on - has participated in it at one time or another". Productions. Among the earliest fund raisers for the reopened Georgian Angles Theatre in Wisbech was The Hollow Crown, which launched Jill Freud’s successful company. In 2002, Richardson joined Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Donald Sinden, and Dame Diana Rigg in an international tour visiting Wellington, New Zealand and Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, Australia, returning to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. A Canadian tour in 2004 substituted Alan Howard for Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave for Rigg.

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The Fish Can Sing The Fish Can Sing () is a 1957 novel by Icelandic author Halldór Laxness, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. Plot summary. The novel is set at the start of the twentieth century and deals with the orphaned boy Álfgrímur, his adoptive grandparents, and the small, tolerant community of misfits and eccentrics they gather around them at Brekkukot, their cottage in Reykjavík. As Álfgrímur begins to encounter the minor politicians, businessmen and social-climbers of the growing town of Reykjavík he starts to question his future as a fisherman's grandson, and is increasingly fascinated by Garðar Hólm, the celebrated Icelandic "world singer" whose sporadic returns to Iceland encourage Álfgrímur to pursue his own personal goals of self-expression. He discovers the true value of his boyhood experiences only as he sets out on a path that will take him away from them forever. Trivia. The boy's name, Álfgrímur, is explained in the book as a compound of Álf (elf) and grímur (a poetic word for 'night') meaning 'he who spends the night with the elves'. The original name of the book in Icelandic is "Brekkukotsannáll" (Annals of Brekkukot). The book also had an admirable young lady named Blær, which is why Björk Eiðsdóttir chose this name for her daughter born in 1997, although it was officially a masculine name. In 2013, Björk and Blær won a court case for the right to use this name—see also Icelandic Naming Committee#Blær Bjarkardóttir Rúnarsdóttir

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In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time (), also translated as Remembrance of Things Past, is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust (1871–1922). It is his most prominent work, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory; the most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume. It gained fame in English in translations by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin as "Remembrance of Things Past", but the title "In Search of Lost Time", a literal rendering of the French, became ascendant after D. J. Enright adopted it for his revised translation published in 1992. "In Search of Lost Time" follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in the late 19th century and early 20th century high society France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning to the world. The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished he kept adding new material and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages, as they existed only in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert. The work was published in France between 1913 and 1927. Proust paid for the publication of the first volume (by the Grasset publishing house) after it had been turned down by leading editors who had been offered the manuscript in longhand. Many of its ideas, motifs and scenes were anticipated in Proust's unfinished novel "Jean Santeuil" (1896–99), though the perspective and treatment there are different, and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, "Contre Sainte-Beuve" (1908–09). The novel had great influence on twentieth-century literature; some writers have sought to emulate it, others to parody it. In the centenary year of the novel's first volume, Edmund White pronounced "À la recherche du temps perdu" "the most respected novel of the twentieth century." Initial publication. The novel was initially published in seven volumes: Synopsis. The novel recounts the experiences of the Narrator (who is never definitively named) while he is growing up, learning about art, participating in society, and falling in love. Volume One: "Swann's Way". The Narrator begins by noting, "For a long time, I went to bed early." He comments on the way sleep seems to alter one's surroundings, and the way habit makes one indifferent to them. He remembers being in his room in the family's country home in Combray, while downstairs his parents entertain their friend Charles Swann, an elegant man of Jewish origin with strong ties to society. Due to Swann's visit, the Narrator is deprived of his mother's goodnight kiss, but he gets her to spend the night reading to him. This memory is the only one he has of Combray until years later the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea inspires a nostalgic incident of involuntary memory. He remembers having a similar snack as a child with his invalid aunt Léonie, and it leads to more memories of Combray. He describes their servant Françoise, who is uneducated but possesses an earthy wisdom and a strong sense of both duty and tradition. He meets an elegant "lady in pink" while visiting his uncle Adolphe. He develops a love of the theater, especially the actress Berma, and his awkward Jewish friend Bloch introduces him to the works of the writer Bergotte. He learns Swann made an unsuitable marriage but has social ambitions for his beautiful daughter Gilberte. Legrandin, a snobbish friend of the family, tries to avoid introducing the boy to his well-to-do sister. The Narrator describes two routes for country walks the child and his parents often enjoyed: the way past Swann's home (the Méséglise way), and the Guermantes way, both containing scenes of natural beauty. Taking the Méséglise way, he sees Gilberte Swann standing in her yard with a lady in white, Mme. Swann, and her supposed lover: Baron de Charlus, a friend of Swann's. Gilberte makes a gesture that the Narrator interprets as a rude dismissal. During another walk, he spies a lesbian scene involving Mlle. Vinteuil, daughter of a composer, and her friend. The Guermantes way is symbolic of the Guermantes family, the nobility of the area. The Narrator is awed by the magic of their name and is captivated when he first sees Mme. de Guermantes. He discovers how appearances conceal the true nature of things and tries writing a description of some nearby steeples. Lying in bed, he seems transported back to these places until he awakens. Mme. Verdurin is an autocratic hostess who, aided by her husband, demands total obedience from the guests in her "little clan". One guest is Odette de Crécy, a former courtesan, who has met Swann and invites him to the group. Swann is too refined for such company, but Odette gradually intrigues him with her unusual style. A sonata by Vinteuil, which features a "little phrase", becomes the motif for their deepening relationship. The Verdurins host M. de Forcheville; their guests include Cottard, a doctor; Brichot, an academic; Saniette, the object of scorn; and a painter, M. Biche. Swann grows jealous of Odette, who now keeps him at arm's length, and suspects an affair between her and Forcheville, aided by the Verdurins. Swann seeks respite by attending a society concert that includes Legrandin's sister and a young Mme. de Guermantes; the "little phrase" is played and Swann realizes Odette's love for him is gone. He tortures himself wondering about her true relationships with others, but his love for her, despite renewals, gradually diminishes. He moves on and marvels that he ever loved a woman who was not his type. At home in Paris, the Narrator dreams of visiting Venice or the church in Balbec, a resort, but he is too unwell and instead takes walks in the Champs-Élysées, where he meets and befriends Gilberte. He holds her father, now married to Odette, in the highest esteem, and is awed by the beautiful sight of Mme. Swann strolling in public. Years later, the old sights of the area are long gone, and he laments the fleeting nature of places. Volume Two: "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower". The Narrator's parents invite M. de Norpois, a diplomat colleague of the Narrator's father, to dinner. With Norpois's intervention, the Narrator is finally allowed to go see the Berma perform in a play, but is disappointed by her acting. Afterwards, at dinner, he watches Norpois, who is extremely diplomatic and correct at all times, expound on society and art. The Narrator gives him a draft of his writing, but Norpois gently indicates it is not good. The Narrator continues to go to the Champs-Élysées and play with Gilberte. Her parents distrust him, so he writes to them in protest. He and Gilberte wrestle and he has an orgasm. Gilberte invites him to tea, and he becomes a regular at her house. He observes Mme. Swann's inferior social status, Swann's lowered standards and indifference towards his wife, and Gilberte's affection for her father. The Narrator contemplates how he has attained his wish to know the Swanns, and savors their unique style. At one of their parties he meets and befriends Bergotte, who gives his impressions of society figures and artists. But the Narrator is still unable to start writing seriously. His friend Bloch takes him to a brothel, where there is a Jewish prostitute named Rachel. He showers Mme. Swann with flowers, being almost on better terms with her than with Gilberte. One day, he and Gilberte quarrel and he decides never to see her again. However, he continues to visit Mme. Swann, who has become a popular hostess, with her guests including Mme. Bontemps, who has a niece named Albertine. The Narrator hopes for a letter from Gilberte repairing their friendship, but gradually feels himself losing interest. He breaks down and plans to reconcile with her, but spies from afar someone resembling her walking with a boy and gives her up for good. He stops visiting her mother also, who is now a celebrated beauty admired by passersby, and years later he can recall the glamour she displayed then. Two years later, the Narrator, his grandmother, and Françoise set out for the seaside town of Balbec. The Narrator is almost totally indifferent to Gilberte now. During the train ride, his grandmother, who only believes in proper books, lends him her favorite: the "Letters" of Mme. de Sévigné. At Balbec, the Narrator is disappointed with the church and uncomfortable in his unfamiliar hotel room, but his grandmother comforts him. He admires the seascape, and learns about the colorful staff and customers around the hotel: Aimé, the discreet headwaiter; the lift operator; M. de Stermaria and his beautiful young daughter; and M. de Cambremer and his wife, Legrandin's sister. His grandmother encounters an old friend, the blue-blooded Mme. de Villeparisis, and they renew their friendship. The three of them go for rides in the country, openly discussing art and politics. The Narrator longs for the country girls he sees alongside the roads, and has a strange feeling—possibly memory, possibly something else—while admiring a row of three trees. Mme. de Villeparisis is joined by her glamorous great-nephew Robert de Saint-Loup, who is involved with an unsuitable woman. Despite initial awkwardness, the Narrator and his grandmother become good friends with him. Bloch, the childhood friend from Combray, turns up with his family, and acts in typically inappropriate fashion. Saint-Loup's ultra-aristocratic and extremely rude uncle the Baron de Charlus arrives. The Narrator discovers Mme. de Villeparisis, her nephew M. de Charlus, and his nephew Saint-Loup are all of the Guermantes family. Charlus ignores the Narrator, but later visits him in his room and lends him a book. The next day, the Baron speaks shockingly informally to him, then demands the book back. The Narrator ponders Saint-Loup's attitude towards his aristocratic roots, and his relationship with his mistress, a mere actress whose recital bombed horribly with his family. One day, the Narrator sees a "little band" of teenage girls strolling beside the sea, and becomes infatuated with them, along with an unseen hotel guest named Mlle Simonet. He joins Saint-Loup for dinner and reflects on how drunkenness affects his perceptions. Later they meet the painter Elstir, and the Narrator visits his studio. The Narrator marvels at Elstir's method of renewing impressions of ordinary things, as well as his connections with the Verdurins (he is "M. Biche") and Mme. Swann. He discovers the painter knows the teenage girls, particularly one dark-haired beauty who is Albertine Simonet. Elstir arranges an introduction, and the Narrator becomes friends with her, as well as her friends Andrée, Rosemonde, and Gisele. The group goes for picnics and tours the countryside, as well as playing games, while the Narrator reflects on the nature of love as he becomes attracted to Albertine. Despite her rejection, they become close, although he still feels attracted to the whole group. At summer's end, the town closes up, and the Narrator is left with his image of first seeing the girls walking beside the sea. Volume Three: "The Guermantes Way". The Narrator's family has moved to an apartment connected with the Guermantes residence. Françoise befriends a fellow tenant, the tailor Jupien and his niece. The Narrator is fascinated by the Guermantes and their life, and is awed by their social circle while attending another Berma performance. He begins staking out the street where Mme. de Guermantes walks every day, to her evident annoyance. He decides to visit her nephew Saint-Loup at his military base, to ask to be introduced to her. After noting the landscape and his state of mind while sleeping, the Narrator meets and attends dinners with Saint-Loup's fellow officers, where they discuss the Dreyfus Affair and the art of military strategy. But the Narrator returns home after receiving a call from his aging grandmother. Mme. de Guermantes declines to see him, and he also finds he is still unable to begin writing. Saint-Loup visits on leave, and they have lunch and attend a recital with his actress mistress: Rachel, the Jewish prostitute, toward whom the unsuspecting Saint-Loup is crazed with jealousy. The Narrator then goes to Mme. de Villeparisis's salon, which is considered second-rate despite its public reputation. Legrandin attends and displays his social climbing. Bloch stridently interrogates M. de Norpois about the Dreyfus Affair, which has ripped all of society asunder, but Norpois diplomatically avoids answering. The Narrator observes Mme. de Guermantes and her aristocratic bearing, as she makes caustic remarks about friends and family, including the mistresses of her husband, who is M. de Charlus's brother. Mme. Swann arrives, and the Narrator remembers a visit from Morel, the son of his uncle Adolphe's valet, who revealed that the "lady in pink" was Mme. Swann. Charlus asks the Narrator to leave with him, and offers to make him his protégé. At home, the Narrator's grandmother has worsened, and while walking with him she suffers a stroke. The family seeks out the best medical help, and she is often visited by Bergotte, himself unwell, but she dies, her face reverting to its youthful appearance. Several months later, Saint-Loup, now single, convinces the Narrator to ask out the Stermaria daughter, newly divorced. Albertine visits; she has matured and they share a kiss. The Narrator then goes to see Mme. de Villeparisis, where Mme. de Guermantes, whom he has stopped following, invites him to dinner. The Narrator daydreams of Mme. de Stermaria, but she abruptly cancels, although Saint-Loup rescues him from despair by taking him to dine with his aristocratic friends, who engage in petty gossip. Saint-Loup passes on an invitation from Charlus to come visit him. The next day, at the Guermantes's dinner party, the Narrator admires their Elstir paintings, then meets the cream of society, including the Princess of Parma, who is an amiable simpleton. He learns more about the Guermantes: their hereditary features; their less-refined cousins the Courvoisiers; and Mme. de Guermantes's celebrated humor, artistic tastes, and exalted diction (although she does not live up to the enchantment of her name). The discussion turns to gossip about society, including Charlus and his late wife; the affair between Norpois and Mme. de Villeparisis; and aristocratic lineages. Leaving, the Narrator visits Charlus, who falsely accuses him of slandering him. The Narrator stomps on Charlus's hat and storms out, but Charlus is strangely unperturbed and gives him a ride home. Months later, the Narrator is invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's party. He tries to verify the invitation with M. and Mme. de Guermantes, but first sees something he will describe later. They will be attending the party but do not help him, and while they are chatting, Swann arrives. Now a committed Dreyfusard, he is very sick and nearing death, but the Guermantes assure him he will outlive them. Volume Four: "Sodom and Gomorrah". The Narrator describes what he had seen earlier: while waiting for the Guermantes to return so he could ask about his invitation, he saw Charlus encounter Jupien in their courtyard. The two then went into Jupien's shop and had intercourse. The Narrator reflects on the nature of "inverts", and how they are like a secret society, never able to live in the open. He compares them to flowers, whose reproduction through the aid of insects depends solely on happenstance. Arriving at the Princesse's party, his invitation seems valid as he is greeted warmly by her. He sees Charlus exchanging knowing looks with the diplomat Vaugoubert, a fellow invert. After several tries, the Narrator manages to be introduced to the Prince de Guermantes, who then walks off with Swann, causing speculation on the topic of their conversation. Mme. de Saint-Euverte tries to recruit guests for her party the next day, but is subjected to scorn from some of the Guermantes. Charlus is captivated by the two young sons of M. de Guermantes's newest mistress. Saint-Loup arrives and mentions the names of several promiscuous women to the Narrator. Swann takes the Narrator aside and reveals the Prince wanted to admit his and his wife's pro-Dreyfus leanings. Swann is aware of his old friend Charlus's behavior, then urges the Narrator to visit Gilberte, and departs. The Narrator leaves with M. and Mme. de Guermantes, and heads home for a late-night meeting with Albertine. He grows frantic when first she is late and then calls to cancel, but he convinces her to come. He writes an indifferent letter to Gilberte, and reviews the changing social scene, which now includes Mme. Swann's salon centered on Bergotte. He decides to return to Balbec, after learning the women mentioned by Saint-Loup will be there. At Balbec, grief at his grandmother's suffering, which was worse than he knew, overwhelms him. He ponders the intermittencies of the heart and the ways of dealing with sad memories. His mother, even sadder, has become more like his grandmother in homage. Albertine is nearby and they begin spending time together, but he starts to suspect her of lesbianism and of lying to him about her activities. He fakes a preference for her friend Andrée to make her become more trustworthy, and it works, but he soon suspects her of knowing several scandalous women at the hotel, including Lea, an actress. On the way to visit Saint-Loup, they meet Morel, the valet's son who is now an excellent violinist, and then the aging Charlus, who falsely claims to know Morel and goes to speak to him. The Narrator visits the Verdurins, who are renting a house from the Cambremers. On the train with him is the little clan: Brichot, who explains at length the derivation of the local place-names; Cottard, now a celebrated doctor; Saniette, still the butt of everyone's ridicule; and a new member, Ski. The Verdurins are still haughty and dictatorial toward their guests, who are as pedantic as ever. Charlus and Morel arrive together, and Charlus's true nature is barely concealed. The Cambremers arrive, and the Verdurins barely tolerate them. Back at the hotel, the Narrator ruminates on sleep and time, and observes the amusing mannerisms of the staff, who are mostly aware of Charlus's proclivities. The Narrator and Albertine hire a chauffeur and take rides in the country, leading to observations about new forms of travel as well as country life. The Narrator is unaware that the chauffeur and Morel are acquainted, and he reviews Morel's amoral character and plans towards Jupien's niece. The Narrator is jealously suspicious of Albertine but grows tired of her. She and the Narrator attend evening dinners at the Verdurins, taking the train with the other guests; Charlus is now a regular, despite his obliviousness to the clan's mockery. He and Morel try to maintain the secret of their relationship, and the Narrator recounts a ploy involving a fake duel that Charlus used to control Morel. The passing station stops remind the Narrator of various people and incidents, including two failed attempts by the Prince de Guermantes to arrange liaisons with Morel; a final break between the Verdurins and Cambremers; and a misunderstanding between the Narrator, Charlus, and Bloch. The Narrator has grown weary of the area and prefers others over Albertine. But she reveals to him as they leave the train that she has plans with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend (the lesbians from Combray) which plunges him into despair. He invents a story about a broken engagement of his, to convince her to go to Paris with him, and after hesitating she suddenly agrees to go immediately. The Narrator tells his mother: he must marry Albertine. Volume Five: "The Prisoner". The Narrator is living with Albertine in his family's apartment, to Françoise's distrust and his absent mother's chagrin. He marvels that he has come to possess her, but has grown bored with her. He mostly stays home, but has enlisted Andrée to report on Albertine's whereabouts, as his jealousy remains. The Narrator gets advice on fashion from Mme. de Guermantes, and encounters Charlus and Morel visiting Jupien and her niece, who is being married off to Morel despite his cruelty towards her. One day, the Narrator returns from the Guermantes and finds Andrée just leaving, claiming to dislike the smell of their flowers. Albertine, who is more guarded to avoid provoking his jealousy, is maturing into an intelligent and elegant young lady. The Narrator is entranced by her beauty as she sleeps, and is only content when she is not out with others. She mentions wanting to go to the Verdurins, but the Narrator suspects an ulterior motive and analyzes her conversation for hints. He suggests she go instead to the Trocadéro with Andrée, and she reluctantly agrees. The Narrator compares dreams to wakefulness, and listens to the street vendors with Albertine, then she departs. He remembers trips she took with the chauffeur, then learns Lea the notorious actress will be at the Trocadero too. He sends Françoise to retrieve Albertine, and while waiting, he muses on music and Morel. When she returns, they go for a drive, while he pines for Venice and realizes she feels captive. He learns of Bergotte's final illness. That evening, he sneaks off to the Verdurins to try to discover the reason for Albertine's interest in them. He encounters Brichot on the way, and they discuss Swann, who has died. Charlus arrives and the Narrator reviews the Baron's struggles with Morel, then learns Mlle Vinteuil and her friend are expected (although they do not come). Morel joins in performing a septet by Vinteuil, which evokes commonalities with his sonata that only the composer could create. Mme. Verdurin is furious that Charlus has taken control of her party; in revenge the Verdurins persuade Morel to repudiate him, and Charlus falls temporarily ill from the shock. Returning home, the Narrator and Albertine fight about his solo visit to the Verdurins, and she denies having affairs with Lea or Mlle Vinteuil, but admits she lied on occasion to avoid arguments. He threatens to break it off, but they reconcile. He appreciates art and fashion with her, and ponders her mysteriousness. But his suspicion of her and Andrée is renewed, and they quarrel. After two awkward days and a restless night, he resolves to end the affair, but in the morning Françoise informs him: Albertine has asked for her boxes and left. Volume Six: "The Fugitive". The Narrator is anguished at Albertine's departure and absence. He dispatches Saint-Loup to convince her aunt Mme. Bontemps to send her back, but Albertine insists the Narrator should ask, and she will gladly return. The Narrator lies and replies he is done with her, but she just agrees with him. He writes to her that he will marry Andrée, then hears from Saint-Loup of the failure of his mission to the aunt. Desperate, he begs Albertine to return, but receives word: she has died in a riding accident. He receives two last letters from her: one wishing him and Andrée well, and one asking if she can return. The Narrator plunges into suffering amid the many different memories of Albertine, intimately linked to all of his everyday sensations. He recalls a suspicious incident she told him of at Balbec, and asks Aime, the headwaiter, to investigate. He recalls their history together and his regrets, as well as love's randomness. Aime reports back: Albertine often engaged in affairs with girls at Balbec. The Narrator sends him to learn more, and he reports other liaisons with girls. The Narrator wishes he could have known the true Albertine, whom he would have accepted. He begins to grow accustomed to the idea of her death, despite constant reminders that renew his grief. Andrée admits her own lesbianism but denies being with Albertine. The Narrator knows he will forget Albertine, just as he has forgotten Gilberte. He happens to meet Gilberte again; her mother Mme. Swann became Mme. de Forcheville and Gilberte is now part of high society, received by the Guermantes. The Narrator finally publishes an article in "Le Figaro". Andrée visits him and confesses relations with Albertine and also explains the truth behind her departure: her aunt wanted her to marry another man. The Narrator finally visits Venice with his mother, which enthralls him in every aspect. They happen to see Norpois and Mme. de Villeparisis there. A telegram signed from Albertine arrives, but the Narrator is indifferent and it is only a misprint anyway. Returning home, the Narrator and his mother receive surprising news: Gilberte will marry Saint-Loup, and Jupien's niece will be adopted by Charlus and then married to Legrandin's nephew, an invert. There is much discussion of these marriages among society. The Narrator visits Gilberte in her new home, and is shocked to learn of Saint-Loup's affair with Morel, among others. He despairs for their friendship. Volume Seven: "Time Regained". The Narrator is staying with Gilberte at her home near Combray. They go for walks, on one of which he is stunned to learn the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way are actually linked. Gilberte also tells him she was attracted to him when young, and had made a suggestive gesture to him as he watched her. Also, it was Lea she was walking with the evening he had planned to reconcile with her. He considers Saint-Loup's nature and reads an account of the Verdurins' salon, deciding he has no talent for writing. The scene shifts to a night in 1916, during World War I, when the Narrator has returned to Paris from a stay in a sanatorium and is walking the streets during a blackout. He reflects on the changed norms of art and society, with the Verdurins now highly esteemed. He recounts a 1914 visit from Saint-Loup, who was trying to enlist secretly. He recalls descriptions of the fighting he subsequently received from Saint-Loup and Gilberte, whose home was threatened. He describes a call paid on him a few days previously by Saint-Loup; they discussed military strategy. Now on the dark street, the Narrator encounters Charlus, who has completely surrendered to his impulses. Charlus reviews Morel's betrayals and his own temptation to seek vengeance; critiques Brichot's new fame as a writer, which has ostracized him from the Verdurins; and admits his general sympathy with Germany. The last part of the conversation draws a crowd of suspicious onlookers. After parting the Narrator seeks refuge in what appears to be a hotel, where he sees someone who looks familiar leaving. Inside, he discovers it to be a male brothel, and spies Charlus using the services. The proprietor turns out to be Jupien, who expresses a perverse pride in his business. A few days later, news comes that Saint-Loup has been killed in combat. The Narrator pieces together that Saint-Loup had visited Jupien's brothel, and ponders what might have been had he lived. Years later, again in Paris, the Narrator goes to a party at the house of the Prince de Guermantes. On the way he sees Charlus, now a mere shell of his former self, being helped by Jupien. The paving stones at the Guermantes house inspire another incident of involuntary memory for the Narrator, quickly followed by two more. Inside, while waiting in the library, he discerns their meaning: by putting him in contact with both the past and present, the impressions allow him to gain a vantage point outside time, affording a glimpse of the true nature of things. He realizes his whole life has prepared him for the mission of describing events as fully revealed, and (finally) resolves to begin writing. Entering the party, he is shocked at the disguises old age has given to the people he knew, and at the changes in society. Legrandin is now an invert, but is no longer a snob. Bloch is a respected writer and vital figure in society. Morel has reformed and become a respected citizen. Mme. de Forcheville is the mistress of M. de Guermantes. Mme. Verdurin has married the Prince de Guermantes after both their spouses died. Rachel is the star of the party, abetted by Mme. de Guermantes, whose social position has been eroded by her affinity for theater. Gilberte introduces her daughter to the Narrator; he is struck by the way the daughter encapsulates both the Méséglise and Guermantes ways within herself. He is spurred to writing, with help from Françoise and despite signs of approaching death. He realizes that every person carries within them the accumulated baggage of their past, and concludes that to be accurate he must describe how everyone occupies an immense range "in Time". Themes. "À la recherche" made a decisive break with the 19th-century realist and plot-driven novel, populated by people of action and people representing social and cultural groups or morals. Although parts of the novel could be read as an exploration of snobbery, deceit, jealousy and suffering and although it contains a multitude of realistic details, the focus is not on the development of a tight plot or of a coherent evolution but on a multiplicity of perspectives and on the formation of experience. The protagonists of the first volume (the narrator as a boy and Swann) are, by the standards of 19th century novels, remarkably introspective and passive, nor do they trigger action from other leading characters; to contemporary readers, reared on Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy, they would not function as centers of a plot. While there is an array of symbolism in the work, it is rarely defined through explicit "keys" leading to moral, romantic or philosophical ideas. The significance of what is happening is often placed within the memory or in the inner contemplation of what is described. This focus on the relationship between experience, memory and writing and the radical de-emphasizing of the outward plot, have become staples of the modern novel but were almost unheard of in 1913. Roger Shattuck elucidates an underlying principle in understanding Proust and the various themes present in his novel: Thus the novel embodies and manifests the principle of intermittence: to live means to perceive different and often conflicting aspects of reality. This iridescence never resolves itself completely into a unitive point of view. Accordingly, it is possible to project out of the "Search" itself a series of putative and intermittent authors... The portraitist of an expiring society, the artist of romantic reminiscence, the narrator of the laminated "I," the classicist of formal structure—all these figures are to be found in Proust... Memory. The role of memory is central to the novel, introduced with the famous madeleine episode in the first section of the novel and in the last volume, "Time Regained", a flashback similar to that caused by the madeleine is the beginning of the resolution of the story. Throughout the work many similar instances of involuntary memory, triggered by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells conjure important memories for the narrator and sometimes return attention to an earlier episode of the novel. Although Proust wrote contemporaneously with Sigmund Freud, with there being many points of similarity between their thought on the structures and mechanisms of the human mind, neither author read the other. The madeleine episode reads: No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea. Gilles Deleuze believed that the focus of Proust was not memory and the past but the narrator's learning the use of "signs" to understand and communicate ultimate reality, thereby becoming an artist. While Proust was bitterly aware of the experience of loss and exclusion—loss of loved ones, loss of affection, friendship and innocent joy, which are dramatized in the novel through recurrent jealousy, betrayal and the death of loved ones—his response to this, formulated after he had discovered Ruskin, was that the work of art can recapture the lost and thus save it from destruction, at least in our minds. Art triumphs over the destructive power of time. This element of his artistic thought is clearly inherited from romantic platonism, but Proust crosses it with a new intensity in describing jealousy, desire and self-doubt. (Note the last quatrain of Baudelaire's poem "Une Charogne": "Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will / Devour you with kisses, / That I have kept the form and the divine essence / Of my decomposed love!"). Separation anxiety. Proust begins his novel with the statement, "For a long time I used to go to bed early." This leads to lengthy discussion of his anxiety at leaving his mother at night and his attempts to force her to come and kiss him goodnight, even on nights when the family has company, culminating in a spectacular success, when his father suggests that his mother stay the night with him after he has waylaid her in the hall when she is going to bed. His anxiety leads to manipulation, much like the manipulation employed by his invalid aunt Leonie and all the lovers in the entire book, who use the same methods of petty tyranny to manipulate and possess their loved ones. Nature of art. The nature of art is a motif in the novel and is often explored at great length. Proust sets forth a theory of art in which we are all capable of producing art, if by this we mean taking the experiences of life and transforming them in a way that shows understanding and maturity. Writing, painting, and music are also discussed at great length. Morel the violinist is examined to give an example of a certain type of "artistic" character, along with other fictional artists like the novelist Bergotte, the composer Vinteuil, and the painter Elstir. As early as the "Combray" section of "Swann's Way", the narrator is concerned with his ability to write, since he desires to pursue a writing career. The transmutation of the experience of a scene in one of the family's usual walks into a short descriptive passage is described and the sample passage given. The narrator presents this passage as an early sample of his own writing, in which he has only had to alter a few words. The question of his own genius relates to all the passages in which genius is recognized or misunderstood because it presents itself in the guise of a humble friend, rather than a passionate "artiste". The question of taste or judgement in art is also an important theme, as exemplified by Swann's exquisite taste in art, which is often hidden from his friends who do not share it or subordinated to his love interests. Homosexuality. Questions pertaining to homosexuality appear throughout the novel, particularly in the later volumes. The first arrival of this theme comes in the "Combray" section of "Swann's Way", where the daughter of the piano teacher and composer Vinteuil is seduced, and the narrator observes her having lesbian relations in front of the portrait of her recently deceased father. The narrator invariably suspects his lovers of liaisons with other women, a repetition of the suspicions held by Charles Swann about his mistress and eventual wife, Odette, in "Swann's Way". The first chapter of "Cities of the Plain" ("Sodom and Gomorrah") includes a detailed account of a sexual encounter between M. de Charlus, the novel's most prominent male homosexual, and his tailor. Critics have often observed that while the character of the narrator is ostensibly heterosexual, Proust intimates that the narrator is a closeted homosexual. The narrator's manner towards male homosexuality is consistently aloof, yet the narrator is unaccountably knowledgeable. This strategy enables Proust to pursue themes related to male homosexuality—in particular the nature of closetedness—from both within and without a homosexual perspective. Proust does not designate Charlus' homosexuality until the middle of the novel, in "Cities"; afterwards the Baron's ostentatiousness and flamboyance, of which he is blithely unaware, completely absorb the narrator's perception. Lesbianism, on the other hand, tortures Swann and the narrator because it presents an inaccessible world. Whereas male homosexual desire is recognizable, insofar as it encompasses male sexuality, Odette's and Albertine's lesbian trysts represent Swann and the narrator's painful exclusion from characters they desire. There is much debate as to how great a bearing Proust's sexuality has on understanding these aspects of the novel. Although many of Proust's close family and friends suspected that he was homosexual, Proust never admitted this. It was only after his death that André Gide, in his publication of correspondence with Proust, made public Proust's homosexuality. In response to Gide's criticism that he hid his actual sexuality within his novel, Proust told Gide that "one can say anything so long as one does not say 'I'." Proust's intimate relations with such individuals as Alfred Agostinelli and Reynaldo Hahn are well-documented, though Proust was not "out and proud", except perhaps in close-knit social circles. In 1949, the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's lovers—Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée—and one has their masculine counterpart. This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in "Epistemology of the Closet" (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and in "Proust's Lesbianism" (1999) by Elisabeth Ladenson. Feminized forms of masculine names were and are commonplace in French. Critical reception. "In Search of Lost Time" is considered, by many scholars and critics, to be the definitive modern novel. It has had a profound effect on subsequent writers such as the Bloomsbury Group. "Oh if I could write like that!" marvelled Virginia Woolf in 1922. Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that "In Search of Lost Time" is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century". Vladimir Nabokov, in a 1965 interview, named the greatest prose works of the 20th century as, in order, "Joyce's "Ulysses", Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", Bely's "Petersburg", and the first half of Proust's fairy tale "In Search of Lost Time"". J. Peder Zane's book "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books", collates 125 "top 10 greatest books of all time" lists by prominent living writers; "In Search of Lost Time" is placed eighth. In the 1960s, Swedish literary critic Bengt Holmqvist described the novel as "at once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the 'nouveau roman'", indicating the sixties vogue of new, experimental French prose but also, by extension, other post-war attempts to fuse different planes of location, temporality and fragmented consciousness within the same novel. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has called it his favorite book. Proust's influence (in parody) is seen in Evelyn Waugh's "A Handful of Dust" (1934), in which Chapter 1 is entitled "Du Côté de Chez Beaver" and Chapter 6 "Du Côté de Chez Tod". Waugh did not like Proust: in letters to Nancy Mitford in 1948, he wrote, "I am reading Proust for the first time ...and am surprised to find him a mental defective" and later, "I still think [Proust] insane...the structure must be sane & that is raving." Another critic is Kazuo Ishiguro who said in an interview: "To be absolutely honest, apart from the opening volume of Proust, I find him crushingly dull." Since the publication in 1992 of a revised English translation by The Modern Library, based on a new definitive French edition (1987–89), interest in Proust's novel in the English-speaking world has increased. Two substantial new biographies have appeared in English, by Edmund White and William C. Carter, and at least two books about the experience of reading Proust have appeared by Alain de Botton and Phyllis Rose. The Proust Society of America, founded in 1997, has three chapters: at The New York Mercantile Library, the Mechanic's Institute Library in San Francisco, and the Boston Athenæum Library. Publication in English. The first six volumes were first translated into English by the Scotsman C. K. Scott Moncrieff under the title "Remembrance of Things Past", a phrase taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30; this was the first translation of the "Recherche" into another language. The individual volumes were "Swann's Way" (1922), "Within a Budding Grove" (1924), "The Guermantes Way" (1925), "Cities of the Plain" (1927), "The Captive" (1929), and "The Sweet Cheat Gone" (1930). The final volume, "Le Temps retrouvé", was initially published in English in the UK as "Time Regained" (1931), translated by Stephen Hudson (a pseudonym of Sydney Schiff), and in the US as "The Past Recaptured" (1932) in a translation by Frederick Blossom. Although cordial with Scott Moncrieff, Proust grudgingly remarked in a letter that "Remembrance" eliminated the correspondence between "Temps perdu" and "Temps retrouvé" (Painter, 352). Terence Kilmartin revised the Scott Moncrieff translation in 1981, using the new French edition of 1954. An additional revision by D.J. Enright—that is, a revision of a revision—was published by the Modern Library in 1992. It is based on the "La Pléiade" edition of the French text (1987–89), and rendered the title of the novel more literally as "In Search of Lost Time". In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation based on the "La Pléiade" French text (published in 1987–89) of "In Search of Lost Time" by a team of seven different translators overseen by editor Christopher Prendergast. The six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002, each volume under the name of a separate translator, the first volume being American writer Lydia Davis, and the others under English translators and one Australian, James Grieve. The first four volumes were published in the US under the Viking imprint as hardcover editions in 2003–2004, while the entire set is available in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint. Both the Modern Library and Penguin translations provide a detailed plot synopsis at the end of each volume. The last volume of the Modern Library edition, "Time Regained", also includes Kilmartin's "A Guide to Proust", an index of the novel's characters, persons, places, and themes. The Modern Library volumes include a handful of endnotes, and alternative versions of some of the novel's famous episodes. The Penguin volumes each provide an extensive set of brief, non-scholarly endnotes that help identify cultural references perhaps unfamiliar to contemporary English readers. Reviews which discuss the merits of both translations can be found online at the "Observer", the "Telegraph", "The New York Review of Books", "The New York Times", "TempsPerdu.com", and Reading Proust. Most recently, Yale University Press has begun to issue "In Search of Lost Time" at the rate of one volume every two or three years. They are based on the public domain translations of C. K. Scott Moncrieff (and probably Stephen Hudson), modernized and corrected, with extensive annotations. "Swann's Way" was published in the centenary year of 2013; "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" in 2015; "The Guermantes Way" in 2018. English-language translations in print. Partial Translations. Volume 1 Volumes 2-5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Terence Kilmartin compiled an index/concordance to the novel which was published in 1983 as the "Reader's Guide to the Remembrance of Things Past". The guide contains four indices: fictional characters from the novels; actual persons; places; and themes. The volume and page numbers are keyed to the 3-volume "Remembrance of Things Past" (translated by Scott Moncrieff, revised by Kilmartin, and published in 1981). Adaptations. Print Film Television Stage Radio Notes and references. Notes Bibliography

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The Sot-Weed Factor (1960 novel) The Sot-Weed Factor is a 1960 novel by the American writer John Barth. The novel marks the beginning of Barth's literary postmodernism. "The Sot-Weed Factor" takes its title from the poem "The Sotweed Factor, or A Voyage to Maryland, A Satyr" (1708) by the English-born poet Ebenezer Cooke ( – ), of whom few biographical details are known. A satirical epic set in the 1680s–90s in London and colonial Maryland, the novel tells of a fictionalized Ebenezer Cooke, who is given the title "Poet Laureate of Maryland" by Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore and commissioned to write a "Marylandiad" to sing the praises of the colony. He undergoes adventures on his journey to and within Maryland while striving to preserve his virginity. The complicated "Tom Jones"–like plot is interwoven with numerous digressions and stories-within-stories, and is written in a style patterned on the writing of 18th-century novelists such as Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett. Plot. The novel is a satirical epic of the colonization of Maryland based on the life of an actual poet, Ebenezer Cooke, who wrote a poem of the same title. "The Sot-Weed Factor" is what Northrop Frye called an "anatomy"—a large, loosely structured work, with digressions, distractions, stories within stories, and lists (such as a lengthy exchange of insulting terms by two prostitutes). The fictional Ebenezer Cooke (repeatedly described as "poet and virgin") is a Candide-like innocent who sets out to write a heroic epic, becomes disillusioned and ends up writing a biting satire. The novel is set in the 1680s and 90s in London and on the eastern shore of the colony of Maryland. It tells the story of an English poet named Ebenezer Cooke who is given the title "Poet Laureate of Maryland" by Charles Calvert. He undergoes many adventures on his journey to Maryland and while in Maryland, all the while striving to preserve his innocence (i.e. his virginity). The book takes its title from the grand poem that Cooke composes throughout the story, which was originally intended to sing the praises of Maryland, but ends up being a biting satire based on his disillusioning experiences. Ebenezer Cooke is the son of Andrew Cooke, an English merchant who owns a tobacco (or 'sot-weed') plantation at the settlement of Malden in the colony of Maryland. Along with his twin sister Anna, Ebenezer is tutored privately by a young man named Henry Burlingame III. Later, while Ebenezer is studying at Cambridge University, he is reunited with Henry who reveals his past life as an orphan, travelling musician and seaman. Henry recounts a tale of saving a mother and daughter from pirates, and then persuades Ebenezer to travel to London, where Ebenezer decides that his true vocation is to be a poet. While ill, Andrew Cooke grants power of attorney to Ebenezer and reveals that, after the death of their mother, Ebenezer and Anna were nursed by a woman named Roxanne Edouarde. In London, Ebenezer declares his love for the prostitute Joan Toast, but refuses to pay her fee, and confesses to being a virgin. Joan's pimp and lover, John McEvoy, subsequently informs Andrew that Ebenezer has been leading a dissolute life, so Andrew sends Ebenezer and a servant, Bertrand Burton, to Maryland. From devotion to Joan, Ebenezer swears to remain a virgin. Before his departure, Ebenezer visits Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who is the Governor of Maryland, and offers his services as a Poet Laureate of the colony. Calvert is bemused, but grants the commission. Ebenezer decides to write an epic poem entitled "Marylandiad". On the coach to Plymouth, Ebenzer encounters one Peter Sayer, who is really Henry in disguise. Henry reveals that, while trying to ascertain his true identity, he has become embroiled in the politics of Maryland, but has discovered that he was adopted as an infant by one Captain Salmon, after being found floating on a raft in Chesapeake Bay. He has also obtained part of a journal which reveals that his grandfather, Henry Burlingame I, took part in an expedition led by Captain John Smith that was attacked by Indians. In order to save his own life, and that of Burlingame, Smith undergoes a sexual trial with Pocahontas, the daughter of the Indian chief Powhatans. At this point, the journal breaks off, and Henry explains that he is searching for the remaining sections of the document. In Plymouth, Henry leaves Ebenezer, who is terrified by a sinister pair of seamen called Slye and Scurry who declare that they are pursuing a man by the name of Ebenezer Cooke. Ebenezer boards his ship, the Poseidon, only to find that his identity has been assumed by Bertrand, who is fleeing London because of an affair with a married woman. In order to escape detection, Ebenezer agrees to exchange places with Bertrand on the voyage. Bertrand then loses Ebenezer's savings by gambling with the Reverend Tubman and a young woman named Lucy Rowbotham. The Poseidon is captured by pirates led by a Captain Pound, and Ebenezer and Bertrand are taken on board their ship, which then attacks another ship, the Cyprian, which is loaded with prostitutes. The pirates rape the female passengers, and Ebenezer is tempted to rape a woman who reminds him of Joan. Captain Pound has Ebenezer and Bertrand thrown overboard, telling them that he has heard that someone by the name of Ebenezer Cooke has already arrived in Maryland. Expecting to drown, Bertrand tells Ebenezer that he has wagered away to Tubman the whole of the Malden estate. The pair make it to shore where they free a bound black man named Drepacca, and treat the wounds of an elderly Indian chief named Quassapelagh. They meet Susan Warren, a female swineherd who also reminds Ebenezer of Joan. Susan claims that she has been debased by Captain William Mitchell, and that she is acquainted with Joan. Ebenezer meets both Captain Mitchell and his son Tim, who turns out to be Henry Burlingame III in another disguise. Ebenezer and Henry visit Father Smith, a Jesuit priest who owns part of the journal sought by Henry. Smith relates how he was told by an Indian named Charley Mattasin the tale of Father Fitzmaurice, a missionary who fathered three children on Indian women of the same tribe. The journal gives further details of the capture of Captain Smith and Henry's grandfather, but in order to discover more, Henry turns next to locating a cooper by the name of William Smith. At the next settlement, Ebenezer witnesses a chaotic outdoor court in session. He hears how William Smith was once indentured to a man named Ben Spurdance and how Spurdance tried to swindle Smith out of his share of land upon expiry of his indenture. The court is about to find in favour of Spurdance, but an outraged Ebenezer insists that the court punish Spurdance by signing the rights to Spurdance's land over to Smith. The judge agrees and gets Ebenezer to sign a document, whereupon Ebenezer discovers that Spurdance is the overseer of Malden, and that his father's estate has now passed to Smith. Ebenezer meets Mary Mungummory, a prostitute who was once the lover of the Indian Charley Mattasin. He hears that John McEvoy has travelled to Maryland in search of Joan Toast, and meets Thomas Tayhoe, a man who has been indentured to William Smith because of trickery on the part of McEvoy. Ebenezer offers to exchange places with Tayhoe, and this plan is accepted by Smith on the condition that Ebenezer marries Susan Warren. After the marriage, Susan reveals that she is really Joan Toast. Upon hearing that his father is due to arrive at Malden, Ebenezer flees in the company of one Nicholas Lowe, who turns out to be Henry in yet another disguise. Henry reveals that Anna is in Maryland and Ebenezer resolves to find her. Upon arrival in the town of St Mary's, Ebenezer encounters Bertrand, who has again been posing as Ebenezer. Bertrand has become the lover of Lucy Rowbotham, who had married the Reverend Tubman only to discover that Tubman was already married. Because of the wagers made on board of the Poseidon, Tubman and Lucy both believe they have a claim on Malden. After deciding to return to Malden, Ebenezer and Bertrand commission a boat skippered by Captain Cairn. During a storm, they shelter upon Bloodsworth Island, where they are captured by a community of rogue slaves and rebellious Indians that is dedicated to waging war against white men. Another prisoner is John McEvoy. They meet Drepacca and Quassapelagh, but are threatened with execution by Chicamec, king of the Ahatchwoop people. Ebenezer mentions the name of Henry Burlingame, whereupon Chicamec suspends their execution. Ebenezer is allowed to read a journal that gives a further account of the adventures of John Smith and Henry Burlingame I. The journal relates how Burlingame became chief of the Ahatchwoops by winning an eating contest. Furthermore, Burlingame—who has a remarkably small penis—uses Smith's egg-plant recipe in order to impregnate the wife he marries as chief. The child is Chicamec himself, who then takes as his bride a young woman who is the descendant of Father Fitzmaurice. He has three sons; one of whom is white-skinned; another golden skinned; and a third dark-skinned. The first he names Henry Burlingame III and places on a raft. The second and third, Chicamec states, fell in love with white women, and betrayed the Ahatchwoops. Ebenezer calculates that the dark-skinned son became Charley Mattasin, who loved Mary Mungummory and was executed for murder. Ebenezer strikes a deal with Chicamec whereby, after leaving Bertrand and Captain Cairn as hostages, he will attempt to trace Chicamec's surviving sons and bring them to Bloodsworth Island. After leaving the island, they encounter Mary who, along with the trapper Harvey Russecks, explains that a golden-skinned Indian by the name of Billy Rumbly is living with a white English woman. They then encounter Harvey's brother, Harry, a crooked and violent miller who is jealous of his wife, Roxanne, and daughter, Henrietta. McEvoy plays a trick on Harry that results in Harry becoming gravely injured. It transpires that Roxanne and Henrietta are the mother and daughter who were saved from the clutches of pirates by Henry years earlier. Billy Rumbly arrives and is astonished to hear that his father and lost brother are still alive, but is reluctant to take steps to prevent the imminent conflict with the Indians and slaves. Rumbly leads Ebenezer to his cabin where it transpires that Rumbly's partner is Anna. After hearing of Anna's affection for Henry, Rumbly decides to return to Bloodsworth Island, accompanied by McEvoy. Ebenezer and Anna discover that Roxanne is their former nurse and that Henrietta is their half-sister. McEvoy returns with Bertrand and Captain Cairn but claims that Rumbly has now sided with the Indians and slaves. Ebenezer and Anna decide to return to Malden along with McEvoy, Henrietta, Bertrand and Roxanne. Their boat is seized by the pirate Ben Avery and the men forced to swim to shore. The women are freed after Ben Avery recognizes Roxanne as a former lover. At Malden, the ownership of the Cooke estate is decided by a court presided over by Governor Nicholson. The claim by Lucy Rowbotham and her father are rejected. By way of a legal nicety, Malden passes back to the Cooke family because of Joan Toast's marriage to Ebenzer. William Smith and his lawyer Sowter are threatened with imprisonment, but are released after presenting Henry with more of the journal that tells of his ancestor's fate. Together with a fragment held by Joan, this reveals the egg-plant recipe by which Smith and Burlingame increased their penis size and enabled them to fulfil their sexual challenges. Ebenezer and Joan consummate their marriage, and Joan falls pregnant. Burlingame leaves for Bloodsworth Island in order to quell the rebellion. He returns in Indian guise with the intention of marrying Anna but leaves once more and does not return. Anna falls pregnant, but is saved from disgrace when Joan and her child die in childbirth and Anna's child is reared as Ebenezer's. Writing process. "The Sot-Weed Factor" was initially intended, with Barth's previous two novels, as the concluding novel on a trilogy on nihilism, but the project took a different direction as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer. The novel takes its title from a poem of the same name published in London in 1708 and signed Ebenezer Cooke. "Sot-weed" is an old term for the tobacco plant. A "factor" is a middleman who buys something to resell it. As Barth explained: "The Sot–Weed Factor" began with the title and, of course, Ebenezer Cooke's original poem ... Nobody knows where the real chap is buried; I made up a grave for Ebenezer because I wanted to write his epitaph. Barth also made extensive use of the few pieces of information known at the time about the historical Cooke, his assumed father and grandfather, both called Andrew Cooke, and his sister, Anna. The novel parodies, mimics, recuperates and rewrites the forms of the 18th century genre of the "Bildungsroman" ("formation novel") and "Künstlerroman" ("novel on the formation of an artist"), and in particular Fielding's "Tom Jones", Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", and Samuel Richardson's three epistolary novels. The narrative presents Ebenezer as a "Künstlerroman" hero. The novel is also a parody of the picaresque genre, in particular of "Tristram Shandy" and "Tom Jones". The novel also rewrites the tale of John Smith and Pocahontas, presenting Smith as a boastful and bawdy opportunist, whose narrative of his explorations in Virginia is portrayed as highly fictional and self-serving. This view is generally accepted by historians today. In 1994, Barth said retrospectively that this novel marks his discovery of postmodernism: "Looking back, I am inclined to declare grandly that I needed to discover, or to be discovered by, Postmodernism." Publication. Barth spent four years writing the original version of the book; it was published by Doubleday in 1960, consisting of about 800 pages. Barth revisited the text for a new hardcover edition issued in 1967 by the same publisher, and shortened it by 60 pages. In 1987, the revised edition was reissued in paperback, in the Doubleday Anchor Edition series, with an added foreword. The novel has been translated into several languages, including Italian, Japanese and others. Background. Before "The Sot-Weed Factor" Barth published two novels, "The Floating Opera" (1956) and "The End of the Road" (1958). Both were in a conventional realistic mode that made "The Sot-Weed Factor"s excesses a surprise. Barth saw earlier 20th-century modes of writing as having come to a conclusion, exemplified in the writing of Joyce and Kafka, and then in Beckett and Borges. With "The Sot-Weed Factor", Barth returned to earlier novel forms, both in their structure and mannerisms as well as in the irony and imitation found in Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote" and Fielding's "Shamela". Reception and legacy. Critics generally consider "The Sot-Weed Factor" to mark the beginning of a period in which Barth established himself at the forefront of American literary postmodernism. The works of this period become progressively more metafictional and fabulist. These critics see this period as lasting until "LETTERS" (1979), and it includes the essays on postmodernism "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) and "The Literature of Replenishment" (1980). "Time" included it in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, where Richard Lacayo called it "Dense, funny, endlessly inventive". A review in "Kirkus Reviews" compared "The Sot-Weed Factor" to the works of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Cervantes and Voltaire, but criticized some elements of the book as "pornography and scatology". Edmund Fuller, writing in "The New York Times" gave the book a positive review, calling it "a brilliantly specialized performance, so monstrously long that reading it seemed nearly as laborious as writing it" and concluding "though it is not for all palates, it is possible that Barth's book may be cherished by its true audience for some time to come". Adaptation. In March 2013, director Steven Soderbergh announced he would make a 12-hour adaptation of "The Sot-Weed Factor". The adaptation was written by James Greer.

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The Sorrows of Young Werther The Sorrows of Young Werther () is a epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. First published in 1774, it reappeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the most important novels in the "Sturm und Drang" period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished "Werther" in five-and-a-half weeks of intensive writing in January–March 1774. The book's publication instantly placed the author among the foremost international literary celebrities, and was among the best known of his works. Plot summary. Most of "The Sorrows of Young Werther", a story about unrequited love, is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of a sensitive and passionate temperament, to his friend Wilhelm. These give an intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on , near Wetzlar), whose peasants have enchanted him with their simple ways. There he meets Charlotte, a beautiful young girl who takes care of her siblings after the death of their mother. Werther falls in love with Charlotte despite knowing beforehand that she is engaged to a man named Albert, eleven years her senior. Despite the pain it causes him, Werther spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with them both. His sorrow eventually becomes so unsupportable that he is forced to leave Wahlheim for Weimar, where he makes the acquaintance of "Fräulein" von B. He suffers great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend and unexpectedly has to face there the weekly gathering of the entire aristocratic set. He is not tolerated and asked to leave since he is not a nobleman. He then returns to Wahlheim, where he suffers still more than before, partly because Charlotte and Albert are now married. Every day becomes a torturing reminder that Charlotte will never be able to requite his love. She, out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, decides that Werther must not visit her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after he recites to her a passage of his own translation of "Ossian". Even before that incident, Werther had hinted at the idea that one member of the love triangle – Charlotte, Albert or Werther himself – had to die to resolve the situation. Unable to hurt anyone else or seriously consider murder, Werther sees no other choice but to take his own life. After composing a farewell letter to be found after his death, he writes to Albert asking for his two pistols, on the pretext that he is going "on a journey". Charlotte receives the request with great emotion and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but does not die until twelve hours later. He is buried between two lime trees that he had mentioned frequently in his letters. The funeral is not attended by any clergy, or by Albert or Charlotte. The book ends with an intimation that Charlotte may die of a broken heart: "I shall say nothing of...Charlotte's grief. ... Charlotte's life was despaired of." Effect on Goethe. "Werther" was one of Goethe's few works aligned with the aesthetic, social and philosophical ideals that pervaded the German proto-Romantic movement known as "Sturm und Drang", before he and Friedrich von Schiller moved into Weimar Classicism. The novel was published anonymously, and Goethe distanced himself from it in his later years, regretting the fame it had brought him and the consequent attention to his own youthful love of Charlotte Buff, then already engaged to Johann Christian Kestner. Although he wrote "Werther" at the age of 24, it was all for which some of his visitors in his old age knew him. Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then, even denouncing the Romantic movement as "everything that is sick." Goethe described the powerful impact the book had on him, writing that even if Werther had been a brother of his whom he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by his vengeful ghost. Yet, Goethe substantially reworked the book for the 1787 edition and acknowledged the great personal and emotional influence that "The Sorrows of Young Werther" could exert on forlorn young lovers who discovered it. As he commented to his secretary in 1821, "It must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though "Werther" had been written exclusively for him." Even fifty years after the book's publication, Goethe wrote in a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann about the emotional turmoil he had gone through while writing the book: "That was a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart." Cultural impact. "The Sorrows of Young Werther" turned Goethe, previously an unknown author, into a literary celebrity almost overnight. Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature, having written a Goethe-inspired soliloquy in his youth and carried "Werther" with him on his campaigning to Egypt. It also started the phenomenon known as the "Werther Fever", which caused young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel. Items of merchandising such as prints, decorated Meissen porcelain and even a perfume were produced. The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide. The men were often dressed in the same clothing "as Goethe's description of Werther and using similar pistols." Often the book was found at the scene of the suicide. Rüdiger Safranski, a modern biographer of Goethe, dismisses the Werther Effect 'as only a persistent rumor'. Nonetheless, this aspect of "Werther Fever" was watched with concern by the authorities – both the novel and the Werther clothing style were banned in Leipzig in 1775; the novel was also banned in Denmark and Italy. It was also watched with fascination by fellow authors. One of these, Friedrich Nicolai, decided to create a satirical piece with a happy ending, entitled "Die Freuden des jungen Werthers" ("The Joys of Young Werther"), in which Albert, having realized what Werther is up to, loaded chicken's blood into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther's suicide, and happily concedes Charlotte to him. After some initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen. Goethe, however, was not pleased with the "Freuden" and started a literary war with Nicolai that lasted all his life, writing a poem titled "Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe" ("Nicolai on Werther's grave"), in which Nicolai (here a passing nameless pedestrian) defecates on Werther's grave, so desecrating the memory of a Werther from which Goethe had distanced himself in the meantime, as he had from the "Sturm und Drang". This argument was continued in his collection of short and critical poems, the "Xenien", and his play "Faust."

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Doctor Faustus (novel) Doctor Faustus is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde ("Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend"). Outline. The novel is a re-shaping of the Faust legend set in the context of the first half of the 20th century and the turmoil of Germany in that period. The story centers on the life and work of the (fictitious) composer Adrian Leverkühn. The narrator is Leverkühn's childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom, who writes in Germany between 1943 and 1946. Leverkühn's extraordinary intellect and creativity as a young man mark him as destined for success, but his ambition is for true greatness. He strikes a Faustian bargain for creative genius: he intentionally contracts syphilis, which deepens his artistic inspiration through madness. He is subsequently visited by a Mephistophelean being (who says, in effect, "that you can only see me because you are mad, does not mean that I do not really exist"), and, renouncing love, bargains his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of genius. His madness – his daemonic inspiration – leads to extraordinary musical creativity (which parallels the actual innovations of Arnold Schoenberg). Leverkühn's last creative years are increasingly haunted by his obsession with the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment. He feels the inexorable progress of his neuro-syphilitic madness leading towards complete breakdown. As in certain of the Faust legends, he calls together his closest friends to witness his final collapse. At a chamber-reading of his cantata "The Lamentation of Doctor Faust", he ravingly confesses his demonic pact before becoming incoherent. His madness reduces him to an infantile state in which he lives under the care of his relatives for another ten years. Leverkühn's life unfolds in the context of, and in parallel with, the German cultural and political environment which led to the rise and downfall of Nazi Germany. But the predisposing conditions for Leverkühn's pact with the devil are set in character, and in the artistic life, the artistic processes themselves, not merely as political allegory. The interplay of layers between the narrator's historical situation, the progress of Leverkühn's madness, and the medieval legends with which Leverkühn consciously connects himself makes for an overwhelmingly rich symbolic network, an ambiguous complexity that cannot be reduced to a single interpretation. Plot. The origins of the narrator and the protagonist in the fictitious small town of Kaisersaschern on the Saale, the name of Zeitblom's apothecary father, Wohlgemut, and the description of Adrian Leverkühn as an old-fashioned German type, with a cast of features "from a time before the Thirty Years' War", evoke the old post-medieval Germany. In their respective Catholic and Lutheran origins, and theological studies, they are heirs to the German Renaissance and the world of Dürer and Bach, but sympathetic to, and admired by, the "keen-scented receptivity of Jewish circles". They are awakened to musical knowledge by Wendell Kretzschmar, a German American lecturer and musicologist who visits Kaisersaschern. After schooling together, both boys study at Halle – Adrian studies theology; Zeitblom does not, but participates in discussions with the theological students – but Adrian becomes absorbed in musical harmony, counterpoint and polyphony as a key to metaphysics and mystic numbers, and follows Kretzschmar to Leipzig to study with him. Zeitblom describes "with a religious shudder" Adrian's embrace with the woman who gave him syphilis (whom Adrian names "Esmeralda" after the butterfly that fascinates his father), how he worked her name in note-ciphers into his compositions, and how the medics who sought to heal him were all prevented from effecting a cure by mysterious and deadly interventions. Zeitblom begins to perceive the demonic, as Adrian develops other friendships, first with the translator Rüdiger Schildknapp, and then after his move to Munich with the handsome young violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Frau Rodde and her doomed daughters Clarissa and Ines, a numismatist named Dr. Kranich, and two artists named Leo Zink and Baptist Spengler. Zeitblom insists, however, on the unique closeness of his own relationship to Adrian, for he remains the only person whom the composer addresses by the familiar pronoun. Adrian meets the Schweigestill family at Pfeiffering in the country an hour from Munich, which later becomes his permanent home and retreat. While a fictional town, Mann based Pfeiffering on the actual Bavarian town of Polling. He lives at Palestrina in Italy with Schildknapp in 1912, and Zeitblom visits them. It is there that Adrian, working on music for an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost", has his long dialogue with a Mephistopheles figure who appears either objectively or out of his own afflicted soul. In these central pages, the fulcrum of the story, Zeitblom presents Adrian's manuscript of the conversation. The demon, speaking in archaic German, claims Esmeralda as the instrument by which he entraps Adrian and offers him twenty-four years' life as a genius – the supposed incubation period of his syphilis – if he will now renounce the warmth of love. The dialogue reveals the anatomy of Leverkühn's thought. Adrian then moves permanently to Pfeiffering, and in conversations with Zeitblom confesses a darker view of life. Figures of a demonic type appear, such as Dr. Chaim Breisacher, to cast down the idols of the older generation. In 1915, Ines Rodde marries, but forms an adulterous love for Rudi Schwerdtfeger. Adrian begins to experience illnesses of retching, headaches and migraines, but is producing new and finer music, preparing the way for his great work, the oratorio "Apocalypsis cum Figuris" ('The Apocalypse with Figures'). Schwerdtfeger woos himself into Adrian's solitude, asking for a violin concerto that would be like the offspring of their platonic union. By August 1919 Adrian has completed the sketch of "Apocalypsis". There is also a new circle of intellectual friends, including Sextus Kridwiss, the art-expert; Chaim Breisacher; Dr. Egon Unruhe, the palaeozoologist; Georg Vogler, a literary historian; Dr. Holzschuher, a Dürer scholar; and the saturnine poet Daniel zur Höhe. In their discussions they declare the need for the renunciation of bourgeois softness and a preparation for an age of pre-medieval harshness. Adrian writes to Zeitblom that collectivism is the true antithesis of Bourgeois culture; Zeitblom observes that aestheticism is the herald of barbarism. "Apocalypsis" is performed in Frankfurt in 1926 under Otto Klemperer with 'Erbe' as the St. John narrator. Zeitblom describes the work as filled with longing without hope, with hellish laughter transposed and transfigured even into the searing tones of spheres and angels. Adrian, producing the concerto which Rudi solicited, attempts to evade his contract and obtain a wife by employing Rudi as the messenger of his love. She however prefers Rudi himself, and not Adrian. Soon afterwards Rudi is shot dead in a tram by Ines out of jealousy. As Adrian begins to plan the second oratorio "The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus", in 1928, his sister's child Nepomuk is sent to live with him. The boy, who calls himself "Echo", is beloved by all. As the work of gigantic dimensions develops in Adrian's mind, the child falls ill and dies, and Adrian, despairing, believes that by gazing at him with love, in violation of his contract, he has killed him with poisonous and hellish influences. The score of the "Lamentation" is completed in 1930, Adrian summons his friends and guests, and instead of playing the music he relates the story of his infernal contract, and descends into the brain disease which lasts until his death ten years later. Zeitblom visits him occasionally, and survives to witness the collapse of Germany's "dissolute triumphs" as he tells the story of his friend. Sources and origins. Mann published his own account of the genesis of the novel in 1949. The novel's title and themes are inseparable in German literature from its highest dramatical expression in the "Faust I" and "Faust II" of the poet Goethe, and declares Mann's intention to address his subject in the light of that profound, authentic exploration and depiction of the German character. Yet the relationship is indirect, the Faustian aspect of Leverkühn's character being paralleled in the abnormal circumstances surrounding Nazism. Helen Lowe-Porter, the novel's first English translator, wrote of its themes, Readers of "Faustus" will and must be involved, with shudders, in all three strands of the book: the German scene from within, and its broader, its universal origins; the depiction of an art not German alone but vital to our whole civilization; music as one instance of the arts and the state in which the arts find themselves today [sc. 1949]; and, finally, the invocation of the daemonic. Nietzsche. The trajectory of Leverkühn's career is modeled partly upon the life of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). From his supposed contraction of syphilis to his complete mental collapse in 1889 proclaiming the Anti-Christ, and his death in 1900, Nietzsche's life presents a celebrated example imitated in Leverkühn. (The illnesses of Delius and Wolf also resonate, as does the death of Mahler's child after he had tempted fate (as Alma Mahler thought) by setting the "Kindertotenlieder".) Nietzsche's 1871 work "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music", presents the theme that the evolution of Art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and Dionysian Hellenic impulses, which the novel illuminates. Perhaps the 'serene' Zeitblom and the tragical Leverkuhn personify such a duality between impulses towards reasoned, contemplative progress, and those toward passion and tragic destiny, within character or creativity in the context of German society. Mann wrote, "Zeitblom is a parody of myself. Adrian's mood is closer to my own than one might – and ought to – think." Guidance. Theodor Adorno acted as Mann's adviser and encouraged him to rewrite large sections of the book. Mann also read chapters to groups of invited friends (a method also used by Kafka) to test the effect of the text. In preparation for the work, Mann studied musicology and biographies of major composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Hugo Wolf, Franz Schreker and Alban Berg. He communicated with living composers, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler. In Chapter XXII Leverkühn develops the twelve-tone technique or row system, which was actually invented by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg lived near Mann in Los Angeles as the novel was being written. He was very annoyed by this appropriation without his consent, and later editions of the novel included an Author's Note at the end acknowledging that the technique was Schoenberg's invention, and that passages of the book dealing with musical theory are indebted in many details to Schoenberg's "Harmonielehre". Models for the composer-legend. Leverkühn's projected work "The Lamentation of Dr Faustus" echoes the name of Ernst Krenek's "Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae", an oratorio of 1941–1942 which combines the Schoenbergian twelve-tone technique with modal counterpoint. As a model for the composer-legend Mann was strongly aware of Hans Pfitzner's opera "Palestrina", premiered at Munich in 1917. Leverkühn's preoccupation with polyphonic theory draws on the opera's theme of how the composer Palestrina sought to preserve polyphonic composition in his "Missa Papae Marcelli". The tenor Karl Erb (also very famous as Evangelist narrator in Bach's "St. Matthew Passion") created the role in Pfitzner's opera, and the singer-narrator in Leverkühn's "Apocalysis cum Figuris" is named 'Erbe' (meaning 'heritage', i.e. inheritor of the tradition) in reference to him. Two other German operas of the time, the Berlin-based Ferruccio Busoni's "Doktor Faust" (left unfinished in 1924), and Paul Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler" (about Matthias Grünewald), completed 1935, similarly explore the isolation of the creative individual, presenting the ethical, spiritual and artistic crises of the early 20th century through their roots in the German Protestant Reformation. Naming. Throughout the work personal names are used allusively to reflect the paths of German culture from its medieval roots. For examples, Zeitblom's father Wohlgemut has the resonance of the artist Michael Wohlgemuth, teacher of Albrecht Dürer. Wendell Kretzschmar, the man who awakens them to music, probably hints at Hermann Kretzschmar, musical analyst, whose 'Guides to the Concert Hall' were widely read. The doomed child's name Nepomuk, in the 19th century quite popular in Austria and southern Germany, recalls the composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel and the playwright Johann Nestroy. Reflecting the (Counter-Reformation) cult of John Nepomuk, it therefore also evokes the high rococo, the 're-echoing of movement', in the St John Nepomuk Church architecture by the Asam brothers in Munich, and probably the descriptions and interpretations of it by Heinrich Wölfflin. The character of the violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger is modelled on Paul Ehrenberg of Dresden, an admired friend of Mann's. But in general the characters and names echo philosophies and intellectual standpoints without intending portraits or impersonations of real individuals. They serve the many-layered, multi-valent allusiveness of Mann's style to underpin and reinforce the symbolic nature of his work. Themes. As a re-telling of the Faust myth, the novel is concerned with themes such as pride, temptation, the cost of greatness, loss of humanity and so on. Another concern is with the intellectual fall of Germany in the time leading up to World War II. Leverkühn's own moods and ideology mimic the change from humanism to irrational nihilism found in Germany's intellectual life in the 1930s. Leverkühn becomes increasingly corrupt of body and of mind, ridden by syphilis and insanity. In the novel, all of these thematic threads – Germany's intellectual fall, Leverkühn's spiritual fall, and the physical corruption of his body – directly correspond to the national disaster of fascist Germany. In Mann's published version of his 1938 United States lecture tour, The Coming Victory of Democracy, he said, "I must regretfully own that in my younger years I shared that dangerous German habit of thought which regards life and intellect, art and politics as totally separate worlds." He now realised that they were inseparable. In "Doktor Faustus", Leverkühn's personal history, his artistic development, and the shifting German political climate are tied together by the narrator Zeitblom as he feels out and worries over the moral health of his nation (just as he had worried over the spiritual health of his friend, Leverkühn).

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in "Ulysses" (1922) and "Finnegans Wake" (1939). "A Portrait" began life in 1904 as "Stephen Hero"—a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned "Stephen Hero" in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing consciousness. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the English literary magazine "The Egoist" in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of "A Portrait" and the short story collection "Dubliners" (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism. Background. Born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce (1882–1941) excelled as a student, graduating from University College, Dublin, in 1902. He moved to Paris to study medicine, but soon gave it up. He returned to Ireland at his family's request as his mother was dying of cancer. Despite her pleas, the impious Joyce and his brother Stanislaus refused to make confession or take communion, and when she passed into a coma they refused to kneel and pray for her. After a stretch of failed attempts to get published and launch his own newspaper, Joyce then took jobs teaching, singing and reviewing books. Joyce made his first attempt at a novel, "Stephen Hero", in early 1904. That June he saw Nora Barnacle for the first time walking along Nassau Street. Their first date was on June 16, the same date that his novel "Ulysses" takes place. Almost immediately, Joyce and Nora were infatuated with each other and they bonded over their shared disapproval of Ireland and the Church. Nora and Joyce eloped to continental Europe, first staying in Zürich before settling for ten years in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary), where he taught English. In March 1905, Joyce was transferred to the Berlitz School In Trieste, presumably because of threats of spies in Austria. There Nora gave birth to their children, George in 1905 and Lucia in 1907, and Joyce wrote fiction, signing some of his early essays and stories "Stephen ". The short stories he wrote made up the collection "Dubliners" (1914), which took about eight years to be published due to its controversial nature. While waiting on "Dubliners" to be published, Joyce reworked the core themes of the novel "Stephen Hero" he had begun in Ireland in 1904 and abandoned in 1907 into "A Portrait", published in 1916, a year after he had moved back to Zürich in the midst of the First World War. Composition. At the request of its editors, Joyce submitted a work of philosophical fiction entitled "A Portrait of the Artist" to the Irish literary magazine "Dana" on 7 January 1904. "Dana"'s editor, W. K. Magee, rejected it, telling Joyce, "I can't print what I can't understand." On his 22nd birthday, 2 February 1904, Joyce began a realist autobiographical novel, "Stephen Hero", which incorporated aspects of the aesthetic philosophy expounded in "A Portrait". He worked on the book until mid-1905 and brought the manuscript with him when he moved to Trieste that year. Though his main attention turned to the stories that made up "Dubliners", Joyce continued work on "Stephen Hero". At 914 manuscript pages, Joyce considered the book about half-finished, having completed 25 of its 63 intended chapters. In September 1907, however, he abandoned this work, and began a complete revision of the text and its structure, producing what became "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". By 1909 the work had taken shape and Joyce showed some of the draft chapters to Ettore Schmitz, one of his language students, as an exercise. Schmitz, himself a respected writer, was impressed and with his encouragement Joyce continued to work on the book. In 1911 Joyce flew into a fit of rage over the continued refusals by publishers to print "Dubliners" and threw the manuscript of "Portrait" into the fire. It was saved by a "family fire brigade" including his sister Eileen. "Chamber Music", a book of Joyce's poems, was published in 1907. Joyce showed, in his own words, "a scrupulous meanness" in his use of materials for the novel. He recycled the two earlier attempts at explaining his aesthetics and youth, "A Portrait of the Artist" and "Stephen Hero", as well as his notebooks from Trieste concerning the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas; they all came together in five carefully paced chapters. "Stephen Hero" is written from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, but in "Portrait" Joyce adopts the free indirect style, a change that reflects the moving of the narrative centre of consciousness firmly and uniquely onto Stephen. Persons and events take their significance from Stephen, and are perceived from his point of view. Characters and places are no longer mentioned simply because the young Joyce had known them. Salient details are carefully chosen and fitted into the aesthetic pattern of the novel. Publication history. In 1913 the Irish poet W. B. Yeats recommended Joyce's work to the avant-garde American poet Ezra Pound, who was assembling an anthology of verse. Pound wrote to Joyce, and in 1914 Joyce submitted the first chapter of the unfinished "Portrait" to Pound, who was so taken with it that he pressed to have the work serialised in the London literary magazine "The Egoist". Joyce hurried to complete the novel, and it appeared in "The Egoist" in twenty-five installments from 2 February 1914 to 1 September 1915. There was difficulty finding a British publisher for the finished novel, so Pound arranged for its publication by an American publishing house, B. W. Huebsch, which issued it on 29 December 1916. The Egoist Press republished it in the United Kingdom on 12 February 1917 and Jonathan Cape took over its publication in 1924. In 1964 Viking Press issued a corrected version overseen by Chester Anderson that drew upon Joyce's manuscript, list of corrections, and marginal corrections to proof sheets. This edition is "Widely regarded as reputable and the 'standard' edition." As of 2004, the fourth printing of the Everyman's Library edition, the Bedford edition, and the Oxford World's Classics edition used this text. Garland released a "copy text" edition by Hans Walter Gabler in 1993. Synopsis. The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but sensitive to his feelings. The reader experiences Stephen's fears and bewilderment as he comes to terms with the world in a series of disjointed episodes. Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour. While he cannot grasp their significance, at a Christmas dinner he is witness to the social, political and religious tensions in Ireland involving Charles Stewart Parnell, which drive wedges between members of his family, leaving Stephen with doubts over which social institutions he can place his faith in. Back at Clongowes, word spreads that a number of older boys have been caught “smugging” (the term refers to the secret homosexual horseplay that five students were caught at); discipline is tightened, and the Jesuits increase use of corporal punishment. Stephen is strapped when one of his instructors believes he has broken his glasses to avoid studying, but, prodded by his classmates, Stephen works up the courage to complain to the rector, Father Conmee, who assures him there will be no such recurrence, leaving Stephen with a sense of triumph. Stephen's father gets into debt and the family leaves its pleasant suburban home to live in Dublin. Stephen realises that he will not return to Clongowes. However, thanks to a scholarship obtained for him by Father Conmee, Stephen is able to attend Belvedere College, where he excels academically and becomes a class leader. Stephen squanders a large cash prize from school, and begins to see prostitutes, as distance grows between him and his drunken father. As Stephen abandons himself to sensual pleasures, his class is taken on a religious retreat, where the boys sit through sermons. Stephen pays special attention to those on pride, guilt, punishment and the Four Last Things (death, judgement, Hell, and Heaven). He feels that the words of the sermon, describing horrific eternal punishment in hell, are directed at himself and, overwhelmed, comes to desire forgiveness. Overjoyed at his return to the Church, he devotes himself to acts of ascetic repentance, though they soon devolve to mere acts of routine, as his thoughts turn elsewhere. His devotion comes to the attention of the Jesuits, and they encourage him to consider entering the priesthood. Stephen takes time to consider, but has a crisis of faith because of the conflict between his spiritual beliefs and his aesthetic ambitions. Along Dollymount Strand he spots a girl wading, and has an epiphany in which he is overcome with the desire to find a way to express her beauty in his writing. As a student at University College, Dublin, Stephen grows increasingly wary of the institutions around him: Church, school, politics and family. In the midst of the disintegration of his family's fortunes his father berates him and his mother urges him to return to the Church. An increasingly dry, humourless Stephen explains his alienation from the Church and the aesthetic theory he has developed to his friends, who find that they cannot accept either of them. Stephen concludes that Ireland is too restricted to allow him to express himself fully as an artist, so he decides that he will have to leave. He sets his mind on self-imposed exile, but not without declaring in his diary his ties to his homeland: Style. The novel is a bildungsroman and captures the essence of character growth and understanding of the world around him. The novel mixes third-person narrative with free indirect speech, which allows both identification with and distance from Stephen. The narrator refrains from judgement. The omniscient narrator of the earlier "Stephen Hero" informs the reader as Stephen sets out to write "some pages of sorry verse," while "Portrait" gives only Stephen's attempts, leaving the evaluation to the reader. The novel is written primarily as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue until the final chapter. This chapter includes dialogue-intensive scenes alternately involving Stephen, Davin and Cranly. An example of such a scene is the one in which Stephen posits his complex Thomist aesthetic theory in an extended dialogue. Joyce employs first-person narration for Stephen's diary entries in the concluding pages of the novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally found his own voice and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others. Joyce fully employs the free indirect style to demonstrate Stephen's intellectual development from his childhood, through his education, to his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young man. The style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, as the complexity of language and Stephen's ability to comprehend the world around him both gradually increase. The book's opening pages communicate Stephen's first stirrings of consciousness when he is a child. Throughout the work language is used to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist and the subjective effect of the events of his life. The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of quotation marks: he indicates dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian publications. Themes. Identity. As a narrative which depicts a character throughout his formative years, M. Angeles Conde-Parrilla posits that identity is possibly the most prevalent theme in the novel. Towards the beginning of the novel, Joyce depicts the young Stephen's growing consciousness, which is said to be a condensed version of the arc of Dedalus' entire life, as he continues to grow and form his identity. Stephen's growth as an individual character is important because through him Joyce laments Irish society's tendency to force individuals to conform to types, which some say marks Stephen as a modernist character. Themes that run through Joyce's later novels find expression there. Religion. As Stephen transitions into adulthood, he leaves behind his Catholic religious identity, which is closely tied to the national identity of Ireland. His rejection of this dual identity is also a rejection of constraint and an embrace of freedom in identity. Furthermore, the references to Dr Faustus throughout the novel conjure up something demonic in Stephen renouncing his Catholic faith. When Stephen stoutly refuses to serve his Easter duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors characters like Faust and Lucifer in its rebelliousness. Myth of Daedalus. The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his surname, as well as the epigraph containing a quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Ivan Canadas, the epigraph may parallel the heights and depths that end and begin each chapter, and can be seen to proclaim the interpretive freedom of the text. Stephen's surname being connected to Daedalus may also call to mind the theme of going against the status quo, as Daedalus defies the King of Crete. Irish freedom. Stephen's struggle to find identity in the novel parallels the Irish struggle for independence during the early twentieth century. He rejects any outright nationalism, and is often prejudiced toward those that use Hiberno-English, which was the marked speech patterns of the Irish rural and lower-class. However, he is also heavily concerned with his country's future and understands himself as an Irishman, which then leads him to question how much of his identity is tied up in said nationalism. Critical reception. While some critics take the prose to be too ornate, critics on the whole praise the novel and its complexity, heralding Joyce's talent and the beauty of the novel's originality. These critics view potentially apparent lack of focus as intentional formlessness which imitates moral chaos in the developing mind. The lens of vulgarity is also commented on, as the novel is unafraid to delve the disgusting topics of adolescence. In many instances, critics that comment on the novel as a work of genius may concede that the work does not always exhibit this genius throughout. "A Portrait" won Joyce a reputation for his literary skills, as well as a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the business manager of "The Egoist". In 1917 H. G. Wells wrote that "one believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction," while warning readers of Joyce's "cloacal obsession," his insistence on the portrayal of bodily functions that Victorian morality had banished from print. Adaptations. A film version adapted for the screen by Judith Rascoe and directed by Joseph Strick was released in 1977. It features Bosco Hogan as Stephen Dedalus and T. P. McKenna as Simon Dedalus. John Gielgud plays Father Arnall, the priest whose lengthy sermon on Hell terrifies the teenage Stephen. The first stage version was produced by Léonie Scott-Matthews at Pentameters Theatre in 2012 using an adaptation by Tom Neill. Hugh Leonard's stage work "Stephen D" is an adaptation of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "Stephen Hero". It was first produced at the Gate Theatre during the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1962. As of 2017 computer scientists and literature scholars at University College Dublin, Ireland are in a collaboration to create the multimedia version of this work, by charting the social networks of characters in the novel. Animations in the multimedia editions express the relation of every character in the chapter to the others.

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Martin Eden Martin Eden is a 1909 novel by American author Jack London about a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer. It was first serialized in "The Pacific Monthly" magazine from September 1908 to September 1909 and then published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909. Eden represents writers' frustration with publishers by speculating that when he mails off a manuscript, a "cunning arrangement of cogs" immediately puts it in a new envelope and returns it automatically with a rejection slip. The central theme of Eden's developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the "Künstlerroman", in which is narrated the formation and development of an artist. Eden differs from London in that Eden rejects socialism, attacking it as "slave morality" and relies on a Nietzschean individualism. Nevertheless, in the copy of the novel which he inscribed for Upton Sinclair, London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it." Plot summary. Living in Oakland at the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse. Because Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background and the Morses are a bourgeois family, a union between them would be impossible unless and until he reached their level of wealth and refinement. Over a period of two years, Eden promises Ruth that success will come, but just before it does, Ruth loses her patience and rejects him in a letter, saying, "if only you had settled down ... and attempted to make something of yourself". By the time Eden attains the favour of the publishers and the bourgeoisie who had shunned him, he has already developed a grudge against them and become jaded by toil and unrequited love. Instead of enjoying his success, he retreats into a quiet indifference, interrupted only to rail mentally against the genteelness of bourgeois society or to donate his new wealth to working-class friends and family. He felt that people did not value him for himself or for his work but only for his fame. The novel ends with Eden's committing suicide by drowning, which contributed to what researcher Clarice Stasz calls the "biographical myth" that Jack London's own death was a suicide. London's oldest daughter Joan commented that in spite of its tragic ending, the book is often regarded as "a 'success' story ... which inspired not only a whole generation of young writers but other different fields who, without aid or encouragement, attained their objectives through great struggle". Main characters. Martin Eden. A former sailor from a working-class background, who falls in love with the young, bourgeois Ruth and educates himself to become a writer, aiming to win her hand in marriage. Ruth Morse. The young, bourgeois university student who captivates Eden while tutoring him in English. Though initially both attracted and repelled by his working-class background, she eventually realizes that she loves him. They become engaged, with the condition that they cannot marry until her parents approve of his financial and social status. Lizzie Connolly. A cannery worker who is rejected by Eden, who is already in love with Ruth. Initially, while Eden strives for education and culture, Lizzie's rough hands make her seem inferior to Ruth in his eyes. Despite this, Lizzie remains devoted to him. He feels an attachment to her because she has always loved him for who he is, and not for fame or money, as Ruth does. Joe Dawson. Eden's boss at the laundry, who wins Eden over with his cheeriness and capacity for work, but, like Martin Eden, he suffers from overworking. He quits the laundry, and tries to convince Martin to adopt a hobo lifestyle. Towards the end of the book, Martin meets him again, and offers him a laundry. Joe, who likes the hobo life, except for the lack of girls, eventually accepts the offer and promises to treat the employees fairly. Russ Brissenden. A sickly writer who encourages Eden to give up writing and return to the sea before city life swallows him up. Brissenden is a committed socialist and introduces Eden to a group of amateur philosophers that he calls the "real dirt". His final work, "Ephemera", causes a literary sensation when Eden breaks his word and publishes it on the writer's death. Major themes. Social class. Social class, seen from Eden's point of view, is a very important theme in the novel. Eden is a sailor from a working-class background who feels uncomfortable but inspired when he first meets the bourgeois Morse family. As he improves himself, he finds himself increasingly distanced from his working-class background and surroundings, becoming repelled by Lizzie's hands. Eventually, when Eden finds that his education has far surpassed that of the bourgeoisie he looked up to, he feels more isolated than ever. Paul Berman comments that Eden cannot reconcile his present "civilized and clean" self with the "fistfighting barbarian" of the past, and that this inability causes his descent into a delirious ambivalence. Machinery. London conjures up a series of allusions to the workings of machinery in the novel. It is machines that make Lizzie's hands rough. To Eden, the magazine editors operate a machine that sends out seemingly endless rejection slips. When Eden works in a laundry, he works with machines but feels himself to be a cog in a larger machine. Eden's Blickensdorfer typewriter gradually becomes an extension of his body. When he finally achieves literary success, Eden sets up his friends with machinery of their own, and Lizzie tells him, "Something's wrong with your think-machine." Individualism versus socialism. Although London was a socialist, he invested the semi-autobiographical character of Martin Eden with strong individualism. Eden comes from a working-class background, but he seeks self-improvement rather than improvement for his class as a whole. Quoting Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, he rejects the "slave morality" of socialism, even at socialist meetings. Nevertheless, London stresses that it is this individualism that eventually leads to Eden's suicide. He described the novel as a parable of a man who had to die "not because of his lack of faith in God, but because of his lack of faith in men". Background. When Jack London wrote "Martin Eden" at age 33, he had already achieved international acclaim with "The Call of the Wild", "The Sea-Wolf" and "White Fang". Despite the acclaim, London quickly became disillusioned with his fame and set sail through the South Pacific on a self-designed ketch called the Snark. On the grueling two-year voyage—as he struggled with tiredness and bowel diseases—he wrote "Martin Eden", filling its pages with his frustrations, adolescent gangfights and struggles for artistic recognition. London borrowed the name Martin Eden from a working class man 'Mårten Edin', born in Ådalen (at Båtsmanstorpet in Västgranvåg, Sollefteå), Sweden. However the character Martin Eden had more in common with the author himself than Mr Edin. The character of Ruth Morse was modelled on Mabel Applegarth — the first love of London's life. The character Brissenden is modeled on London's real life friend/ writing inspiration George Sterling. With the plot central, posthumously successful poem "Ephemera", being based on Sterling's seminal work "A Wine of Wizardry".

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Interred with Their Bones Interred With Their Bones is a novel by Jennifer Lee Carrell published in 2007. It was published in the United Kingdom as The Shakespeare Secret. The novel's plot and structure have been compared to "The Da Vinci Code". Its success led to a sequel, "Haunt Me Still" (UK: "The Shakespeare Curse"), about the further adventures of the heroine Kate Stanley. Plot. On the eve of a production of "Hamlet" at Shakespeare's Globe, Shakespeare scholar and theater director Kate Stanley’s eccentric mentor, Harvard Professor Roz Howard, gives her a mysterious box, claiming to have made a groundbreaking discovery. But before she can reveal it to Kate, the Globe burns to the ground and Roz is found dead, murdered precisely in the manner of Hamlet’s father. Inside the box Kate finds the first piece in a Shakespearean puzzle, setting her on a deadly, high-stakes treasure hunt. Historical background. The novel draws heavily on Shakespeare authorship theories, notably Oxfordian theory and Derbyite theory. The author’s note appended to the book explains the historical information used and the ways in which the real-life story of Delia Bacon and of the lost play "Cardenio" has been incorporated into the narrative. She also draws on her own research on the influence of Shakespeare in the old west.

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The Passion of Michel Foucault The Passion of Michel Foucault is a biography of the French philosopher Michel Foucault authored by the American philosopher James Miller. It was first published in the United States by Simon & Schuster in 1993. Within the book, Miller made the claim that Foucault's experiences in the gay sadomasochism community during the time he taught at Berkeley directly influenced his political and philosophical works. Miller's ideas have been rebuked by certain Foucault scholars as being either simply misdirected, a sordid reading of his life and works, or as a politically motivated, intentional misreading. Reception. Writing for "The Boston Globe", book critic George Scialabba described "The Passion of Michel Foucault" as an "intensely interesting" work which provides an "astoundingly vivid though non-prurient description of (mainly homosexual) sadomasochism". The historian of science Roger Smith writes that Miller turns Foucault's life "into a drama for our times".

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De Viris Illustribus (Jerome) De Viris Illustribus ("On Illustrious Men") is a collection of short biographies of 135 authors, written in Latin, by the 4th-century Latin Church Father Jerome. He completed this work at Bethlehem in 392–3 AD. The work consists of a prologue plus 135 chapters, each consisting of a brief biography. Jerome himself is the subject of the final chapter. A Greek version of the book, possibly by the same Sophronius who is the subject of Chapter 134, also survives. Many biographies take as their subject figures important in Christian Church history and pay especial attention to their careers as writers. It "was written as an apologetic work to prove that the Church had produced learned men." The book was dedicated to Flavius Lucius Dexter, who served as high chamberlain to Theodosius I and as praetorian prefect to Honorius. Dexter was the son of Saint Pacianus, who is eulogized in the work. Contents. Listed below are the subjects of Jerome's 135 biographies. The numbers given are the chapter numbers found in editions. Jerome's account of his own literary career. At the conclusion of "De Viris Illustribus", Jerome provided his own biography as the latest example of the scholarly work of Christians. In Chapter 135, Jerome summarized his career to date:

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The Friends of Voltaire The Friends of Voltaire, written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall under the pseudonym "S. G. Tallentyre", was published in 1906. In 1907 it was published in Great Britain under the author's own name by G. P. Putnam's Sons. This classic work about Voltaire was still being printed nearly 100 years later in 2003. Overview. The book is in the form of an anecdotal biography telling the stories of ten men whose lives fell very closely together. The ten men were true contemporaries and aside from their friendship with Voltaire they were more or less closely associated with one another. Each of the ten is characterized by giving him an identifying label: d'Alembert the Thinker, Diderot the Talker, Galiani the Wit, Vauvenargues the Aphorist, d'Holbach the Host, Grimm the Journalist, Helvétius the Contradiction, Turgot the Statesman, Beaumarchais the Playwright, and Condorcet the Aristocrat. The chapter on Helvétius contains a famous quotation that was subsequently misattributed to Voltaire himself. While discussing the persecution of Helvétius for his book "On the Mind" (which was publicly burned), Hall wrote: The phrase "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", which was originally intended as a summary (by Hall) of Voltaire's attitude, was widely misread as a literal quotation from Voltaire.

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Great Writers series The Great Writers series was a collection of literary biographies published in London from 1887, by Walter Scott & Co.. The founding editor was Eric Sutherland Robertson, followed by Frank T. Marzials. The stated intention, articulated by Robertson, was that the series should constitute fact-based textbooks of English literature. He advocated analytical and scholarly methods of literary study. The works generally contained a bibliography, compiled by John Parker Anderson of the British Museum. A comparable French series also began publication in 1887, edited by Jean Jules Jusserand, under the title "Les Grands Écrivains Français". Its inspiration was John Morley's "English Men of Letters", published from 1880. Oscar Wilde called the "Great Writers series" "unfortunate", but suggested that Anderson's bibliographies were of value, and should be collected up. His dislike of the restrictions on authors extended also to the "English Men of Letters". Other series in imitation of "English Men of Letters" were "English Worthies" (Longman) and "Literary Lives" (Hodder). Two further lives from the same publisher, of John Ruskin (1910) by Ashmore Wingate, and of Maurice Maeterlinck (1913) by Jethro Bithell, do not conform to the pattern of the series.

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Invincible Louisa Invincible Louisa is a biography by Cornelia Meigs that won the Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. It retells the life of Louisa May Alcott, author of "Little Women". Plot. "Invincible Louisa", subtitled "The Story of the Author of Little Women", opens with Louisa Alcott's birth on a snowy November day in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Bronson Alcott, ran a school for young children in their home. "It was a time of great happiness, peace, and security... Happiness was to continue... but peace and security were not to come again for a very long time". So Meigs introduces her reader to Alcott's life. Her father, Bronson, is portrayed as brilliant but impractical, unable to support his family as a man of the times was expected to. The book follows the Alcott family to Boston and Concord, as Bronson Alcott seeks places that understand his unusual views on education and transcendentalism. Louisa proves to be an active child, getting into trouble and causing her mother, Abba, some anxiety. When she is ten the family moves again to Fruitlands, the transcendentalist community Alcott helps found. By now there are four girls in the family. Meigs portrays Bronson Alcott and the oldest daughter, Anna, as being fully committed to the ideals of this new life, but says that Louisa and her mother understand how much hard work would be necessary for a communal farm to succeed. The contrast between idealistic and practical is shown when Bronson and the only other adult leave the area for a conference just as the barley is being harvested. An approaching storm has Abba and the children bringing in the grain alone. In less than a year Fruitlands failed, and the family moved several more times. "Invincible Louisa the Alcotts' friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and recounts some of the events Louisa later used in "Little Women", including meetings of the Pickwick Club and the death of one of Louisa's younger sisters, Elizabeth. Louisa later leaves the family to earn her own way writing and teaching. During the Civil War she travels to Washington, DC to nurse soldiers. The book concludes with Louisa writing "Little Women" and the two books that followed, "Little Men" and "Jo's Boys". The success of these books, according to Meigs, gives Louisa her own "happy ending... the whole of what she had wanted from life -- just to take care of them all." "Invincible Louisa" ends with a five page chronology of Louisa May Alcott's life. Critical reception. "Children's Literature" calls "Invincible Louisa" a "graceful, well-written account"... Besides presenting the facts of her life, the author weaves in many evocative descriptions of Louisa's environment and feelings, thus creating a biography that seems more interesting and appealing than a more factual, unadorned work." "Kirkus Reviews" called Meigs "one of the best-loved authors of fiction for boys and girls." It went on to praise "the new biography, which makes Joe (sic) live again in the courageous, gallant girlhood of this favorite of American story tellers." "Invincible Louisa" received the Newbery Medal for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" in 1934. It was awarded the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963.

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Edwin Mullhouse Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright is the critically acclaimed debut novel by American author Steven Millhauser, published in 1972 and written in the form of a biography of a fictitious person by a fictitious author. It was Millhauser's best known novel until the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Martin Dressler" in 1997, and according to Patrick McGrath writing in "The New York Times" it is his best work. "Edwin Mullhouse" is described by "Publishers Weekly" as a 'cult novel'. Plot introduction. Jeffrey Cartwright plays Boswell to Edwin Mullhouse's Johnson, and writes his biography. Edwin is an "eccentric young show-off who fancied himself something of a literary wonder"; he writes a novel at age ten, but dies mysteriously at age eleven. The biography is divided into three parts:

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Forgotten Prophet Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne is a book-length biography of American writer Randolph Bourne written by Bruce Clayton and published by Louisiana State University Press.

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Life with My Sister Madonna Life with My Sister Madonna is an autobiography by American dancer, choreographer and tour director Christopher Ciccone and author Wendy Leigh. The book is a memoir about Ciccone's relationship with his sister, American singer Madonna, and was released on July 14, 2008 by Simon Spotlight Entertainment. A tell-all book, it details Ciccone's life spent with Madonna, and unknown aspects of the singer's life. The relationship between Ciccone and Madonna had deteriorated over the years, following the singer's refusal to employ him as her tour director. Writing the book was a catharsis for him and he contacted Leigh. Together they developed the project secretly and offered it to Simon Spotlight Entertainment for publication. Madonna, who was not aware of the release, was annoyed by it but failed to stop its publication. Simon Spotlight Entertainment sold the book blindly to the retailers, with the expectation that it would create a media uproar for the contents and the nature of the memoir. "Life with My Sister Madonna" received negative reviews from book critics. Reviewers panned the content and felt it was ironic that Ciccone would use Madonna's name to cash-in while at the same time trashing her. They also felt that the book revealed nothing noteworthy. Commercially, the book debuted at number two on "The New York Times" Best Seller list, and went on to sell 35,000 copies. Synopsis. The memoir is divided into different chapters of Madonna's life with the chapter titles like "Spoiled Daddy's Girl", "The Punk Drummer", "The Raunchy Boy Toy", "Material Girl", "Mrs. Sean Penn", "Warren Beatty's Glamorous Hollywood Paramour", "Loving Mother", "Mrs. Guy Ritchie" and "English Grande Dame". The biography starts with the opening night of Madonna's The Girlie Show World Tour (1993) in London. From there it goes on to describe Ciccone and Madonna's childhood together, playing at their father's orchards, the death of their mother. Ciccone reflects on working with Madonna, starting from the music video for her 1983 single, "Lucky Star", to the Girlie Show. He writes about Madonna's relationships with actors Sean Penn and Warren Beatty, as well as director Guy Ritchie, detailing how the latter made homophobic comments about him. Ciccone narrates the early part of his life with Madonna, including his first joint and his first visit to a gay bar. He also recalls Madonna's performance in school donning a provocative costume that displeased their father. Then he debunks Madonna's story regarding her first trip to Manhattan with nothing but $35 in her pocket and a pair of ballet shoes. The book ends with an epilogue listing the singer's accomplishments and Ciccone's current life, as well as an afterword, where he detailed how Madonna supposedly wanted to stop the publishing of the book and previously unreleased family photographs. Background and publication. Christopher Ciccone is the fourth child of Silvio Anthony "Tony" Ciccone and Madonna Louise ("née" Fortin), just below Madonna. He began his career and worked as the singer's assistant, concert tour and art director. He also worked on the singer's 1991 documentary "". In June 2008, Simon & Schuster revealed that Christopher Ciccone had written a memoir on her, titled "Life with My Sister Madonna". The publisher described the book as based "on his life and 47 years of growing up with and working with his sister". Ciccone wrote the book with author Wendy Leigh, who had previously written biographies of John F. Kennedy Jr., Prince Edward, and Liza Minnelli, and ghostwrote Zsa Zsa Gabor's autobiography. Prior to the release of the book, the relationship between Madonna and Ciccone had deteriorated from 2001 onwards, when Madonna refused to employ him as her tour director for the Drowned World Tour. "From the moment I found out that I wasn't doing Drowned World, to her and Guy's wedding, everything became a bit of a blur, a dark, fairly negative period of time for me," he felt. According to Ciccone, he took therapy but faced difficulty in living life separately from his sister. He believed that being under the shadow of Madonna had never allowed him to achieve an identity of his own. Ciccone explained to Chrissy Iley from the "Irish Independent" that Madonna had often tried manipulating him into working for free and forced him to perform tasks that he did not want. However, the relationship completely ended when Madonna accused him of theft from her in an email, "of swindling her after 20 years of being the only person that hadn't". Believing that the book was not just a catharsis for him, the author wrote it feeling that it would also empower him. Ciccone described writing the book as "a giant fucking orgasm. Therapy I already had; this was pure sex". Wendy Leigh explained that the project started when Ciccone had approached her in 2007 for writing a memoir. He showed her a cache of letters from Madonna, where the singer detailed about her marriage to Ritchie, and evident problems they were facing. Feeling that "It showed a side of [Madonna] that made her very human", Leigh decided to write the memoir. Ciccone would secretly arrive at Leigh's home in Key Biscayne, Florida, donning disguises (with the name Mr. Blake) lest anyone found about the project. An auction was held among numerous publication houses, and Simon Spotlight Entertainment finally accepted to release the book. The initial title was, "The Queen and I", but the editors thought that it sounded "snarky" and changed it to "Life with My Sister Madonna". The singer did not find out about the book being published until Ciccone had asked their father for family pictures. She immediately emailed Ciccone to call her, which he refused to do. Back-and-forth conversations took place which escalated to the point where Madonna's legal representatives tried to stop the book being published. Simon Spotlight Entertainment sold the book "blind" to the retailers, without disclosing the book title or subject matter, in the expectation that it would create a media uproar for the contents and the nature of the memoir. Critical response. "Life with My Sister Madonna" received mostly negative reviews from book critics. Barbara Ellen from "The Observer" called it Ciccone's "missed opportunity" at writing a "misery memoir", feeling a better title for the book would have been "Sissie Dearest". She believed that Ciccone could have gone all the way in writing about details that no one knew, but instead chose to reflect unsuccessfully on his relationship with Madonna. Ellen ended the review saying that she felt the book was "an overlong, unintentionally hilarious essay on one brother's obsessive envy and resentment of his flawed but talented famous sister". John Grace from "The Guardian" parodied Ciccone and Leigh's writing style, suggesting Ciccone said he had "no sense of self and even less insight, that's totally beyond me. So I've settled for bitching about that mediocre diva whom I adore really". Writing for "The Daily Telegraph", John Preston noted that the failure of the book was Ciccone's inability to move past his obsession with Madonna, which resulted in the writing being insincere. Preston added: "Is it all true? It sounds plausible enough—all apart from one thunderous piece of self-delusion. 'Any bitterness I had once felt for my sister has long since evaporated,' [Ciccone] writes in conclusion. I don't think so. Percolated maybe, fermented certainly, but evaporated – never." A similar review was written by Lee Randall from "The Scotsman" who added that "while this book is nothing if not self-serving, Ciccone does stop and examine his own ignoble behaviour and motives." Alex Altman from "Time" noted that the memoir was focused less on Madonna but rather on Ciccone's life, self-described as the singer's "doormat". Altman found that ultimately the publication was relegated to offering "a peek at a man still grappling with his sister's dizzying fame". Giles Hattersley from "The Times" commended Ciccone's desire to release a tell-all memoir, but believed that he failed, since the majority of the book showed bitterness at never being better than Madonna. Nathan Rabin from "The A.V. Club" found the book to follow the general theme of tell-all releases by someone bitter with Ciccone laying "out the case against his sister in a prosecutorial fashion", while involving their dead mother at any chance he got. Rabin panned the book saying that Ciccone implied their mother would be "horrified at Madonna's debauchery, but would feel proud her gay son wrote a book that prominently features him snorting cocaine with various super-celebrities". Susanah Cahalan from the "New York Post" was mixed in her review, pointing out the highlight of the book as when Ciccone described the enmity he felt for Madonna's husband Guy Ritchie, by painting him as a homophobe. She noted that by the end, the writing became more melancholic. An article in "New York" felt that Ciccone would profit from the book's sales, by including the same content that was already known about the singer. Nicholas Fonseca from "Entertainment Weekly" gave the book a rating of C+, and felt that although the book had some "surreally humorous life-in-a-bubble moments", it was counterbalanced by the authors' attempt to "psychoanalyze" Madonna, "a ludicrous exercise given that she is already the most overexposed woman of her generation". Molly Friedman believed that "Life with My Sister Madonna" only helped to enhance Madonna's reputation as a "bad girl", which was missing from the singer's repertoire for a long time. Friedman found that the so-called revelations promised by Ciccone in the book appeared to be quite tame compared to the contemporary celebrity culture observed. Commercial reception and aftermath. With an initial print run of 350,000 copies, the memoir went on to sell 35,000 copies according to Nielsen BookScan. It debuted at number two on "The New York Times" Best Seller list dropping to number seven by its third week. In the United Kingdom it reached the top of the best-selling book charts. Following the release, Madonna's representative Liz Rosenberg told the Associated Press that the singer was upset that Ciccone released a book based on her life and chose not to read it. Rosenberg clarified that Madonna realized her relationship with Ciccone was damaged irreparably, and that the release of the book ended any chance of the siblings ever reconciling. Ritchie also commented regarding accusations by Ciccone about him being a homophobe, saying: "I don't make anything of the book. The poor chap wrote it out of desperation. I don't think it'd be intelligent to comment on that. I can't give too much equity in what the chap's gonna write in that book. But you'd be hard pushed to be a homophobe and marry Madonna."

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Lovecraft Remembered Lovecraft Remembered is a collection of memoirs about American writer H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Peter Cannon. It was released in 1998 by Arkham House in an edition of 3,579 copies. Nearly all the memoirs from previous Arkham publications of Lovecraft miscellany are included. Contents. "Lovecraft Remembered" contains the following memoirs:

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James Joyce (biography) James Joyce by Richard Ellmann was published in 1959 (a revised edition was released in 1982). It provides an intimate and detailed account of the life of Irish modernist James Joyce, which informs an understanding of this author's complex works. Reception. Anthony Burgess was so impressed with the biographer's work that he claimed it to be "the greatest literary biography of the century." Edna O'Brien, the Irish novelist, remarked that "H. G. Wells said that "Finnegans Wake" was an immense riddle, and people find it too difficult to read. I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of it—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann." Ellmann quotes extensively from "Finnegans Wake" as epigraphs in his biography of Joyce.

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Fearful Symmetry (book) Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake is a 1947 book by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye whose subject is the work of English poet and visual artist William Blake. The book has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the study of William Blake and one of the first that embarked on the interpretation of many of Blake's most obscure works. As Frye himself acknowledges, Blake's work is not to be deciphered but interpreted and seen within its specific historical and social contexts. In his preface of the 1969 edition, Frye writes: "I wrote "Fearful Symmetry" during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in "Jerusalem", one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say". Reception. Literary critic "Camille Paglia" writes in "Sexual Personae" (1990), that "Fearful Symmetry" is a "pioneering study", but that Frye "optimistically promotes sexual liberation in a way that seems, a weary generation later, simplistic and naive."

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The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley is an unfinished posthumous biography of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley that was written by his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. The first two of the four planned volumes were released in 1858 to largely unfavourable reviews. Though a few friends of Percy Shelley enjoyed the book, many critics attacked the book for being poorly edited and for portraying Shelley negatively. Though more volumes were planned, they were never published because of the Shelley family's objections to Hogg's treatment of him. Origin. Hogg had previously published "Shelley at Oxford" in "The New Monthly Magazine". This was a well-received account of the time they spent together at University College, Oxford. After he published this account, Mary Shelley suggested to him that he write a full biography of Percy Shelley. Hogg did not begin work on a biography for years, however, and Mary Shelley died before it was completed. He finally began the project after Percy Shelley's son Percy Florence Shelley also asked him to write a full account of his father's life. Hogg commenced work on the project in 1855. Unlike the previous article Hogg wrote, this book covered periods of Shelley's life that Hogg had only learned about secondhand. The Shelley family helped him by providing Percy Shelley's papers to him for use in his research. Percy Shelley's sisters Helen and Margaret also contributed accounts of childhood memories involving their brother. Hogg was known for the strength and clarity of his memory, and was able to recall minor details from the time that he spent with Percy Shelley. The initial plan was to release a four-volume work and the first two volumes of the book were published in 1858 by Edward Moxon. The text of "Shelley at Oxford" was included in the work, and comprised roughly one sixth of the final document. Themes. The book primarily discusses the activities and correspondence shared between Hogg and Shelley. It includes 44 letters that were exchanged between Hogg and Shelley in 1810 and 1811. The text of many of the letters was changed by Hogg before the book's publication. He made most of the changes to cover up his own youthful radicalism and his romantic pursuit of Percy's sister Elizabeth. The original text of many of the letters shows that Hogg was often unstable and relied on Percy Shelley for guidance. The changes that were made often misled future biographers, although Hogg did preserve the originals as well. Hogg did not express much admiration for Shelley's poetry in the book. Many readers inferred from his description of Shelley that Hogg viewed him as a lady's man who was often irresponsible. Another irritation to many was that Hogg often boasted about himself in the book. He attempted to present himself as a sober and serious friend to an often foolish Percy Shelley. The book contained many descriptions of Shelley breaking appointments, borrowing money that he could not repay, and fabricating odd stories. Hogg did not mention the atheism that he shared with Percy Shelley, fearing the effect that this disclosure could have on his reputation. He went to great lengths in the book to portray himself as conservative and loyal to the traditions of England. Hogg was careful not to divulge potentially embarrassing information about Shelley's living friends, however. He also failed to mention his own passion for Harriet Shelley, Percy Shelley's first wife. Harriet was portrayed very favourably in the book, although Hogg did discuss her preoccupation with suicide. Percy's father Timothy Shelley was portrayed very negatively, and the book characterized Percy Shelley as often disdainful towards his parents. Reception. Soon after it was released, the book was panned by critics. One of the frequently mentioned problems with the book was that it lacked the extensive editing that his previous article about Shelley had been given. Critics viewed his larger work as often digressive and full of tangents, and some lamented the significant amount of space that Hogg devoted to describing the meals that they ate together. Others pointed out that the book did not contain the novel insights about Shelley and his poetry that "Shelley at Oxford" had delivered. Shelley's family was surprised to read the depictions of the young Percy Shelley and some of the accounts greatly upset them. A few of Mary Shelley's friends and relatives believed that felt that the positive description of Harriet caused Mary to look bad for drawing Percy Shelley away from her. Leigh Hunt was particularly critical of the book, but some have suggested that his critical tone may have been because of his portrayal in the book. Edward John Trelawny, however, spoke very positively of the book. Thomas Love Peacock also enjoyed the book, but thought it should have been described as Hogg's autobiography. Some other commentators have noted that the book does portray Shelley as a very likeable person. After reading the first two volumes, the Shelley family asked Hogg to provide them with his next volumes for pre-release editing. Hogg declined, however, and they revoked the documents about Percy Shelley that they granted to him for his research. Though Hogg had already started writing a third volume, it is generally believed that he never completed the work. Some have speculated that a manuscript of the last two volumes was completed but never discovered.

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The Doors of Perception The Doors of Perception is a book by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it elaborates on his psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, ranging from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision", and reflects on their philosophical and psychological implications. In 1956, he published "Heaven and Hell", another essay which elaborates these reflections further. The two works have since often been published together as one book; the title of both comes from William Blake's 1793 book "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". "The Doors of Perception" provoked strong reactions for its evaluation of psychedelic drugs as facilitators of mystical insight with great potential benefits for science, art, and religion. While many found the argument compelling, others including writer Thomas Mann, Vedantic monk Swami Prabhavananda, philosopher Martin Buber and scholar Robert Charles Zaehner countered that the effects of mescaline are subjective and should not be conflated with objective religious mysticism. Huxley himself continued to take psychedelics until his death and adjusted his understanding, which also impacted his 1962 final novel "Island". Background. Mescaline (peyote and San Pedro cactus). Mescaline is the principal active psychedelic agent of the peyote and San Pedro cacti, which have been used in Native American religious ceremonies for thousands of years. A German pharmacologist, Arthur Heffter, isolated the alkaloids in the peyote cactus in 1897. These included mescaline, which he showed through a combination of animal and self-experiments was the compound responsible for the psychoactive properties of the plant. In 1919, Ernst Späth, another German chemist, synthesised the drug. Although personal accounts of taking the cactus had been written by psychologists such as Weir Mitchell in the US and Havelock Ellis in the UK during the 1890s, the German-American Heinrich Kluver was the first to systematically study its psychological effects in a small book called "Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations" published in 1928. The book stated that the drug could be used to research the unconscious mind. In the 1930s, an American anthropologist Weston La Barre, published "The Peyote Cult", the first study of the ritual use of peyote as an entheogen drug amongst the Huichol people of western Mexico. La Barre noted that the Native American users of the cactus took it to obtain visions for prophecy, healing and inner strength. Most psychiatric research projects into the drug in the 1930s and early 1940s tended to look at the role of the drug in mimicking psychosis. In 1947 however, the US Navy undertook Project Chatter, which examined the potential for the drug as a truth revealing agent. In the early 1950s, when Huxley wrote his book, mescaline was still regarded as a research chemical rather than a drug and was listed in the Parke-Davis catalogue with no controls. Mescaline also played a paramount part in influencing the beat generation of poets and writers of the later 1940s to the early 1960s. Most notable, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg—all of whom were respected contemporary beat artists of their generation. Theirs and many other contemporary artists' works were heavily influenced by over-the-counter forms of mescaline during this time, due to its potency and attainability. Huxley had been interested in spiritual matters and had used alternative therapies for some time. In 1936 he told TS Eliot that he was starting to meditate, and he used other therapies too; the Alexander Technique and the Bates Method of seeing had particular importance in guiding him through personal crises. In the late 1930s he had become interested in the spiritual teaching of Vedanta and in 1945 he published "The Perennial Philosophy", which set out a philosophy that he believed was found amongst mystics of all religions. He had known for some time of visionary experience achieved by taking drugs in certain religions. Research by Humphry Osmond. Huxley had first heard of peyote use in ceremonies of the Native American Church in New Mexico, soon after coming to the United States in 1937. He first became aware of the cactus's active ingredient, mescaline, after reading an academic paper written by Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist working at Weyburn Mental Hospital, Saskatchewan, in early 1952. Osmond's paper set out results from his research into schizophrenia, using mescaline that he had been undertaking with colleagues, doctors Abram Hoffer and John Smythies. In the epilogue to his novel "The Devils of Loudun," published earlier that year, Huxley had written that drugs were "toxic short cuts to self-transcendence". For the Canadian writer George Woodcock, Huxley had changed his opinion because mescaline was not addictive and appeared to be without unpleasant physical or mental side-effects. Further, he had found that hypnosis, autohypnosis and meditation had apparently failed to produce the results he wanted. Huxley's experience with mescaline. After reading Osmond's paper, Huxley sent him a letter on Thursday, 10 April 1952, expressing interest in the research and putting himself forward as an experimental subject. His letter explained his motivations as being rooted in an idea that the brain is a reducing valve that restricts consciousness, and hoping mescaline might help access a greater degree of awareness (an idea he later included in the book). Reflecting on his stated motivations, Woodcock wrote that Huxley had realised that the ways to enlightenment were many, including prayer and meditation. He hoped drugs might also break down the barriers of the ego, and both draw him closer to spiritual enlightenment and satisfy his quest as a seeker of knowledge. In a second letter on Saturday, 19 April, Huxley invited Osmond to stay while he was visiting Los Angeles to attend the American Psychiatric Association convention. He also wrote that he looked forward to the mescaline experience and reassured Osmond that his doctor did not object to his taking it. Huxley had invited his friend, the writer Gerald Heard, to participate in the experiment; although Heard was too busy this time, he did join him for a session in November of that year. Day of the experiment. Osmond arrived at Huxley's house in West Hollywood on Sunday, 3 May 1953, and recorded his impressions of the famous author as a tolerant and kind man, although he had expected otherwise. The psychiatrist had misgivings about giving the drug to Huxley, and wrote, "I did not relish the possibility, however remote, of being the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad," but instead found him an ideal subject. Huxley was "shrewd, matter-of-fact and to the point" and his wife Maria "eminently sensible". Overall, they all liked each other, which was very important when administering the drug. The mescaline was slow to take effect, but Osmond saw that after two and a half hours the drug was working and after three hours Huxley was responding well. The experience lasted eight hours and both Osmond and Maria remained with him throughout. The experience started in Huxley's study before the party made a seven block trip to The Owl Drug (Rexall) store, known as World's Biggest Drugstore, at the corner of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards. Huxley was particularly fond of the shop and the large variety of products available there (in stark contrast to the much smaller selection in English chemist's shops). There he considered a variety of paintings in art books. For one of his friends, Huxley's poor eyesight manifested in both a great desire to see and a strong interest in painting, which influenced the strong visual and artistic nature of his experience. After returning home to listen to music, eat, and walk in the garden, a friend drove the threesome to the hills overlooking the city. Photographs show Huxley standing, alternately arms on hips and outstretched with a grin on his face. Finally, they returned home and to ordinary consciousness. One of Huxley's friends who met him on the day said that despite writing about wearing flannel trousers, he was actually wearing blue jeans. Huxley admitted to having changed the fabric as Maria thought he should be better dressed for his readers. Osmond later said he had a photo of the day that showed Huxley wearing flannels. Compilation of the book. After Osmond's departure, Huxley and Maria left to go on a three-week, car trip around the national parks of the North West of the USA. After returning to Los Angeles, he took a month to write the book. "The Doors of Perception" was the first book Huxley dedicated to his wife Maria. Harold Raymond, at his publisher Chatto and Windus, said of the manuscript, "You are the most articulate guinea pig that any scientist could hope to engage." The title was taken from William Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. Huxley had used Blake's metaphor in "The Doors of Perception" while discussing the paintings of Vermeer and the Nain brothers, and previously in "The Perennial Philosophy", once in relation to the use of mortification as a means to remove persistent spiritual myopia and secondly to refer to the absence of separation in spiritual vision. Blake had a resounding impact on Huxley, he shared many of Blake's earlier revelations and interests in art and literature. In the early 1950s, Huxley had suffered a debilitating attack of the eye condition iritis. This increased his concern for his already poor eyesight and much of his work in the early part of the decade had featured metaphors of vision and sight. Synopsis. After a brief overview of research into mescaline, Huxley recounts that he was given 4/10 of a gram at 11:00 am one day in May 1953. Huxley writes that he hoped to gain insight into extraordinary states of mind and expected to see brightly coloured visionary landscapes. When he only sees lights and shapes, he puts this down to being a bad visualiser; however, he experiences a great change in his perception of the external world. By 12:30 pm, a vase of flowers becomes the "miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence". The experience, he asserts, is neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but simply "is". He likens it to Meister Eckhart's "istigkeit" or "is-ness", and Plato's "Being" but not separated from "Becoming". He feels he understands the Hindu concept of Satchitananda, as well as the Zen koan that, "the dharma body of the Buddha is in the hedge" and Buddhist suchness. In this state, Huxley explains he didn't have an "I", but instead a "not-I". Meaning and existence, pattern and colour become more significant than spatial relationships and time. Duration is replaced by a perpetual present. Reflecting on the experience afterwards, Huxley finds himself in agreement with philosopher C. D. Broad that to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the 'Mind at Large'. In summary, Huxley writes that the ability to think straight is not reduced while under the influence of mescaline, visual impressions are intensified, and the human experimenter will see no reason for action because the experience is so fascinating. Temporarily leaving the chronological flow, he mentions that four or five hours into the experience he was taken to the World's Biggest Drug Store (WBDS), where he was presented with books on art. In one book, the dress in Botticelli's "Judith" provokes a reflection on drapery as a major artistic theme as it allows painters to include the abstract in representational art, to create mood, and also to represent the mystery of pure being. Huxley feels that human affairs are somewhat irrelevant whilst on mescaline and attempts to shed light on this by reflecting on paintings featuring people. Cézanne's "Self-portrait with a straw hat" seems incredibly pretentious, while Vermeer's human still lifes (also, the Le Nain brothers and Vuillard) are the nearest to reflecting this not-self state. For Huxley, the reconciliation of these cleansed perceptions with humanity reflects the age old debate between active and contemplative life, known as the way of Martha and the way of Mary. As Huxley believes that contemplation should also include action and charity, he concludes that the experience represents contemplation at its height, but not its fullness. Correct behaviour and alertness are needed. Nonetheless, Huxley maintains that even quietistic contemplation has an ethical value, because it is concerned with negative virtues and acts to channel the transcendent into the world. After listening to Mozart's C-Minor Piano Concerto, Gesualdo's madrigals and Alban Berg's "Lyric Suite", Huxley heads into the garden. Outside, the garden chairs take on such an immense intensity that he fears being overwhelmed; this gives him an insight into madness. He reflects that spiritual literature, including the works of Jakob Böhme, William Law and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, talks of these pains and terrors. Huxley speculates that schizophrenia is the inability to escape from this reality into the world of common sense and thus help would be essential. After lunch and the drive to the WBDS he returns home and to his ordinary state of mind. His final insight is taken from Buddhist scripture: that within sameness there is difference, although that difference is not different from sameness. The book finishes with Huxley's final reflections on the meaning of his experience. Firstly, the urge to transcend one's self is universal through times and cultures (and was characterised by H. G. Wells as The Door in the Wall). He reasons that better, healthier "doors" are needed than alcohol and tobacco. Mescaline has the advantage of not provoking violence in takers, but its effects last an inconveniently long time and some users can have negative reactions. Ideally, self-transcendence would be found in religion, but Huxley feels that it is unlikely that this will ever happen. Christianity and mescaline seem well-suited for each other; the Native American Church for instance uses the drug as a sacrament, where its use combines religious feeling with decorum. Huxley concludes that mescaline is not enlightenment or the Beatific vision, but a "gratuitous grace" (a term taken from Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica"). It is not necessary but helpful, especially so for the intellectual, who can become the victim of words and symbols. Although systematic reasoning is important, direct perception has intrinsic value too. Finally, Huxley maintains that the person who has this experience will be transformed for the better. Reception. The book met with a variety of responses, both positive and negative, from writers in the fields of literature, psychiatry, philosophy and religion. These included a symposium published in "The Saturday Review" magazine with the unlikely title of, "Mescalin – An Answer to Cigarettes", including contributions from Huxley; J.S. Slotkin, a professor of Anthropology; and a physician, Dr. W.C. Cutting. Literature. For the Scottish poet, Edwin Muir "Mr. Huxley's experiment is extraordinary, and is beautifully described". Thomas Mann, the author and friend of Huxley, believed the book demonstrated Huxley's escapism. He thought that while escapism found in mysticism might be honourable, drugs were not. Huxley's 'aesthetic self-indulgence' and indifference to humanity would lead to suffering or stupidity; Mann concluded the book was irresponsible, if not quite immoral, to encourage young people to try the drug. For Huxley's biographer and friend, the author Sybille Bedford, the book combined sincerity with simplicity, passion with detachment. "It reflects the heart and mind open to meet the given, ready, even longing, to accept the wonderful. "The Doors" is a quiet book. It is also one that postulates a goodwill – the choice once more of the nobler hypothesis. It turned out, for certain temperaments, a seductive book". For biographer David King Dunaway, "The Doors of Perception", along with "The Art of Seeing", can be seen as the closest Huxley ever came to autobiographical writing. Psychiatry. William Sargant, the controversial British psychiatrist, reviewed the book for "The British Medical Journal" and particularly focused on Huxley's reflections on schizophrenia. He wrote that the book brought to life the mental suffering of schizophrenics, which should make psychiatrists uneasy about their failure to relieve this. Also, he hoped that the book would encourage the investigation of the physiological, rather than psychological, aspects of psychiatry. Other medical researchers questioned the validity of Huxley's account. According to Roland Fisher, book contained "99 percent Aldous Huxley and only one half gram mescaline". Joost A.M. Meerloo found Huxley's reactions "not necessarily the same as... other people's experiences." For Steven J. Novak, "The Doors of Perception" and "Heaven and Hell" redefined taking mescaline as a mystical experience with possible psychotherapeutic benefits, where physicians had previously thought of the drug in terms of mimicking a psychotic episode, known as psychotomimetic. The popularity of the book also affected research into these drugs, because researchers needed a random sample of subjects with no preconceptions about the drug to conduct experiments, and these became very difficult to find. Philosophy and religion. Huxley's friend and spiritual mentor, the Vedantic monk Swami Prabhavananda, thought that mescaline was an illegitimate path to enlightenment, a "deadly heresy" as Christopher Isherwood put it. Other thinkers expressed similar apprehensions. Martin Buber. Martin Buber, the Jewish religious philosopher, attacked Huxley's notion that mescaline allowed a person to participate in "common being", and held that the drug ushered users "merely into a strictly private sphere". Buber believed the drug experiences to be holidays "from the person participating in the community of logos and cosmos—holidays from the very uncomfortable reminder to verify oneself as such a person." For Buber man must master, withstand and alter his situation, or even leave it, "but the fugitive flight out of the claim of the situation into situationlessness is no legitimate affair of man." Robert Charles Zaehner. Robert Charles Zaehner, a professor at Oxford University, formed one of the fullest and earliest critiques of "The Doors of Perception" from a religious and philosophical perspective. In 1954, Zaehner published an article called "The Menace of Mescaline", in which he asserted that "artificial interference with consciousness" could have nothing to do with the Christian "Beatific Vision". Zaehner expanded on these criticisms in his book "Mysticism Sacred and Profane" (1957), which also acts as a theistic riposte to what he sees as the monism of Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy". Although he acknowledged the importance of "The Doors of Perception" as a challenge to people interested in religious experience, he pointed out what he saw as inconsistencies and self-contradictions. Zaehner concludes that Huxley's apprehensions under mescaline are affected by his deep familiarity with Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. So the experience may not be the same for others who take the drug and do not have this background, although they will undoubtedly experience a transformation of sensation. Zaehner himself was a convert to Catholicism. That the longing to transcend oneself is "one of the principal appetites of the soul" is questioned by Zaehner. There are still people who do not feel this desire to escape themselves, and religion itself need not mean escaping from the ego. Zaehner criticises what he sees as Huxley's apparent call for all religious people to use drugs (including alcohol) as part of their practices. Quoting St Paul's proscriptions against drunkenness in church, in 1 Corinthians xi, Zaehner makes the point that artificial ecstatic states and spiritual union with God are not the same. Holding that there are similarities between the experience on mescaline, the mania in a manic-depressive psychosis and the visions of God of a mystical saint suggests, for Zaehner, that the saint's visions must be the same as those of a lunatic. The personality is dissipated into the world, for Huxley on mescaline and people in a manic state, which is similar to the experience of nature mystics. However, this experience is different from the theistic mystic who is absorbed into a God, who is quite different from the objective world. The appendices to "Mysticism Sacred and Profane" include three accounts of mescaline experiences, including those of Zaehner himself. He writes that he was transported into a world of farcical meaninglessness and that the experience was interesting and funny, but not religious. Soon after the publication of his book, Huxley wrote to Harold Raymond at Chatto and Windus that he thought it strange that when Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton wrote the praises of alcohol they were still considered good Christians, while anyone who suggested other routes to self-transcendence was accused of being a drug addict and perverter of mankind. Later Huxley responded to Zaehner in an article published in 1961: "For most of those to whom the experiences have been vouchsafed, their value is self-evident. By Dr. Zaehner, the author of "Mysticism, Sacred and Profane", their deliberate induction is regarded as immoral. To which his colleague, Professor Price, retorts in effect, 'Speak for yourself!'". Huston Smith. Professor of religion and philosophy Huston Smith argued that "Mysticism Sacred and Profane" had not fully examined and refuted Huxley's claims made in "The Doors of Perception". Smith claims that consciousness-changing substances have been linked with religion both throughout history and across the world, and further it is possible that many religious perspectives had their origins in them, which were later forgotten. Acknowledging that personality, preparation and environment all play a role in the effects of the drugs, Huston Smith draws attention to evidence that suggests that a religious outcome of the experience may not be restricted to one of Huxley's temperament. Further, because Zaehner's experience was not religious, does not prove that none will be. Contrary to Zaehner, Huston Smith draws attention to evidence suggesting that these drugs can facilitate theistic mystical experience. As the descriptions of naturally occurring and drug-stimulated mystical experiences cannot be distinguished phenomenologically, Huston Smith regards Zaehner's position in "Mysticism Sacred and Profane", as a product of the conflict between science and religion – that religion tends to ignore the findings of science. Nonetheless, although these drugs may produce a religious experience, they need not produce a religious life, unless set within a context of faith and discipline. Finally, he concludes that psychedelic drugs should not be forgotten in relation to religion because the phenomenon of religious awe, or the encounter with the holy, is declining and religion cannot survive long in its absence. Later experience. Huxley continued to take these substances several times a year until his death, but with a serious and temperate frame of mind. He refused to talk about the substances outside scientific meetings, turned down an invitation to talk about them on TV and refused the leadership of a foundation devoted to the study of psychedelics, explaining that they were only one of his diverse number of interests. For Philip Thody, a professor of French literature, Huxley's revelations made him conscious of the objections that had been put forward to his theory of mysticism set out in "Eyeless in Gaza" and "Grey Eminence", and consequently "Island" reveals a more humane philosophy. However, this change in perspective may lie elsewhere. In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in "The Doors of Perception". He decided his previous experiments, the ones detailed in "Doors" and "Heaven and Hell", had been "temptations to escape from the central reality into false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge." He wrote in a letter to Humphry Osmond, that he experienced "the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. ... I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been." The experience made its way into the final chapter of "Island". This raised a troublesome point. Was it better to pursue a course of careful psychological experimentation... or was the real value of these drugs to "stimulate the most basic kind of religious ecstasy"? Influence. A variety of influences have been claimed for the book. The psychedelic proselytiser Timothy Leary was given the book by a colleague soon after returning from Mexico where he had first taken psilocybin mushrooms in the summer of 1960. He found that "The Doors of Perception" corroborated what he had experienced 'and more too'. Leary soon set up a meeting with Huxley and the two became friendly. The book can also be seen as a part of the history of entheogenic model of understanding these drugs, that sees them within a spiritual context. William Blake. William Blake (Born in London, 28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) who inspired the book's title and writing style, was an influential English artist most notable for his paintings and poetry. The Doors of Perception was originally a metaphor written by Blake, used in his 1790 book, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". The metaphor was used to represent Blake's feelings about mankind's limited perception of the reality around them; ""If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."” Publication history. "The Doors of Perception" is usually published in a combined volume with Huxley's essay "Heaven and Hell" (1956)

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Darkness Visible (memoir) Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is a memoir by American writer William Styron about his descent into depression and the triumph of recovery. It is among the last books published by Styron and is widely considered one of his best and most influential works. "Darkness Visible" also helped raise awareness for depression, which was relatively unknown at the time. First published in December 1989 in "Vanity Fair", the book grew out of a lecture that Styron originally delivered at a symposium on affective disorders at the Department of Psychiatry of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Through the employment of anecdotes, speculation, and reportage, Styron reflects on the causes and effects of depression, drawing links between his own illness and that of other writers and public figures. Plot. In October 1985, American author William Styron travels to Paris to receive the "Prix mondial Cino Del Duca," a prestigious literary award. During the trip, Styron's mental state begins to degenerate rapidly as the depressive symptoms that he has been experiencing for several months worsen. He tentatively concludes that his depression was brought about by his sudden withdrawal from years of alcoholism and exacerbated by his overdependence on Halcion, a prescription drug that he took to treat insomnia. Styron also briefly mentions his own father's battle with depression and his mother's premature death from breast cancer, both of which he believes could have also contributed to his deteriorated state of mind. As his depression becomes more severe, Styron seeks multiple treatment methods, including psychotherapy, consulting with a psychiatrist, and countless antidepressants, but to no avail. Initially, Styron is able to function better in the morning than in the afternoon and evening, but he soon struggles to even get out of bed. He eventually loses the ability to perform basic tasks such as driving and often contemplates suicide. One night, after a particularly intense bout of suicide ideation that culminates in him actively preparing to take his own life, Styron hears a passage from Brahms' "Alto Rhapsody," to which he has a fiercely emotional response. He is suddenly repulsed at the idea of suicide and is compelled to eliminate his depression once and for all. The following day, Styron checks himself into a hospital, which he had previously avoided on the advice of his psychiatrist, who harbors a strong opposition to institutional treatment. It is ultimately at the hospital that Styron finally emerges from his depression and eventually makes a full recovery. Themes. The most prevalent theme in "Darkness Visible" is how every individual afflicted by clinical depression ultimately has his or her own unique experience with the mental disorder. Styron repeatedly emphasizes how each person encounters different sets of physical and psychological symptoms, which can include persistent sadness, fatigue, insomnia, pain, self-harm, futility, lack of concentration, loss of pleasure in things and activities that were once enjoyed, and suicide ideation. He also discusses how every patient possesses a unique response to various treatments and how the success of a method on one individual does not guarantee its effectiveness on another. For example, Styron acknowledges that although psychotherapy and antidepressants did not successfully treat him, they are highly effectual in healing numerous others. He also expresses frustration at the stigma and ignorance surrounding depression, and frequently states that people cannot truly understand how devastating and destructive depression is until they experience it themselves. Additionally, Styron stresses the importance of perseverance and taking initiative in seeking help and treatment for not only depression, but for any mental illness. The longer one keeps his or her ailment a secret out of either shame, fear, or apathy, the lower his or her chances of recovery will be, and the more likely he or she will succumb to the condition's symptoms, especially suicide. Throughout the memoir, Styron discusses the effects of depression on the lives of several notable people, who range from accomplished authors such as Romain Gary (a close friend of Styron's), Randall Jarrell, Albert Camus, and Primo Levi (also a chemist and Holocaust survivor) to prominent political figures such as U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and activist Abbie Hoffman. Styron also mentions Jean Seberg, an American actress who experienced severe depression herself and who was also Romain Gary's second wife. Many of these individuals eventually committed suicide. Through the connections he draws between his own experience with depression and that of the public figures he analyzes, Styron deduces that people with creative tendencies are ultimately more vulnerable to the disorder. Styron also suggests alcohol withdrawal and benzodiazepine use as possible causes of his depression. Background and publication history. Upon learning of the significant amount of criticism and ignorance directed towards the suicide of Primo Levi, Styron wrote an op-ed for "The New York Times" in December 1988, maintaining that Levi ended his life not because of a lack of morality, but because of a real, dangerous illness that threatened the health and lives of many people. The op-ed garnered positive reception and compelled many readers to openly speak about their experiences with depression, ultimately inspiring Styron to begin documenting his own ordeal. In May 1989, William Styron delivered a lecture about his experience with depression at a symposium for affective disorders at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Several months later, he adapted the lecture into an essay and published it in the December 1989 issue of "Vanity Fair". The following year, Random House published Styron's essay as a full-length memoir titled "Darkness Visible," which included additional material that had been excluded from the original work due to limited space in "Vanity Fair." For instance, Styron's account of his fateful trip to Paris in October 1985 was not included in the essay, but it was incorporated into "Darkness Visible". Other than the few minor additions and changes, "Darkness Visible" was released as unabridged from the "Vanity Fair" piece. The title of the memoir originates from John Milton's description of Hell in "Paradise Lost:" Critical reception. Upon its release, "Darkness Visible" received praise from critics and readers for eloquently yet frankly bringing awareness to clinical depression, a condition that was obscure yet prevalent among many people and highly stigmatized. In his review for "The Washington Post", Anthony Storr lauded "Darkness Visible" as "a beautifully written, deeply moving, courageously honest account of an illness which is eminently treatable, but which often goes unrecognized." "The Chicago Sun-Times" conveyed similar praise in its description of "Darkness Visible" as "a chilling yet hopeful report from a mental wilderness into which one in ten Americans disappear...enlightening...fascinating." In its critique, "The New York Times" hailed "Darkness Visible" as "compelling...harrowing...a vivid portrait of a debilitating disorder...it offers the solace of shared experience." James Kaplan of "Entertainment Weekly" gave the memoir an A- and praised it for being a "moving and authoritative account." Kaplan also noted that although "Styron does much to dignify depression...[and] bring it out of the realm of unmentionable shame," he "failed to see...how the disease had been central to his whole existence." Meanwhile, some critics were dissatisfied with the short length of "Darkness Visible". "People" described the memoir as "either woefully incomplete or, at almost 100 pages, more than you would want to know about Styron's history of melancholia." "People" also criticized Styron for having "the same difficulty doctors do in defining depression and its causes." "Kirkus Reviews" expressed a similar sentiment in its review of "Darkness Visible", which stated that the memoir should have been written "with more intense intimacy and searing detail." However, "Kirkus Reviews" still offered commendation by calling the memoir "gripping" and declaring, "...we feel that Styron has shown us...as much of his black pit as he can bear to show." Legacy. "Darkness Visible" is renowned for being a pioneering literary work in clinical depression awareness. It shed light on an illness that was not well known nor well documented at the time. According to Peter Fulham of "The Atlantic", Styron was effectively able to portray depression, which was typically difficult to describe, and its devastating impacts on not only his own life, but on those of others also afflicted by the disorder. By doing so, he was able to eliminate a substantial amount of stigma surrounding depression, which encouraged individuals with the illness to share their experiences and seek help. Through his memoir, Styron ultimately served as a liaison between people with and without depression and as a leading advocate for mental health overall.

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The Motion of Light in Water The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, is an autobiography by science fiction author Samuel R. Delany in which he recounts his experiences as growing up as a gay African American man, as well as some of his time in an interracial and open marriage with Marilyn Hacker. It describes encounters with Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael and Stormé DeLarverie, a dinner with W. H. Auden, and a phone call to James Baldwin. Among many cultural events of the decade that he witnessed, Delany recounts his attendance at the first New York City performance of artist Allan Kaprow's "18 Happenings in 6 Parts", the 1959 performance piece that, for many, marks the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism. In section 17.4 of the University of Minnesota Press edition, he describes the event and its venue, and speculates on its artistic significance. The introduction puts an emphasis on the idea of the unreliable narrator; Delany's accounts often contrast his life as it "felt" to ways in which it actually occurred. Legacy. Hazel Carby called it one of two contemporary autobiographies that are "absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood" (the other being that of Miles Davis). In the chapter, "The Future Is in the Present" of the book "Cruising Utopia" by José Esteban Munoz, Delany's "The Motion of Light in the Water" serves to explain how the future, as a formed of utopia, can be "glimpsed" in the present through what Delany employed as "the massed bodies" of sexual dissidence. Masha Gessen in O, The Oprah Magazine selected this title as a pick for the "Best LGBTQ Books of All Time," describing it as "a textbook in observing the self, thinking about sex and love, and the best writing manual I know." Publication history. The first edition is subtitled "1957–1965", the revised 1993 edition is subtitled "1960–1965".

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Dwikhandito Dwikhandito ("Split in two") is an autobiographical book of Bengali novelist and poet Taslima Nasrin, published in 2003. This is the third volume of "Amar Meyebela". The book was first published in Bangladesh under the title "Ko" ("Speak") and banned. It was also banned in the Indian state of West Bengal for two years alleging insult of religious beliefs and obscenity. In March 2018 the book was translated into English and published as "Split: A Life" by Penguin Random House. Controversy. Writer claimed that the book tells about her experiences and works as a doctor, how she became the target of fundamentalists. Dwikhandito or Ko was banned by a Dhaka Court and its copies have been confiscated following a defamation suit moved by a senior Bengali poet and novelist, Syed Shamsul Haq, against the writer. Kolkata based intellectuals, at the instance of the Calcutta Khilafat Committee, had urged the state government to ban the controversial book in the interest of communal amity. At the same time five fatwas were issued against her for writing this book. Sunil Gangopadhayay said in Kolkata that Dwikhandito is not literature. It may be good to read if you are interested in scandals about some writers. But it is not literature. Writer Dibyendu Palit opined that they must have imposed the ban after taking note of the appeal made by Muslim intellectuals who had apprehended that the book might foment communal discord. Several poets and writers, both in Dhaka and Kolkata, say that Nasrin has written a fictitious fantasy about sexual encounters in his book. The Left Front Government banned the book on 28 November 2003 fearing that book could incite communal discord. The then Chief Minister of West Bengal Buddhadeb Bhattacharya decided to ban the book after consulting intellectuals. CPI (M) leader Anil Biswas said that Dwikhandito may create riot and disturb communal harmony in West Bengal. Kolkata Police had seized about 3,000 copies of the book from its local publisher. Government stated that it contains matters on pages 49 and 50 which could promote enmity, ill-will and hatred between different groups on grounds of religion, punishable under Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code. It was alleged that Nasrin's statement in this book on Prophet Mohammad hurts the sentiments of the Muslim community. On 18 November 2003, the Calcutta High Court put out an injunction against publication after a poet, Syed Hasmat Jalal, filed an 11 crore INR defamation suit against Nasrin. On 22 September 2005, the Division Bench of Hon'ble Justice Dilip Seth lifted the ban.

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Confessions (Rousseau) The Confessions is an autobiographical book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In modern times, it is often published with the title The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to distinguish it from Saint Augustine's "Confessions". Covering the first fifty-three years of Rousseau's life, up to 1765, it was completed in 1769, but not published until 1782, four years after Rousseau's death, even though Rousseau did read excerpts of his manuscript publicly at various salons and other meeting places. Background and contents. The "Confessions" was two distinct works, each part consisting of six books. Books I to VI were written between 1765 and 1767 and published in 1782, while books VII to XII were written in 1769–1770 and published in 1789. Rousseau alludes to a planned third part, but it was never completed. Though the book contains factual inaccuracies—in particular, Rousseau's dates are frequently off, some events are out of order, and others are misrepresented, incomplete, or incorrect—Rousseau provides an account of the experiences that shaped his personality and ideas. For instance, some parts of his own education are clearly present in his account of ideal education, "Emile, or On Education". Rousseau's work is notable as one of the first major autobiographies. Prior to the "Confessions", the two great autobiographies were Augustine's own "Confessions" and Saint Teresa's "Life of Herself". However, both of these works focused on the religious experiences of their authors; the "Confessions" was one of the first autobiographies in which an individual wrote of his own life mainly in terms of his worldly experiences and personal feelings. Rousseau recognized the unique nature of his work; it opens with the famous words: "I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself." His example was soon followed: not long after publication, many other writers (such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal, De Quincey, Casanova and Alfieri) wrote their own autobiographies in a similar fashion. The "Confessions" is also noted for its detailed account of Rousseau's more humiliating and shameful moments. For instance, Rousseau recounts an incident when, while a servant, he covered up his theft of a ribbon by framing a young girl—who was working in the house—for the crime. In addition, Rousseau explains the manner in which he disposes of the five children he had with Thérèse Levasseur. Debate over the truthfulness of the "Confessions". According to historian Paul Johnson, Rousseau's autobiography contains many inaccuracies. Will and Ariel Durant have written that the debate regarding the truthfulness of the book hinges on Rousseau's allegation that Grimm and Diderot had connived to give a mendacious description of his relationship with Mme. d'Épinay, Mme. d'Houdetot, and themselves. As stated by Durant, most scholarly opinion prior to 1900 was against Rousseau, but subsequently several scholars including Frederika Macdonald, , Mathew Johnson, Émile Faguet, Jules Lemaître and C. E. Vaughn have reached judgments in favor of Rousseau's veracity. External links. – English translation. Note that this is an expurgated translation; certain incidents in the original, chiefly erotic, are not present.

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The Heart of a Woman The Heart of a Woman (1981) is an autobiography by American writer Maya Angelou. The book is the fourth installment in Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. "The Heart of a Woman" recounts events in Angelou's life between 1957 and 1962 and follows her travels to California, New York City, Cairo, and Ghana as she raises her teenage son, becomes a published author, becomes active in the civil rights movement, and becomes romantically involved with a South African anti-apartheid fighter. One of the most important themes of "The Heart of a Woman" is motherhood, as Angelou continues to raise her son. The book ends with her son leaving for college and Angelou looking forward to newfound independence and freedom. Like Angelou's previous volumes, the book has been described as autobiographical fiction, though most critics, as well as Angelou, have characterized it as autobiography. Although most critics consider Angelou's first autobiography "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" more favorably, "The Heart of a Woman" has received positive reviews. It was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1997. Critic Mary Jane Lupton says it has "a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography" and that it is Angelou's "most introspective" autobiography. The title is taken from a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, which connects Angelou with other female African-American writers. African-American literature critic Lyman B. Hagen states, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, "The Heart of a Woman" moves its central figures to a point of full personhood". The book follows Angelou to several places in the US and Africa, but the most important journey she describes is "a voyage into the self." Background. "The Heart of a Woman", published in 1981, is the fourth installment of Maya Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The success of her previous autobiographies and the publication of three volumes of poetry had brought Angelou a considerable amount of fame by 1981. "And Still I Rise", her third volume of poetry, was published in 1978 and reinforced Angelou's success as a writer. Her first volume of poetry, "Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie" (1971), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Writer Julian Mayfield states that Angelou's work set a precedent not only for other black women writers but for the genre of autobiography as a whole. Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women through the writing of her life stories. It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton stated, "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer." Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to discuss her personal life publicly, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books. Writer Hilton Als calls her a pioneer of self-exposure, willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices. While Angelou was composing her second autobiography, "Gather Together in My Name", she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband Paul Du Feu talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and to "be honest about it." In 1957, the year "The Heart of a Woman" opens, Angelou had appeared in an off-Broadway revue that inspired her first film, "Calypso Heat Wave", in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions, something she does not mention in the book. Also in 1957 and not discussed in the book, her first album, "Miss Calypso", was released; it was reissued as a CD in 1995. According to Als, Angelou sang and performed calypso music because it was popular at the time, and not to develop as an artist. As described in "The Heart of a Woman", Angelou eventually gave up performing for a career as a writer and poet. According to Chuck Foster, who wrote the liner notes in "Miss Calypso's" 1995 reissue, her calypso music career is "given short shrift" and dismissed in the book. Title. The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home. The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars. -— "The Heart of a Woman", by Georgia Douglas Johnson Angelou takes the title of her fourth autobiography from a poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson, a Harlem Renaissance writer. Critic Lyman B. Hagan states that although the title is "less striking or oblique than titles of her preceding books," it is appropriate because Johnson's poem mentions a caged bird and provides a connection to Angelou's first autobiography, whose title was taken from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The title suggests Angelou's painful loneliness and exposes a spiritual dilemma also present in her first volume. Johnson's use of the metaphor is different from Dunbar's because her bird is a female whose isolation is sexual rather than racial. The caged bird may also refer to Angelou after her failed marriage, but writer Mary Jane Lupton says that "the Maya Angelou of "The Heart of a Woman" is too strong and too self-determined to be kept in a cage". "The Heart of a Woman" is the first time Angelou identifies with another female African-American writer. Her early literary influences were men, including James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and William Shakespeare. Angelou has stated that she always admired women writers like Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Her choice of title for this book is an acknowledgment of her legacy as a Black woman writer. Synopsis. The events described in "The Heart of a Woman" take place between 1957 and 1962, beginning shortly after the end of Angelou's previous autobiography, "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas". Angelou and her teenage son Guy have moved into a houseboat commune in Sausalito, California. After a year, they move to a rented house near San Francisco. Singer Billie Holiday visits Angelou and her son there, and Holiday sings "Strange Fruit", her famous song about the lynching of Black men, to Guy. Holiday tells Angelou, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing." In 1959, Angelou and Guy moved to New York City. The transition is difficult for Guy, and Angelou is forced to protect him from a . No longer satisfied with performing in nightclubs, she dedicates herself to acting, writing, political organizing, and her son. Her friend, novelist John Killens, invites her to join the Harlem Writers Guild. She meets other important African-American artists and writers, including James Baldwin, who would become her mentor. She becomes a published writer for the first time. Angelou becomes more politically active and participates in African-American and African protest rallies, including helping to organize a sit-in at the United Nations following the execution of Patrice Lumumba, the ousted prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She meets Malcolm X and is struck by his good looks and magnetism. After hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak, she and her friend, activist Godfrey Cambridge, are inspired to produce a successful fundraising event for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) called "Cabaret For Freedom". King names her coordinator of SCLC's office in New York. She performs in Jean Genet's play "The Blacks", with Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, and Cicely Tyson. In 1961, Angelou meets South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make. Angelou and Make never marry, but she and Guy move with Make to London and Cairo, where she acts as his political wife while he is in exile. Their relationship is full of cultural conflicts; he expects her to be a subservient African wife, and she yearns for the freedom of a working woman. She learns that Make is too friendly with other women and is irresponsible with money, so she accepts a position as assistant editor at the "Arab Observer". Their relationship is examined by their community of friends, and Angelou and Make eventually separate. Angelou accepts a job in Liberia, and she and Guy travel to Accra, where he has been accepted to attend college. Guy is seriously injured in an automobile accident, so she begins working at the University of Ghana and remains there while he recuperates. "The Heart of a Woman" ends with Guy leaving for college and Angelou remarking to herself, "At last, I'll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself." Genre. All seven of Angelou's installments of her life story are in the tradition of African-American autobiography. Starting with "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", Angelou challenges the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Angelou said in 1989 that she is the only serious writer to choose autobiography to express herself, but she reports not one person's story, but the collective's. Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe writes that Angelou is representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people. Her use of devices common in fictional writing, such as dialog, characterization and thematic development, has led some reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction. All of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the autobiography's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies, and later acknowledges that she follows the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I' meaning 'we'". Lupton compares "The Heart of a Woman" with other autobiographies, and states that for the first time in Angelou's series, she is able to present herself as a model for successful living. However, Angelou's "woman's heart"—her perspective as a woman with concerns about her self-esteem and the conflicts with her lovers and her son—is what makes her autobiography different. Angelou's feelings as described in "The Heart of a Woman", which Lupton calls Angelou's "most introspective" book, are what dictates the book's form. Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to all her books, which differentiate her work from more traditional "truthful" autobiographies. Her approach parallels the conventions of many African-American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US when truth was often censored for purposes of self-protection. Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the tradition of African-American autobiography, but insists that she has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form. In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discusses her writing process, and "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs. When asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she states, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about." Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories. Hagen states, "One can assume that 'the essence of the data' is present in Angelou's work", and that Angelou uses aspects of fiction writing to make her depictions of events and people more interesting. Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis, said that she could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader. "The Heart of a Woman" is similar to Angelou's previous volumes because it is narrated from the intimate point of view of a woman and a mother, but by this time, she can refer to events that occurred in her past books. Angelou has become a serial autobiographer, something Lupton calls "a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography". Angelou successfully draws upon her previous works, and can build upon the themes she has already explored; for example, Angelou threatens the gang leader who has been threatening her son, a powerful incident when considered in light of Angelou's rape in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings". Lupton calls Angelou's violent behavior an "unconscious effort to rewrite her own history". Style. Angelou does not begin to create her own narrative until "The Heart of a Woman", which depends less upon the conventions of fiction than her previous books. For example, there is less dialog and fewer dramatic episodes. "The Heart of a Woman" is more uplifting than its predecessors due to Angelou's resolution of her conflict between her duties as a mother and her success as a performer. Angelou perfects the use of the vignette in "The Heart of a Woman" to present her acquaintances and close associates. Two of her most developed vignettes in this book are of Billie Holiday and Malcolm X. The vignettes of those she knew well, like Vusumzi Make, also present her interactions and relationships. Hagen writes that although "frank talk seemed to be almost requisite for a commercially successful book" in the early 1980s, Angelou values monogamy, fidelity, and commitment in her relationships. For the only time in this series, Angelou describes her son's accident in detail at both the end of this book and the beginning of her next one, "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes", a technique that centralizes the two books, connects them with each other, creates a strong, emotional link between them, and repeats Angelou's pattern of ending each book on a positive note. In this book, Angelou ends with a hopeful look to the future as her son attains his independence and she looks forward to hers. Hagen writes, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, "The Heart of a Woman" moves its central figures to a point of full personhood." Themes. Race. Race, like in the rest of the series, is a central theme in "The Heart of a Woman". The book opens with Angelou and Guy living in an experimental commune with white people, trying to participate in the new openness between Blacks and whites. She is not completely comfortable with the arrangement; Angelou never names her roommates, even though "naming" has been an important theme in her books thus far. For the most part, Angelou is able to get along well with whites, but she occasionally encounters prejudice, as when she needs help from white friends to rent a home in a segregated neighborhood. Hagen calls Angelou's descriptions of whites and the hopes for eventual equality in this book "optimistic". Angelou continues her indictment of white power structure and her protests against racial injustice. Angelou becomes more politicized and develops a new sense of Black identity. Even Angelou's decision to leave show business is political. She sees herself as a social and cultural historian of her time, and of the civil rights and Black literary movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She becomes more attracted to the causes of Black militants in the US and Africa, to the point of entering into a relationship with a significant militant, and becomes more committed to activism. During this time, she becomes an active political protester, but she does not think of herself in that way. She places the focus upon herself and uses the autobiographical form to demonstrate how the civil rights movement influenced her. According to Hagen, Angelou's contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective". Journey. Travel is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole; McPherson writes that it is something of a national myth to Americans as a people. This is also the case for African-American autobiography, which has its roots in the slave narrative. "The Heart of a Woman" has three primary settings—the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Egypt—and two secondary ones—London and Accra. Like all of Angelou's books, the structure of "The Heart of a Woman" is based on a journey. Angelou emphasizes the theme of movement by opening her book with a spiritual ("The ole ark's a-moverin'"), which McPherson calls "the theme song of the United States in 1957". This spiritual, which contains a reference to Noah's Ark, presents Angelou as a type of Noah and demonstrates her spirituality. Angelou mentions Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's 1951 novel "On the Road", thus connecting her own journey and uncertainty about the future with the journeys of literary figures. Even though Angelou travels to Africa for a relationship, she makes a connection with the continent. Lupton states, "Africa is the site of her growth". Angelou's time in Africa makes her more aware of her African roots as she searches for the past of her ancestors. Although Angelou journeys to many places in the book, the most important journey she describes is "a voyage into the self". Writing. Angelou's primary role in "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas" was stage performer, but in "The Heart of a Woman" she changes from someone who uses others' method of expression—the songs and dances of the African, Caribbean, and African-American oral tradition—to a writer. Angelou makes this decision for political reasons as she becomes more involved with the civil rights movement, and so that she can care for her son. For the first time in Angelou's autobiographies, she begins to think of herself as a writer and recounts her literary development. Angelou begins to identify with other Black women writers for the first time in "The Heart of a Woman". She has been influenced by several writers since her childhood, but this is the first time she mentions female authors. Up to this point, her identification has been with male writers; her new affiliations with female writers is due to her emerging feminism. Angelou's concept of herself as an artist changed after her encounter with Billie Holiday. Up to that point, Angelou's career was more about fame than about art; Als states, "Developing her artistry was not the point". Als also says that Angelou's busy career, instead of revealing her ambition, shows "a woman who is only moderately talented and perpetually unable to understand who she is". Angelou, in spite of the mistakes of her youth, needed the approval and acceptance of others, and observes that Holiday was able to perceive this. Holiday tells her, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing." Angelou had begun to write sketches, songs and short stories, and shows her work to her friend John Killens, who invites her to New York City to develop her writing skills. She joins the Harlem Writers Guild and receives feedback from other African-American authors such as Killens, Rosa Guy, and Caribbean writer Paule Marshall, who would eventually make significant contributions to African-American literature. Angelou dedicates herself to improving her craft, forcing herself to understand the technical aspects of writing. Lupton writes, "Readers can actually envision in this volume the distinguished artist who becomes the Maya Angelou of the 1990s". Motherhood. Motherhood, a theme throughout Angelou's autobiographies, becomes more complex in "The Heart of a Woman". Although Guy struggles with the developmentally appropriate process of adolescent separation from his mother, they remain close. Many years of experience as a mother, and her success as a writer, actress, and activist, enable Angelou to behave more competently and with more maturity, professionally and as a mother. Her self-assurance becomes a major part of her personality. Her past conflict between her professional and personal lives are resolved, and she fulfills her promise to Guy she made to him at the end of her previous autobiography that they would never be separated again. Lupton writes that Angelou resolves this conflict by subordinating her needs to her child's. Lupton also writes that motherhood is important in Angelou's books, as is "the motif of the responsible mother". Angelou's commitment to caring for her son is revealed in her confrontation with the street gang leader who has threatened Guy. In this episode, which Lupton considers the most dramatic in the book, Angelou has become a powerful mother. Angelou is no longer torn by self-doubt, but is now a strong and aggressive Black mother. Angelou has become what Joanne Braxton calls the "outraged mother", which represents the Black mother's strength and dedication found throughout slave narratives. Lupton also writes that Angelou has become a reincarnation of her grandmother, a central figure in "Caged Bird". By the end of "The Heart of a Woman", Angelou is alone; for example, after Guy recuperates from the car accident, he leaves her to attend college. The final word in the book is the negative "myself", a word that signifies Angelou's new-found freedom and independence. Angelou has become truly herself and is no longer defined as someone's wife or mother. Scholar Wallis Tinnie calls this moment one of "illusive transcendence" and "a scene of hope and completion". For the first time in many years, Angelou will be able to eat a chicken breast alone, something that is valued throughout her books. Lupton calls this thought "perfectly formed". Tinnie states that "The Heart of a Woman's" "lonely aching" hearkens back to the poem that inspired the book's title. Critical reception and sales. Critics gave "The Heart of a Woman" positive reviews, praising its professional qualities. The American Library Association's ' magazine says that although "Caged Bird" was the best of Angelou's autobiographies, "every book since has been very much worth the reading and pondering". Janet B. Blundell writes that the book was "lively, revealing, and worth the reading", but also found it "too chatty and anecdotal". Hagen responded to this criticism by stating that all of Angelou's books consist of episodes connected by theme and character. Sheree Crute, writing for "Ms.", appreciated the episodic nature of Angelou's writing and praised her for her "wonderfully unaffected story telling skills". Cudjoe called it "the most political segment of Angelou's autobiographical statement". In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration; in the following week, sales of her works, including "The Heart of a Woman", rose by 300–600 percent. Bantam Books printed 400,000 copies of her books to meet demand. Random House, which published Angelou's hardcover books and the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, marking a 1,200 percent increase. In 1997, Angelou's friend Oprah Winfrey named "The Heart of a Woman" as a selection in her book club, making it a bestseller and increasing its total printing to over one million copies, sixteen years after its publication.

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Bitter Lemons Bitter Lemons is an autobiographical work by writer Lawrence Durrell, describing the three years (1953–1956) he spent on the island of Cyprus. The book was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for 1957, the second year the prize was awarded. Background. Durrell moved to Cyprus in 1953, following several years spent working for the British Council in Argentina and the Foreign Office in Yugoslavia. Having relinquished government employment, Durrell wanted to plunge himself once more into writing, and was looking to return to the Mediterranean world he had experienced in Corfu and Rhodes. He had hoped that he would be able to purchase a house in an affordable location and write. Although Durrell must have experienced personal difficulties—his wife, Eve, was undergoing treatment for mental illness and had left him in charge of his young daughter, Sappho (born 1951) — the book does not mention these people or incidents, aside from a few oblique references to his daughter. In 1956, he abandoned his home on the island and left Cyprus very rapidly for a very brief residence in the UK, quickly relocating to France for the remaining three decades of his life. Plot summary. The book is alternately comic and serious, charting Durrell's experiences on Cyprus and the people he met and befriended, as well as charting the progress of the Cypriot "Enosis" (union with Greece and freedom from British rule) movement, which plunged the island into chaos and violence. Comic moments include Durrell's successful house-buying adventure, and the visits of his mother and brother, naturalist Gerald Durrell. Durrell settled in the village of Bellapais (purposely spelt "Bellapaix" by Durrell to evoke the old name Paix), which is now part of the Turkish-controlled north. During his stay, Durrell worked first as an English teacher at the Pancyprian Gymnasium, where several of his female students reportedly fell in love with him: Invited to write an essay on her favourite historical character, [Electra] never failed to delight me with something like this: 'I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me. How pleasure is the moment when I see him came at the door. My glad is very big.' Eventually, however, "the vagaries of fortune and the demons of ill-luck dragged Cyprus into the stock-market of world affairs" and as Greek Cypriot armed groups emerged demanding an end to British rule in Cyprus. Inter communal violence between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots ensued, with Greek Cypriot nationalists wanting union with Greece. Durrell accepted a job as press adviser to the British governor. Durrell was not enamoured with the Greek Cypriot militants, however, and felt that they were dragging the island to a "feast of unreason" and that "embedded so deeply in the medieval compost of religious hatreds, the villagers floundered in the muddy stream of undifferentiated hate like drowning men." The account ends with him fleeing the island without saying goodbye to his friends, approaching the "heavily guarded airport" by taxi in conversation with the driver who tells him "Dighenis, though he fights the British, really loves them. But he will have to go on killing them—with regret, even with affection."

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My Story (Das book) My Story is an autobiographical book written by Indian author and poet Kamala Das (also known as Kamala Surayya or Madhavikutty). The book was originally published in Malayalam, titled "Ente Katha". The book evoked violent reactions of admiration and criticism among the readers and critics. It remains to date the best-selling woman's autobiography in India. "My Story" is a chronologically ordered, linear narrative written in a realist style. In the book, Das recounts the trials of her marriage and her painful self-awakening as a woman and writer. The entire account written in the format of a novel. Though "My Story" was supposed to be an autobiography, Das later admitted that there was plenty of fiction in it. Plot summary. The book, with 50 chapters, follows Aami's ( Kamala ) life from age four through British colonial and missionary schools in Calcutta where she had to face racist discrimination; through the brutal and indulgent relationship with her husband; through her sexual awakening; her literary career; extramarital affairs; the birth of her children; and, finally, a slow but steady coming to terms with her spouse, writing, and sexuality. She mostly upholds her personal self in her autobiography rather than the political and social upheaval predominant during the war of independence in the then India. Publication. "Ente Katha" was serialised in 1972 in the now defunct "Malayalanadu" weekly, a literary magazine published by S. K. Nair. The novel not only created a literary sensation but even invited the wrath of Das' close relatives who wanted to stop its publication. V. B. C. Nair, the Editor of "Malayalanadu" recalls, "Despite pressure from her influential relatives to stop the publication of the work, Kamala remained bold and it proved a roaring hit boosting the circulation of the weekly by 50,000 copies within a fortnight." Das had written "My Story" in English a couple of years back before it was rendered into Malayalam. At the time when she was penning down the memoir in English, S. K. Nair suggested her to translate it for his weekly. The novel was first published as a book by Current Books in February 1973. It is being published by DC Books from August 1982. The English version was published in the year 1976 by Sterling Publishers, with many changes made to the manuscript which she wrote in 1970. The book has been published by Harper Collins India since 2009. A Hindi translation titled "Meri Kahaani" is being published by Hind Pocket Books. Reception. "My Story" remains one of the most popular and controversial autobiographies by an Indian author. Poet and litterateur K. Satchidanandan said, "I cannot think of any other Indian autobiography that so honestly captures a woman's inner life in all its sad solitude, its desperate longing for real love and its desire for transcendence, its tumult of colours and its turbulent poetry." For Jaydeep Sarangi, doyen Indian English critic, Das was a champion voice of 'confessional poetry'.

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My Life and Loves My Life and Loves is the autobiography of the Ireland-born, naturalized-American writer and editor Frank Harris (1856–1931). As published privately by Harris between 1922 and 1927, and by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press in 1931, the work consisted of four volumes, illustrated with many drawings and photographs of nude women. The book gives a graphic account of Harris's sexual adventures and relates gossip about the sexual activities of celebrities of his day. The work was banned in both the United States and Britain for 40 years. It first became available in America in 1963. At one time it was sold in Paris for more than $100. Contemporary and historic figures discussed frequently in the book include Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Lord Folkestone, William Ewart Gladstone, Heinrich Heine, George Meredith, Charles Stewart Parnell, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Salisbury, Byron Caldwell Smith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and many others. Table of contents, volume 1. Foreword. The foreword begins, "Here in the blazing heat of an American August, amid the hurry and scurry of New York, I sit down to write my final declaration of Faith, as a preface or foreword to the Story of my Life." Additional volume. In the early 1950s, Harris's widow Nellie sold about a hundred pages of his writings on further autobiographical matters to Kahane's son Maurice Girodias for a million French francs. Girodias gave the task of producing something publishable from them to Alexander Trocchi, and described the result as having only 20% of its content derived from the nominal source material. It was published by Girodias's Olympia Press in 1954 as "My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume". Grove Press omnibus edition. John F. Gallagher edited, and provided annotations for, a new omnibus edition, "My Life and Loves: Five Volumes in One/Complete and Unexpurgated", published by Grove Press in 1963. This edition contained no illustrations. Gallagher described the Trocchi version as "apparently not authentic". James Campbell, comparing the two editions' fifth volumes, does however argue that Girodias's 20% figure was too low.

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Before Night Falls Before Night Falls () is the 1992 autobiography of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, describing his early life in Cuba, his time in prison, and his escape to the United States in the Mariel Boatlift of 1980. It received a favorable review from "The New York Times" and was on the newspaper's list of the ten best books of 1993. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2000, starring Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp. Opera adaptation. On May 29, 2010 the premiere performance of "Before Night Falls", an opera by Jorge Martín, took place at the Fort Worth Opera. The opera follows the book by Reinaldo Arenas closely. On March 29, 2017, Florida Grand Opera premiered "Before Night Falls" in Miami with five performances at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

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Bad Blood (Sage book) Bad Blood is a 2000 work blending collective biography and memoir by the Anglo-Welsh literary critic and academic Lorna Sage. Set in post-war North Wales, it reflects on the dysfunctional generations of a family, its problems, and their effect on Sage. It won the 2001 Whitbread Book Biography of the Year seven days before Sage died of emphysema. James Fenton wrote in "The New York Review of Books": "What makes the book remarkable is the individual story she has to tell, and which she delivers with such glee." "The Guardian" ranked "Bad Blood" at number 89 in its list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century in September 2019.

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Book of the Dead (memoir) Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others is a collection of memoirs by author E. Hoffmann Price. It was published in 2001 by Arkham House in an edition of approximately 4,000 copies. The book contains memoirs of several writers of the pulp magazine era. Also included are several appreciations of Price by other authors. Contents. "Book of the Dead" contains the following:

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Memory Hold-the-Door Memory Hold-the-Door is a 1940 autobiographical memoir by the Scottish writer John Buchan. It was published posthumously, Buchan having died in February of that year. In the United States the book was released under the title Pilgrim's Way. In a preface to the book Buchan disclaims the description of autobiography, preferring to call his work "a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory". Content. The book recounts Buchan's life of public service, his literary work from his early days in the Scottish Highlands through his years at Oxford, and his service in both Britain's Boer campaign and World War I (the latter, as Britain's Director of Intelligence and Information for the War Cabinet), before covering his years in Parliament, and appointment as Governor General of Canada. He includes profiles of such contemporaries as Lord Grey, Lord Oxford, Raymond Asquith, Lord Haldane, Earl Balfour, Lord French, Sir Henry Wilson, Lord Haig, Lord Byng of Vimy, T.E. Lawrence, and King George V. Appreciation. "Pilgrim's Way" (as it was called in America) was said to be John F. Kennedy's favourite book. A list of Kennedy's favourite books given to "Life" magazine in 1961 was headed by Buchan's "Montrose", and another list sent out upon request to various libraries during National Library Week was headed by David Cecil's "Lord Melbourne", but there is no evidence that either of these lists placed the books in order of preference. Kennedy urged anyone he wanted to understand him to read "Pilgrim's Way", and often quoted passages from it to friends and associates whom he regarded as equally appreciative of fine prose.

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Autobiographies of Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov (–1992) wrote three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980) were a two-volume work, covering his life up to 1978. The third volume, I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), published after his death, was not a sequel but a new work which covered his whole life. This third book won a Hugo Award. Before writing these books, Asimov also published three anthologies of science fiction stories which contained autobiographical accounts of his life in the introductions to the stories: "The Early Asimov" (1972), "Before the Golden Age" (1974), and "Buy Jupiter and Other Stories" (1975). Books. "The Early Asimov, or, Eleven Years of Trying" (Doubleday, 1972) is a collection of almost all of the published short stories Asimov wrote during the first eleven years of his career, 1938 to 1949, other than his robots and "Foundation" series of stories (and his first story, "Marooned off Vesta"), which had already been collected in other books. Each story is prefaced by an introduction about how the story came to be written and published. The book also refers to eleven unpublished stories which, at the time the book was written, Asimov thought had since been lost, as he no longer had the manuscripts. Collectively, this material describes the beginning of Asimov's career and his long association with John W. Campbell, the editor of "Astounding Science-Fiction", who published many of the stories in the book and to whom the book is dedicated. The book covers the first 60 stories Asimov wrote, and ends with the publication of his first novel in 1950. "Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s" (Doubleday, 1974) is a collection of science fiction short stories by a variety of authors, which were all originally published in pulp magazines in the 1930s. It also includes one of Asimov's eleven lost stories, "Big Game" (written in 1941), which a fan had discovered in a collection of Asimov's papers in Boston University library after reading about it in "The Early Asimov". Edited by Asimov, this book contains autobiographical material describing his childhood as a science fiction fan who grew up reading 1930s magazines. It ends at the point when Asimov sold his first published story in 1938, where "The Early Asimov" began, and thus is a prequel to that book. "Buy Jupiter and Other Stories" (Doubleday, 1975) collects 24 of Asimov's stories, first published between 1950 and 1973. The autobiographical material between the stories covers the same period, carrying on from where "The Early Asimov" left off and ending at his marriage to his second wife, Janet Jeppson Asimov. In the introduction Asimov explains that he hopes that by including autobiographical information in his story collections, it will be easier to resist editorial pressure to write a proper autobiography. "In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954" (Doubleday, 1979) is the first volume of Asimov's two-volume autobiography. It ends shortly before the point when he became a full-time writer. Up until then, his main career had been lecturing in biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine, although by then he already earned more from his writing than he did from his academic post. It is Asimov's joint-200th book; it was published on the same day as "Opus 200". It includes another of Asimov's lost stories, "The Weapon" (written in 1938), which he had forgotten had been published under a pseudonym. In an interview shortly after publication, Asimov said: "I've done nothing in my life. You would be surprised how shrewdly I had to write it to obscure that fact." He later wrote: A reader once told me, enthusiastically, after the autobiography was published, that he had read the book with immense interest and that he had been unable to keep from turning the pages and reading on and on and on, laughing all the way. I said to him, curiously, "Didn't you notice that nothing was happening?" "I noticed that," he said, "but I didn't care." The publishers disliked Asimov's original title, "As I Remember", so they asked him to provide another, suggesting he find a good quote from an obscure poem. Asimov suggested the following poem: <poem>In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.</poem> Doubleday agreed to Asimov's new title, but could not find the source of the verse he had given them. When Doubleday inquired, Asimov confessed: "I wrote it myself". The poem was included at the front of the book, attributed to "Anon." "In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978" (1980) is the second part of Asimov's autobiography. The title is also taken from the poem. The two volumes are 640,000 words long in total. "In Joy Still Felt" won the 1981 Locus Award for best science fiction-related nonfiction book. Asimov had intended to write the third volume in 2000, starting where the second had left off, and to call it "The Scenes of Life". But after falling ill in 1990 he decided to write it early, on his wife Janet's advice, in case he did not live that long. Janet's opinion was that the original two-volume autobiography was too chronological (although it was highly detailed, owing to Asimov's eidetic memory and the copious notes he kept about his life in his daily diary), lending it an emotionless and reserved quality. As such, she encouraged him to write a third volume which would instead convey more of his feelings about the contents. Published posthumously under the title "I. Asimov: A Memoir" (Doubleday, 1994; 235,000 words), it covered his whole life, so that people who had not read the first two volumes could still enjoy it. Janet Asimov wrote an epilogue. All three books were nominated for a Hugo Award, in the category of best non-fiction book. "I. Asimov: A Memoir" won in 1995. Janet Asimov later edited "It's Been a Good Life" (Prometheus Books, 2002), an abridged compilation of all three books.

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Father and Son (book) Father and Son (1907) is a memoir by poet and critic Edmund Gosse, which he subtitled "a study of two temperaments." Edmund had previously published a biography of his father, originally published anonymously. The book describes Edmund's early years in an exceptionally devout Plymouth Brethren home. His mother, who died early and painfully of breast cancer, was a writer of Christian tracts. His father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an influential, though largely self-taught, invertebrate zoologist and student of marine biology who, after his wife's death, took Edmund to live in Devon. The book focuses on the relationship between a sternly religious father who rejects the new evolutionary theories of his scientific colleague Charles Darwin and the son's gradual coming of age and rejection of his father's fundamentalist religion. As Michael Newton, Lecturer in English, University College London, has written, the book is "a brilliant, and often comic, record of the small diplomacies of home: those indirections, omissions, insincerities, and secrecies that underlie family relationships." "[B]rilliantly written, and full of gentle wit," the book is "an unmatched social document, preserving for us whole the experience of childhood in a Protestant sect in the Victorian period...Above all, it is one of our best accounts of adolescence, particularly for those who endured...a religious upbringing." Although Edmund Gosse prefaces the book with the claim that the incidents described are sober reality, a modern biography of Philip Henry Gosse by Ann Thwaite presents him not as a repressive tyrant who cruelly scrutinized the state of his son's soul but as a gentle and thoughtful person of "delicacy and inner warmth," much unlike his son's portrait. Biographer and critic D. J. Taylor described Gosse's own portrayal of his father as "horribly partial" and noted that, in Thwaite's work, "the supposedly sequestered, melancholic pattern of [Edmund] Gosse's London and Devonshire childhood is repeatedly proved to have contained great affection, friends, fun and even light reading." Editions. "Source: Library of Congress" In popular culture. "Father and Son" partially inspired the 1988 novel "Oscar and Lucinda" by Peter Carey, that won the Booker Prize the same year, and the 1989 Miles Franklin Award. The book was the inspiration for Dennis Potter's 1976 television drama "Where Adam Stood", starring Alan Badel as Philip Gosse.

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Little Wilson and Big God Little Wilson and Big God, volume I of Anthony Burgess's autobiography, was first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1986. It won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. The work describes a period of over 40 years from Burgess’s birth, in 1917, to 1959, when his time as teacher and education officer in Malaya and Borneo came to an end. The writer’s education at Xaverian College and at Manchester University, his war service at an army garrison in Gibraltar, and his service as a teacher at Banbury Grammar School (which he describes as one of the happiest periods of his life) are all covered in detail. One of the most significant literary autobiographies in English of the latter part of the 20th century, the book has been described as resembling a picaresque novel in the vividness of its descriptions and its readability. Roger Lewis opined that "It is perhaps Burgess's memoirs...which constitute his best novels, his masterpieces."

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Autobiography of Mark Twain The Autobiography of Mark Twain refers to a lengthy set of reminiscences, dictated, for the most part, in the last few years of American author Mark Twain's life and left in typescript and manuscript at his death. The "Autobiography" comprises a rambling collection of anecdotes and ruminations rather than a conventional autobiography. Twain never compiled these writings and dictations into a publishable form in his lifetime. Despite indications from Twain that he did not want his autobiography to be published for a century, he serialised some "Chapters from My Autobiography" during his lifetime and various compilations were published during the 20th century. However it was not until 2010, in the 100th anniversary year of Twain's death, that the first volume of a comprehensive collection, compiled and edited by The Mark Twain Project of the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley, was published. Twain's writings and dictations. Twain first started to compose an autobiography in 1870, but proceeded fitfully, abandoning the work and returning to it as the mood took him, amassing around 30–40 of these "false starts" over the next 35 years. The bulk of the autobiography was dictated rather than written directly—this was described by a 2010 reviewer as "[having] a secretary follow him around and take down his every passing thought". In a 1904 letter to William Dean Howells, he wrote: "I’ve struck it! And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography." These dictations were made frequently in 1906 and 1907. Twain then seems to have let the book languish; in 1908–9 he hardly added to it at all, and he declared the project concluded in 1909, after the death of his youngest daughter Jean. His innovative notion—to "talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment"—meant that his thoughts could range freely. Twain thought his autobiography would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order. Twain's papers, including the autobiographical works, were left as part of a trust for the benefit of his surviving daughter, Clara Clemens. These papers passed through the control of a number of editors, and have, since 1971, been held by the Bancroft Library, at the University of California, Berkeley. Plans for posthumous publication. Writings by Twain show intent for the majority of the material to be published posthumously. In an interview for "The Times" in 1899, Twain was reported to be considering a work which would be unpublished for a century. Twain wrote instructions for future "editors, heirs and assigns" in 1904. In these he celebrates that posthumous publication allowed him to speak with his "whole frank mind." These also outlined a century-long plan of publications 25 years apart, with progressively more potentially controversial material included. In the introduction to the second edition of "Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review", the scholar Michael Kiskis suggests that these delays were less due to Twain's (purported) concern for those who could be aggrieved by the text, and more likely an attempt to extend the copyright. Various modern reports refer to a "100 year embargo" imposed by Twain on his own autobiography's release which expired in 2010. 20th century publications. Twain himself had published "Chapters from My Autobiography" in twenty-five instalments in the "North American Review" in 1906-7. Since Twain's death in 1910, a number of different editors have made attempts to impose some order on the whole of the material by selection and reorganization, producing several decidedly different published versions of "The Autobiography". Creating a publishable "Autobiography" from the disorganised mass of Twain's unpublished writings has proven to be a significant challenge, and access to the physical materials of Twain's papers was, for the first half-century, greatly limited to just small numbers of scholars. The partial "Autobiography" was published in 1924 by Harper & Brothers, consisting of about two-fifths of the material. It was compiled by personal friend and literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine, who at the time had exclusive access to Twain's papers. Editor and historian Bernard DeVoto succeeded Paine as literary executor for the Clemens estate, and used his access to the material to produce four book collections of "Autobiography" material: "Mark Twain in Eruption" (1940), "The Portable Mark Twain" (1946), "Mark Twain at Work" (1952), and "Letters from the Earth" (1962). The much-delayed publication of the latter was due to objections from Clara Clemens. Two publications were made from re-arrangements of previously published work. In 1959 Charles Neider rejected both Paine's in-order-of-creation and DeVoto's arranged-by-topic approaches and rearranged material to match the chronology of a standard autobiography. In 1990 (republished February 2010) scholar Michael Kiskis edited "Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review." Mark Twain Project edition. The Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library undertook to produce a complete autobiography of Twain, based upon material within their collection. The stated goal is "to publish the complete text as nearly as possible in the way Mark Twain intended it to be published after his death.". This was published in three-volumes between 2010 and 2015, with the first in the 100th anniversary year of Twain's death. All three volumes are available online with introductions and historical annotation from the editors also included with the text. The head editor for this work was Harriet Elinor Smith. Volume 1. The first volume of a three-volume edition runs to 760 pages. It includes introductory material explaining how Twain's autobiography was written. Then follows Twain's early, fragmentary attempts at writing it; and the text of his autobiographical dictations (the main series), beginning on 10 January 1906. Volume 1 collects these up until 30 March 1906. Volume 2. Volume 2 was published in October 2013 and runs to 736 pages. This collects dictations from 2 April 1906 until 28 February 1907. Volume 3. The third and final volume of the Mark Twain Project edition was published in October 2015. It contains 792 pages with entries dated from 1 March 1907 to 21 October 1909. Twain's autobiography closes with a piece written in December 1909 where he laments the death of his daughter Jean and declares that, with her, his motivation for writing the autobiography has died. Suffixing this, the volume also contains the 429-page "Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript" written in 1909. In this Twain attacks his secretary, Isabel Lyon, and business manager, Ralph Ashcroft, for alleged embezzlement of money from the author and for manipulation of Twain's relationship with Jean, much to her distress. It takes the form of a letter to William Dean Howells, though it was never sent nor intended to be so. It was not intended by Twain to include this as part of his autobiography, and it had never been published prior to 2015 — though it had been available to scholars as part of his papers. The 21st-century editors considered it sufficiently important to include within this publication. Copyright status. The version published in 2010, representing Twain's attempts from 1906 and earlier, would have entered the public domain by under ordinary circumstances. The state of the law at the time of his death notwithstanding, the 1976 revision provided that unpublished works created before January 1, 1978 would have entered the public domain by 2003. However, the publishers, the Mark Twain Foundation and the University of California Press, published the 2010 version in secret on microfilm in 2001, selling all three upcoming volumes for $50,000. Because of this, the 2010 version bears copyright marks for 2001 and 2010, and will not enter the public domain until 2047, 137 years after Mark Twain's death. David Bollier criticized the Foundation and UC Press for this move, saying, "So is the argument that academic presses have a special entitlement to game the usual terms of copyright law because they are doing God's work as academic presses? Copyright industries frequently inveigh against the 'theft' of sharing copyrighted works online, solemnly intoning that 'the law is the law.' So is a theft not a theft when the victim is the public, and not a private copyright holder?"

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Si le grain ne meurt Si le grain ne meurt is the autobiography of the French writer André Gide. Published in 1924, it recounts the life of Gide from his childhood in Paris until his engagement with his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux in 1895. The book has two parts. In the first, the author recounts his childhood memories: his private tutors, his time at the Ecole Alsacienne, his family, his friendship with Pierre Louÿs, the start of his veneration of his cousin, and his first efforts at writing. The book's title, "Si le grain ne meurt", is an allusion to the Gospel of John 12:24–25. The much shorter second part recounts his discovery of his homosexuality during a trip to Algeria, part of which was with Irish writer Oscar Wilde. At the time of its publication, parts of the book shocked the public with their depictions of homosexuality and detailed descriptions of Gide's debauchery: pages 237 - 310; with a particular emphasis after page 256. Gide, Andre, and Dorothy Bussy. If It Die .. an Autobiography;. New York: Random House, 1935. Print. Gide later recounted the total failure of his married life with Madeleine in another autobiography called "Et nunc manet in te", written shortly after the death of his wife in 1938. It was published in 1951.

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A Little Learning (book) "A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography" (1964) is Evelyn Waugh's unfinished autobiography. It was published just two years before his death on Easter Sunday, 1966, and covers the period of his youth and education. The title is a well-known quotation from Pope's "An Essay on Criticism", "A little learning is a dang'rous thing". In this unfinished work Waugh passes this observation of post-war society in Oxford:

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Miracles of Life Miracles of Life is an autobiography written by British writer J. G. Ballard and published in 2008. Overview. The book describes Ballard's childhood and early teenage years in Shanghai in the 1930s and the early 1940s, when the city is ravaged by the Second Sino-Japanese War in the Battle of Shanghai and World War II. After the happy years spent with his well-to-do family in the Shanghai International Settlement, Ballard experiences the horrors of war and then the deprivations of an internment camp, Lunghua, where he is imprisoned with his parents, his sister, and hundreds of other British, Belgian, Dutch and American nationals. After being liberated by the Americans in 1945, James "returns" to England with his mother and sister, but the return to a country which he has never known, being born in Shanghai, is made difficult by the dismal atmosphere of post-war Britain and the difficulty of integrating into British society. After beginning medical studies at a prestigious Cambridge college, Ballard suddenly quits the university and enlists in the R.A.F. The stint with the air force in a Canadian air base will prove to be a wrong move, and Ballard then quits the R.A.F. and returns to Britain. The autobiography subsequently describes his happy marriage, the birth of his children (the "miracles of life" that the title hints at), his wife's sudden and unexpected death, and the ensuing difficulties, which Ballard faces by deciding to raise his children as a single parent. The book also describes the beginning of his literary career, his friendship with pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, his experimentation culminating in his destructured novel "The Atrocity Exhibition", though less space is devoted to the Sixties and the Seventies than to the 15 years spent in Shanghai. The story of the success of "Empire of the Sun" and the making of Spielberg's film based on it is told, re-telling in non-novelistic style events already covered in his previous autofiction "The Kindness of Women". The book ends with Ballard's return to Shanghai in 1991, and with a very short and moving epilogue wherein he announces that he is sick with a terminal illness. Throughout "Miracles of Life" Ballard compares the events of his life as he remembers them and the more or less inventive way in which he has told them in his previous life narratives "Empire of the Sun" and "The Kindness of Women". Importance of the book. As soon as the publication of "Miracles" was announced in 2007, Ballard scholars and experts looked forward to it, expecting it to clarify some aspects of Ballard's life that had been fictionally reworked in his previous books, especially in the partly autobiographical novel "Empire of the Sun" and in the autofiction "The Kindness of Women". Ballard has repeatedly declared that those two books are a mix of real events and fictional elaboration. Since Ballard has interwoven real life experiences (especially the time spent in the Lunghua camp) in many of his works (even the overtly non-realistic ones, such as his science-fiction novels and short stories), many readers were interested in the opportunity to read Ballard's own possibly ultimate version. The book actually offers important biographical details about Ballard's crucial period in Shanghai, 1930–1946, but does not cover in detail other parts of his life (e.g. the 1970s and 1980s). However, many elements of "Miracles" show Ballard's intention to present it as a truthful narrative of his life, such as the pictures of his parents, his wife, his children, and his then current partner. A remarkable difference of this narrative from both "Empire" and "Kindness" is the presence of Ballard's parents, who had been edited out from these earlier works. With regard to "Empire", Ballard explains: In my novel the most important break with real events is the absence from Lunghua of my parents... I felt it was closer to the psychological and emotional truth of events to make 'Jim' effectively a war orphan. Much of the added value of the book is to be found in Ballard's witty and insightful remarks that comment on his experiences, but also tie the facts of his childhood and teenage years to the realities of today's globalised world. Shanghai, the city he was born in and the one he gets back to in his 1991 visit, is envisioned as a prototype of our late-modern or postmodern world.

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My Life and Hard Times My Life and Hard Times is the 1933 autobiography of James Thurber. It is considered his greatest work as he relates in bewildered deadpan prose the eccentric goings on of his family and the town beyond (Columbus, Ohio). Characters include the maid who lives in constant fear of being hypnotised; a grandfather who believes that the American Civil War is still going on; a mother who fears electricity is leaking all over the house and Muggs, "The Dog That Bit People", an Airedale Terrier that had a penchant for biting certain people... including the author. The book was a best seller and also achieved high critical praise. Russell Baker writing in the "New York Times" said it was "possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever". Ogden Nash said it was "just about the best thing I ever read"', and Dorothy Parker said "Mad, I don't say. Genius I grant you."

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Surprised by Joy Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is a partial autobiography published by C. S. Lewis in 1955. The work describes Lewis’s life from very early childhood (born 1898) until his conversion to Christianity in 1931, but does not go beyond that date. Overview. Lewis' purpose in writing was not primarily historical. His aim was instead to identify and describe the events surrounding his accidental discovery of and consequent search for the phenomenon he labeled "Joy", his best translation of the idea of "Sehnsucht" (). This "Joy" was so intense for something so good and so high up it could not be explained with words. He is struck with "stabs of joy" throughout his life. "Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing." Overall, the book contains less detail concerning specific events than a typical autobiography, although it is not devoid of information about his life. Lewis recounts and remembers his early years with a measure of amusement sometimes mixed with pain. However, while he does describe his life, the principal theme of the book is "Joy" as he defined it for his own purpose. Lewis ultimately discovers the true nature and purpose of Joy and its place in his own life. The book's last two chapters cover the end of his search as he makes the leap from atheism to theism and then from theism to Christianity and, as a result, he realizes that Joy is like a "signpost" to those lost in the woods, pointing the way, and that its appearance is not as important "when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles." Allusions of title. "Surprised by Joy" is an allusion to William Wordsworth's poem, "Surprised By Joy — Impatient As The Wind", relating an incident when Wordsworth forgot the death of his beloved daughter: "Surprised by joy — impatient as the Wind"<br> "I turned to share the transport — Oh! with whom"<br> "But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,"<br> "That spot which no vicissitude can find?"<br> "Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind —"<br> "But how could I forget thee? Through what power,"<br> "Even for the least division of an hour,"<br> "Have I been so beguiled as to be blind"<br> "To my most grievous loss? — That thought's return"<br> "Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,"<br> "Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,"<br> "Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;"<br> "That neither present time, nor years unborn"<br> "Could to my sight that heavenly face restore." Contrary to assumptions, "Surprised by Joy" is not about the American poet and writer Joy Gresham, who edited its final draft and would become Lewis' unexpected wife two years after its publication. However, his friends and contemporaries were quick to notice the coincidence, frequently remarking that Lewis had really been "Surprised by Joy".

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Thraliana The Thraliana was a diary kept by Hester Thrale and is part of the genre known as table talk. Although the work began as Thrale's diary focused on her experience with her family, it slowly changed focus to emphasise various anecdotes and stories about the life of Samuel Johnson. The work was used as a basis for Thrale's "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson", but the "Thraliana" remained unpublished until 1942. The anecdotes contained within the work were popular with Thrale's contemporaries but seen as vulgar. Among 20th-century readers, the work was popular, and many literary critics believe that the work is a valuable contribution to the genre and for providing information about Johnson's and her own life. Background. Hester Thrale, when still Hester Lynch Salusbury, spent her youth writing letters and keeping journals. Her talents at writing won her the respect of her uncles, Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Thomas Salusbury, who later appointed her their heir. When Thrale was older, she became close to Johnson. It was natural to her to keep a detailed collection of anecdotes and stories of their time together, as of everything she experienced. The two initially bonded after Thrale gave birth to her first child, Queeney, in 1766. However, there were problems between Thrale and Johnson, along with "his defenders" during his life and in criticism since then, over their "gradual estrangement" from each other after the death of her husband. These problems were then heightened by her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi. After Johnson's death, Thrale felt isolated because she believed that Johnson's previous friends along with the public as a whole did not accept her, and some went so far as to claim she abandoned Johnson in his final moments. In particular, James Boswell, who resented Thrale and felt himself as her literary competitor, began to exploit the falling out between Thrale and Johnson's friends in order to promote his "Life of Samuel Johnson". After the birth of Queeney, Thrale began to document the various moments in her daughter's life in a "baby book" called "The Children's Book". The work eventually expanded to include documentation of the whole family and was retitled the "Family Book". To encourage his wife's writing her husband Henry Thrale gave her six blank diary books, with the title "Thraliana" on the cover, in 1776. The work was intended as an Ana, which she admits her fascination with in the "Thraliana": "I am grown quite mad after these French Anas; Anecdote is in itself so seducing". After searching for English models for writing her Ana, she settled on used John Selden's "Table Talk", William Camden's "Remains", and Joseph Spence's "Anecdotes" as her guides. In May 1778, she was given by Johnson a manuscript of Spence's "Anecdotes", but her first years of the Ana were written without an exact model. Before the "Thraliana", Thrale kept two sets of anecdotes: the first was devoted to Samuel Johnson and the other for miscellaneous events. She relied on these, along with her memory, to write the early portions of her work. Boswell, when trying to find information for his own work, wrote: "Mr. Thrale told me, I am not sure what day, that there is a Book of "Johnsoniana" kept int heir Family, in which all Mr. Johnson's sayings and all that they can collect about him is put down ... I must try to get this "Thralian" Miscellany, to assist me in writing Mr. Johnson's Life, if Mrs. Thrale does not intend to do it herself." After Johnson's death, Thrale used the "Thraliana" to create the "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson" (1786). The manuscript passed through many hands and was owned by A. Edward Newton until his death in autumn 1940. The "Thraliana" was eventually published in 1942, and it was produced by the Clarendon Press in England while its editor, Katharine Balderston, was prohibited from travelling across the ocean from Wellesley College because of World War II. Ana. Thrale explains that her book is not for "diary-keeping in the strict sense" when she writes on the first page: "It is many Years since Doctor Samuel Johnson advised me to get a little Book, and write in it all the little Anecdotes which might come to my Knowledge, all the Observations I might make or hear; all the Verses never likely to be published, and in fine ev'ry thing which struck me at the Time. Mr Thrale has now treated me with a Repository, - and provided it with the pompous Title of Thraliana; I must endeavour to fill it with Nonsense new and old." These encouraging remarks from Johnson set the theme of the work as it became a new "Johnsoniana" collection. In particular, she transferred her previous notes and documentations about Johnson's life into the collection. In a 6 September 1777 letter, Johnson told Thrale to be "punctual in annexing the dates. Chronology you know is the eye of history". However, the system of Ana allowed Thrale to group items by theme instead of by topics, like "Odd medical Stories", to organize anecdotes, quotations, and stories. When Henry Thrale died while Thrale was writing Volume Three, the work became a diary for Thrale to discuss her thoughts and feelings after her loss. This volume soon began to describe Thrale's feelings for Gabriel Piozzi. Throughout the "Thraliana", Thrale examines how others view her, which reveals her anxieties that she had about how she was perceived. This is especially true when she writes: "Life has been to me nothing but a perpetual "Canvass" carried on in all parts of the World - not to make "Friends" neither - for I have certainly found very few - but to keep off "Enemies"". Thrale initially did not want to write in the sixth volume of the "Thraliana", but did so because "Johnson said that Pleasure might one day be made from such Nonsense, so I'll e'en finish this "last" Volume of Anecdote & store up no more Stuff". However she did not stop journal writing after she finished but continued to write for the remainder of her life. Critical response. Thrale's anecdotes were popular when they were first published in various works, but many readers initially thought that her "relaxed and natural style" was vulgar. However, Martine Brownley points out that this style helped win over 20th century readers even though the work suffered from "unevenness". Katherine Balderston regards the work as "what was almost, if not quite, the first English ana". James Clifford declared that "there is much valuable evidence about the great man," Samuel Johnson, within the "Thraliana". He also stated that the work, along with her "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson", "established her reputation as a bluestocking writer of the late eighteenth century. Edward Bloom et al. claim that the "Thraliana", as with her letters, lays "bare a woman's psychology".

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Nonconformity (book) Nonconformity: Writing on Writing is a book-length essay by Nelson Algren, intended for publication in 1953 but released posthumously in 1996 by Seven Stories Press. Kurt Vonnegut called it, "A handbook for tough, truth-telling outsiders who are proud, as was Algren, to damn well stay that way." Overview. The bulk, written between 1951 and 1953, presents Algren's philosophy as a writer, especially in the context of McCarthyism. The book was demanded by and given in June 1953 to his then-publisher Doubleday, but possibly due to the pressure of the FBI's then-ongoing investigation of Algren, Doubleday rejected it in September. Algren then sent it to his agent, but the manuscript was either lost in the mail or intercepted by the FBI, and the text salvaged from a carbon copy. In 1956, Algren gave those carbons to Van Allen Bradley, the "Chicago Daily News" editor who had commissioned the essay that inspired the book. Excerpts were published as "Things of the Earth: A Groundhog View" (in "The California Quarterly", Autumn 1952) and as "Great Writing Bogged Down in Fear, Says Novelist Algren" (in the "Chicago Daily News", December 3, 1952). Added to the original essay is a memoir on the making of the 1955 film version of his novel "The Man with the Golden Arm".

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Living to Tell the Tale Living to Tell the Tale (original Spanish-language title: "Vivir para contarla") is the first volume of the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez. The book was originally published in Spanish in 2002, with an English translation by Edith Grossman published in 2003. "Living to Tell the Tale" tells the story of García Márquez' life from 1927 through 1950, ending with his proposal to his wife. It focuses heavily on García Márquez' family, schooling, and early career as a journalist and short story writer, and includes references to numerous real-life events that ended up in his novels in one form or another, including the Banana massacre that appears prominently in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and the friend of his whose life and death were the model for "Chronicle of a Death Foretold".

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The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions is a 1972 collective autobiography written by Mario Puzo, on his journey through writing his 1969 novel "The Godfather". "I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was really time to grow up and sell out as Lenny Bruce once advised. So I told my editors, OK, I'll write a book about the Mafia..." It explains Puzo's reasoning for writing "The Godfather": "I have written three novels. "The Godfather" is not as good as the preceding two; I wrote it to make money..."

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Ormayude Arakal Ormayude Arakal ("The Cells of Memory") is a collection of memoirs by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer originally serialised in "Chandrika Weekly" and published as a book by National Book Stall in 1973. It is a rambling, incomplete kind of autobiography by the noted Malayalam author. The book also includes Basheer's conversations with Sreedharan, B. M. Gafoor, P. K. Muhammad, M. A. Hakim, K. K. Amu, I. V. Sasi, and Punalur Rajan.

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Now and Then (memoir) "Now and Then: a memoir of vocation" (1983), is the second of four partial autobiographies written by Frederick Buechner. Published in 1983, the work describes the author’s life from his conversion to Christianity in 1953, at the age of twenty-seven, up to his residency in Vermont at the age of fifty-seven. Overview. Buechner introduces his second autobiographical work by narrating the years leading up to his attendance at Union Theological Seminary, New York. The author recalls the process of writing his first two novels, "A Long Day’s Dying" and "The Seasons’ Difference", and a brief spell in Europe, during which he met Lewis Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Bernard Berenson, and Alice B. Toklas. Upon returning to New York, Buechner recounts his time at Union, and his encounters with Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, James Muilenberg, Samuel Terrien, Wilhelm Pauck, Cyril Richardson, and Robert McAfee Brown. Buechner particularly remembers the teaching style of Muilenberg: ‘Up and down the whole length of the aisle he would stride as he chanted the war songs, the taunt songs, the dirges of ancient Israel. With his body stiff, his knees bent, his arms scarecrowed far to either side, he never merely taught the Old Testament but "was" the Old Testament.’ When Buechner met Judith, the woman who was to be his wife, it was Muilenberg who officiated their wedding: ‘[his] hands trembled so as he read the service’. Alongside his studies, Buechner also recalls the time he spent serving at a church-run ‘employment clinic’ in East Harlem, and the stories of those whom he met while working there – an experience that the author memorialised in his third novel, "The Return of Ansel Gibbs". "Now and Then" further recounts Buechner’s experiences as a chaplain and Theology teacher at the Philips Exeter Academy, and the completion of his fourth novel, "The Final Beast". Here Buechner expounds upon the place that his new-found faith had come to hold in his work as a novelist: ‘I am a Christian novelist in the same sense that somebody from Boston or Chicago is an American novelist. I must be true to my experience as a Christian as black writers to their experience as blacks or women writers to their experience as women. It is no more complicated, no more sinister than that.’ Following nine years spent at Exeter, the author then describes the relocation of his family to Vermont, where he completed his fifth novel, "The Entrance to Porlock" (1970). In this third and final chapter, Buechner also remembers being invited to deliver the Noble Lectures at Harvard (out of which he would publish "The Alphabet of Grace"), and his conception of the character of Leo Bebb, who became the central focus of his next four books, a tetralogy titled "The Book of Bebb": "Lion Country" (1971), "Open Heart" (1972), "Love Feast" (1974), and "Treasure Hunt" (1977). Finally, the author recalls his discovery of hagiography, and with it his encounter with St Godric of Finchdale, which would eventually become his tenth novel, "Godric". Themes. In "Now and Then", Buechner develops the key theme that had been central to his first autobiographical work, "The Sacred Journey": the concept of listening. In the final chapter he writes: ‘Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.’ At the heart of this concept is the notion that ‘if God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think that he speaks to us largely through what happens to us’. ‘What I have done both in this book and its predecessor’, he continues, ‘is to listen back over what has happened to me […] for the sound, above all else, of his voice.’ With this theme in mind, the title for this second memoir, "Now and Then", is drawn from a quote by Paul Tillich: ‘We want only to show you something we have seen and tell you something we have heard […] that here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation.’ Commenting upon Buechner's memoirs, scholar Dale Brown writes that the autobiographical works ‘illustrate Buechner’s theory of what he calls the “sacred function of memory” – the obliteration of the artificial designations of past, present, and future in order to reinhabit and reunderstand the moments of our lives.’

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Peeling the Onion Peeling the Onion () is an autobiographical work by German Nobel Prize-winning author and playwright Günter Grass, published in 2006. It begins with the end of his childhood in Danzig (Gdansk) when the Second World War breaks out, and ends with the author finishing his first great literary success, "The Tin Drum".

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Speak, Memory Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by writer Vladimir Nabokov. The book includes individual essays published between 1936 and 1951 to create the first edition in 1951. Nabokov's revised and extended edition appeared in 1966. Scope. The book is dedicated to his wife, Vera, and covers his life from 1903 until his emigration to America in 1940. The first twelve chapters describe Nabokov's remembrance of his youth in an aristocratic family living in pre-revolutionary Saint Petersburg and at their country estate Vyra, near Siverskaya. The three remaining chapters recall his years at Cambridge and as part of the Russian émigré community in Berlin and Paris. Through memory Nabokov is able to possess the past. Nabokov published "Mademoiselle O", which became Chapter Five of the book, in French in 1936, and in English in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1943, without indicating that it was non-fiction. Subsequent pieces of the autobiography were published as individual or collected stories, with each chapter able to stand on its own. Andrew Field observed that while Nabokov evoked the past through “puppets of memory” (in the characterizations of his educators, Colette, or Tamara, for example), his intimate family life with Véra and Dmitri remained "untouched". Field indicated that the chapter on butterflies is an interesting example how the author deploys the fictional with the factual. It recounts, for example, how his first butterfly escapes at Vyra, in Russia, and is "overtaken and captured" forty years later on a butterfly hunt in Colorado. The book's opening line, "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," is arguably a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle's "One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities," found in Carlyle's 1840 lecture "The Hero as Man of Letters," published in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in 1841. There is also a similar concept expressed in "On the nature of things" by the Roman Poet Lucretius. The line is parodied at the start of "Little Wilson and Big God", the autobiography of the English writer Anthony Burgess. "If you require a sententious opening, here it is. Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now." Nabokov writes in the text that he was dissuaded from titling the book "Speak, Mnemosyne" by his publisher, who feared that readers would not buy a "book whose title they could not pronounce". It was first published in a single volume in 1951 as "Speak, Memory" in the United Kingdom and as "Conclusive Evidence" in the United States. The Russian version was published in 1954 and called "Drugie berega" (Other Shores). An extended edition including several photographs was published in 1966 as "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited". In 1999 Alfred A. Knopf issued a new edition with the addition of a previously unpublished section titled "Chapter 16". There are variations between the individually published chapters, the two English versions, and the Russian version. Nabokov, having lost his belongings in 1917, wrote from memory, and explains that certain reported details needed corrections; thus the individual chapters as published in magazines and the book versions differ. Also, the memoirs were adjusted to either the English- or Russian-speaking audience. It has been proposed that the ever-shifting text of his autobiography suggests that "reality" cannot be "possessed" by the reader, the "esteemed visitor", but only by Nabokov himself. Nabokov had planned a sequel under the title "Speak on, Memory" or "Speak, America". He wrote, however, a fictional autobiographic memoir of a double persona, "Look at the Harlequins!," apparently being upset by a real biography published by Andrew Field. Chapters. The chapters were individually published as follows—in the "New Yorker", unless otherwise indicated: Reception. The book was instantly called a masterpiece by the literary world. In 2011, Time Magazine listed the book among the 100 All-TIME non-fiction books indicating that its "impressionist approach deepens the sense of memories relived through prose that is gorgeous, rich and full". Joseph Epstein lists Nabokov's book among the few truly great autobiographies. While he opines that it is odd that so great a writer as Nabokov has not been able to generate passion in his readers for his own greatest passion, chess and butterflies, he finds that the autobiography succeeds "at making a reasonable pass at understanding that greatest of all conundrums, its author's own life". Jonathan Yardley writes that the book is witty, funny and wise, "at heart it is … deeply humane and even old-fashioned", with an "astonishing prose". He indicates that while any autobiography is "inherently an act of immodesty", the real subject is the development of the inner and outer self, an act that can plunge the subject into "the abyss of self". Richard Gilbert who finds the long genealogical histories tedious notes that Nabokov apparently bullied his younger brother and "doesn't pretend to guilt he doesn't feel", nor is he asking for sympathy when his idyllic world is crushed by the Russian revolution.

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Biographia Literaria Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817, in two volumes of twenty-three chapters. The first intended title of the work was Autobiographia Literaria. The formative influences of the work were Wordsworth's theory of imagination, Kantian view of imagination as a shaping power (for which Coleridge later coined the neologism "esemplastic"), and David Hartley and the Associationist psychology. Structure and tone. The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical elements, it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography. Instead, it is meditative. Content. The work was originally intended as a mere preface to a collected volume of his poems, explaining and justifying his own style and practice in poetry. The work grew to a literary autobiography, including, together with many facts concerning his education and studies and his early literary adventures, an extended criticism of William Wordsworth's theory of poetry as given in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads" (a work on which Coleridge collaborated), and a statement of Coleridge's philosophical views. In the first part of the work Coleridge is mainly concerned with showing the evolution of his philosophic creed. At first an adherent of the associationist psychology of David Hartley, he came to discard this mechanical system for the belief that the mind is not a passive but an active agency in the apprehension of reality. The author believed in the "self-sufficing power of absolute Genius" and distinguished between genius and talent as between "an egg and an egg-shell". The discussion involves his definition of the imagination or "esemplastic power", the faculty by which the soul perceives the spiritual unity of the universe, as distinguished from the fancy or merely associative function. The book has numerous essays on philosophy. In particular, it discusses and engages the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Being fluent in German, Coleridge was one of the first major English literary figures to discuss Schelling's ideas, in particular. The later chapters of the book deal with the nature of poetry and with the question of diction raised by Wordsworth. While maintaining a general agreement with Wordsworth's point of view, Coleridge elaborately refutes his principle that the language of poetry should be one taken with due exceptions from the mouths of men in real life, and that there can be no essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition. A critique on the qualities of Wordsworth's poetry concludes the volume. The book contains Coleridge's celebrated and vexed distinction between "imagination" and "fancy". Chapter XIV is the origin of the famous critical concept of the "willing suspension of disbelief" when reading poetic works. Critical reaction. Critics have reacted strongly to the "Biographia Literaria". Early reactions were that it was a demonstration of Coleridge's opiate-driven decline into ill health. Recent re-evaluations have given it more credit. While contemporary critics recognize the degree to which Coleridge borrowed from his sources (with straight lifts from Schelling), they also see in the work far more structure and planning than is apparent on first glance.

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Grumbles from the Grave Grumbles from the Grave is a posthumous 1989 autobiography of science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein collated by his wife Virginia Heinlein from his notes and writings. Background. The work is the closest that Heinlein, an ex-naval officer and prominent science fiction writer, came to writing an autobiography. The book contains a wide range of correspondence, notes and memoirs edited by Heinlein's wife Virginia, and was published a year and a half after his death. Contents. "Grumbles from the Grave" provides insight into Heinlein's writing process (and the editorial/publishing process with which he was often at odds). In addition, it contains evidence of his philosophy as applied to his life and personal opinions. Beginning with a short biography of Robert by Virginia, the bulk of the book consists of excerpts of correspondence from the period from 1939 to 1970, from when he began writing science fiction until the onset of his first major illness. There is considerable information provided into how the 13-year gestation of Heinlein's novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" evolved. Additionally there is the original postlude to "Podkayne of Mars" and a discussion of cuts made to his novel, "Red Planet". Criticisms. Frederik Pohl has complained "Robert had talked about allowing posthumous publication of his real feelings about a lot of things that he didn’t feel comfortable to talk about while he was alive, and indicated that some of his private letters would be a source for the book. Then some posthumous book with that title did come out, and it was a great disappointment. Someone — it could have been only [Virginia Heinlein] — had washed his face and combed his hair and turned whatever it was that Robert might have wanted to say into the equivalent of thank-you notes for a respectable English tea. I know that Robert wrote some much more raunchy letters than any of those, because I myself got one or two. But all the raunch has been edited out. What’s left is actually rather boring and does a great disservice to the real Heinlein, whose physical person may have been embodied as a conventional hard-right conservative but whose writing was — sometimes vulgarly — that of a free-thinking iconoclast". Awards and honors. The book was a finalist for the 1990 Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book.

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Ente Katha Ente Kadha ("My Story") is an autobiography written by Kamala Surayya (Madhavikutty) in the year 1973. She was motivated to write this as she became ill and thought will not survive. The book was controversial and outspoken and had her critics gunning her after it was published in 1973; often shocking her readers with her for conventions and expression of her opinions on subjects in society- more often on the hypocrisy of it. Though "My Story" was supposed to be an autobiography, Das later admitted that there was plenty of fiction in it. Surayya herself translated the book into English, titled "My Story". Plot summary. This book is about Aami (Kamala), starting from her childhood and her village. It also depicts her teenage love towards a neighbor of the same age. Her childhood in colonized Calcutta is also explained vividly. Her failed marriage, the birth of her children and her extramarital affairs are addressed in this work. She moved away from social conventions and portrayed homosexuality as well. Publication. "Ente Kadha" was serialised in 1972 in the now defunct "Malayalanadu" weekly, a literary magazine published by S. K. Nair. The novel not only created a literary sensation but even invited the wrath of Das' close relatives who wanted to stop its publication. V. B. C. Nair, the Editor of "Malayalanadu" recalls, "Despite pressure from her influential relatives to stop the publication of the work, Kamala remained bold and it proved a roaring hit boosting the circulation of the weekly by 50,000 copies within a fortnight." It was published as a book by Current Books in 1973 February.

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Butter at the Old Price Butter at the Old Price: The Autobiography of Marguerite de Angeli is an account of the life and work of the children's author and illustrator Marguerite de Angeli, who wrote such books as "The Door in the Wall", "Ted and Nina Go to the Grocery Store", "Henner's Lydia", and "Black Fox of Lorne". The autobiography was printed in 1971 when its author was 82 years old. Her 1946 story "Bright April" was the first children's book to address the divisive issue of racial prejudice. She was recipient of the 1950 Newbery Award for "The Door in the Wall", and was twice named a Caldecott Honor Book illustrator, first in 1945 for "Yonie Wondernose" and again in 1955 for "Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes". She received a 1957 Newbery Honor mention for "Black Fox of Lorne", a 1961 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and the 1968 Regina Medal. The autobiography is composed in an engaging and personal style, recounting the events of her family of six children, her affection for her husband, the many places they lived, and the circumstances leading to the stories and illustrations of her approximately thirty books. Marguerite de Angeli explained the title as an old family saying, brought out when things did not go as hoped, based on an anecdote about a careless butter-maker.

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When I Was Cool When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School is Sam Kashner's autobiographical account of his experience as the first student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in honor of their late friend, Jack Kerouac. As he describes in his book, Kashner was a disgruntled Long Island teenager in the 1970s who was obsessed with the poetry and prose of the Beat generation of the 1950s. Kashner's book provides a glimpse into the lives and creative processes of his teachers at the Jack Kerouac School, including Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso. Among the various and curious details of life with the Beats, Kashner describes several of Ginsberg's unfinished poems that he asks Kashner to complete. He also recalls the lively conversations at his teachers' dinner parties, which touched on their methodologies as well as American Literature in general. Kashner also chronicles the lingering effects of heroin and other drugs on Burroughs and Corso, as well as William S. Burroughs, Jr.'s alcoholism. Kashner's book was published by HarperCollins in 2004 and was reviewed favorably by "The New York Times" the same year.

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Boy (book) Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) is an autobiographical book by British writer Roald Dahl. This book describes his life from birth until leaving school, focusing on living conditions in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, the public school system at the time, and how his childhood experiences led him to writing as a career. It ends with his first job, working for Royal Dutch Shell. His autobiography continues in the book "Going Solo". An expanded edition titled More About Boy was published in 2008, featuring the full original text and illustrations with additional stories, letters, and photographs. Key points in the story. Dahl's ancestry. Roald Dahl's father Harald Dahl and mother Sofie Hesselberg were Norwegians who lived in Cardiff, Wales. Harald and his brother Oscar split up and went their separate ways, Oscar going to La Rochelle, while Harald had lost an arm from complications after fracturing it. A doctor was summoned, but was drunk on arrival and mistook the injury for a dislocated shoulder. His attempt to relocate the shoulder caused further damage to the fractured arm, necessitating an amputation. According to Dahl, his only serious problem was not being able to cut the top off a boiled egg. Harald Dahl had two children by his first wife, Marie, who died shortly after the birth of their second child. He then married Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, Roald's mother. Harald was considerably older than Sofie; he was born in 1863 and she was born in 1885. By the time Roald Dahl was born in 1916, his father was 53 years old. Family tragedy. When Roald was 3, his 7 year old sister Astri died of an infection from a burst appendix. Only weeks later, Roald's father died of pneumonia. As the narrator of the book, Dahl suggests his father died of grief from the loss of his daughter. Roald's mother was forced to choose between moving the family to Norway with her relatives or relocating to a smaller house in Wales to continue the children's education in the United Kingdom, and ended up choosing the latter which is what her late husband had wanted. Primary school. Roald Dahl started at the Elm Tree House Primary School in Cardiff when he was 6 years old. He was there for a year, but has few memories of his time there because of how long ago it was. Sweets. Roald writes about different confectionery, his love of sweets, his fascination with the local sweet shop, and in particular, about the free samples of Cadbury chocolate bars given to him and his schoolmates when he was a pupil at Repton School. Young Dahl dreamt of working as an inventor for Cadbury, an idea he said later inspired "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Some of the sweets sold at Mrs Pratchett's sweet shop were lemon sherbets, pear drops, and liquorice boot laces. Great mouse plot of 1924. From the age of eight, Dahl attended Llandaff Cathedral School in Cardiff. He and his friends had a grudge against the local sweet-shop owner, Mrs Pratchett, a sour, elderly widow who gave no thought to hygiene (and described by Dahl's biographer, Donald Sturrock, as "a comic distillation of the two witchlike sisters who, it seems, ran the shop in real life"). They played a prank on her by placing a dead mouse in a gobstopper jar while his friend Thwaites distracted her by buying sweets. They were caned by the headmaster as a punishment. Mrs Pratchett, who attended the canings, was not satisfied after the first stroke was delivered and insisted the headmaster should cane much harder which he did: six of the hardest strokes he could muster while Mrs Pratchett beamed with great delight as each boy suffered his punishment. St Peter's School, Weston-super-Mare. Dahl attended St Peter's School, a boarding school in Weston-super-Mare from 1925, when he was nine, to 1929, when he was twelve. He describes having received six strokes of the cane after being accused of cheating at his classwork. In the essay about the life of a penny, he claims that he still has the essay and that he had been doing well until the nib of his pen broke—fountain pens were not accepted. He had to ask his classmate for another one when Captain Hardcastle heard him and accused him of cheating, issuing him with a "stripe", meaning that the next morning he received six strokes of the cane from the headmaster, who refused to believe Dahl's version of events on the basis of Captain Hardcastle's status. Many of the events he describes involved the matron. She once sprinkled soap shavings into Tweedie's mouth to stop his snoring. She also sent a six-year-old boy, who had allegedly thrown a sponge across the dormitory, to the headmaster. Still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, the little boy then received six strokes of the cane. Wragg, a boy in Dahl's dormitory, sprinkled sugar over the corridor floor so they could hear that the matron was coming when she walked upon it. When the boy's friends refused to turn him in, the whole school was punished by the headmaster who confiscated the keys to their tuck boxes containing food parcels which the pupils had received from their families. In the end, he returns home to his family for Christmas. Repton and Shell Oil Company. After St Peter's, Roald's mother entered him for either Marlborough or Repton, but he chose Repton because it was easier to pronounce. Dahl soon realised that Marlborough may have been a better choice, as life at Repton was difficult and cruel. The prefects, named Boazers as per school tradition, were utmost sadists and patrolled the school like secret police. The headmaster treated students similarly, and Dahl describes an occasion when his friend received several brutal strokes of the cane from the headmaster as punishment for misbehaviour. According to Dahl, this headmaster was Geoffrey Francis Fisher, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London in 1939. However, according to Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, Dahl's memory was in error: the beating took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. The headmaster concerned was in fact John Traill Christie, Fisher's successor. Despite his difficulties at school, Dahl did make friends with the Maths professor and a boy named Michael. Even one of the Boazers, Wilberforce, took a liking to Dahl. Despite it being punishment for Dahl's tardiness, Wilberforce was impressed by how Dahl warmed his lavatory seat that he hired him as his personal lavatory warmer. Dahl also excelled in sports and photography, something he says impressed various masters at the school. After school, Dahl worked for Shell, despite the headmaster trying to dissuade him because of his lack of responsibility. Dahl was nonetheless entered into the business and toured Britain in the job. He became a businessman in London and was content. However, he took a trip across Newfoundland with some other boys and a man who had travelled to Antarctica with Scott; Dahl describes Newfoundland as "not much of a country". He was then assigned to go to Africa, but declined Egypt because it was "too dusty". The manager instead selected Dahl for East Africa, delighting him. The book ends with Dahl setting off to Africa, unknowing of the ascension of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, a man who would soon split the world in two.

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A Tale of Love and Darkness A Tale of Love and Darkness ( "Sipur al ahava ve choshech") is a memoir by the Israeli author Amos Oz, first published in Hebrew in 2002. The book has been translated into 28 languages and over a million copies have been sold worldwide. In 2011, a bootleg Kurdish translation was found in a bookstore in northern Iraq. Oz was reportedly delighted. Background. The book documents much of Oz's early life, and includes a family history researched by an uncle of his father. It describes a number of events he previously hadn't communicated. For example, before writing the book, Oz had avoided discussing his mother's 1952 suicide with his father, or writing publicly about it. Summary. Oz chronicles his childhood in Jerusalem in the last years of Mandatory Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel. The love and darkness of his title refer to his mother, whose suffering from severe depression led her to take her own life when he was a boy. The book is an effort to describe Oz's feelings for his mother and the pain of losing her. After her death he spent his teenage years on Kibbutz Hulda. His parents, mother Fania Mussman and father Ariyeh Klausner, feature as prominent characters within the book. Importantly, his mother's 1952 overdose of sleeping pills becomes the point of exploration for the work, launching the deep probing into other parts of his childhood and youth. As a child, he crossed paths with prominent figures in Israeli society, among them Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and David Ben-Gurion. One of his teachers was the Israeli poet Zelda. Historian Joseph Klausner was his great-uncle. Told in a non-linear fashion, Oz's story is interwoven with tales of his family's Eastern European roots. The original family name was Klausner. By changing his own name to a Hebrew one, Oz separated himself from his father. Film adaptation. A production company owned by Natalie Portman acquired the film rights to the book. Portman began shooting the movie in February 2014 in Jerusalem. The film marks her directorial feature film debut and she also plays the role of Oz's mother; Slawomir Idziak is director of photography and Amir Tessler played the young Oz. Translations. Elias Khoury, a Palestinian-Israeli lawyer whose father Daoud was a victim in a suicide bombing of Zion Square and whose son George was shot to death by Palestinian militants who mistook him for a Jew (see George Khoury), paid to have the book translated into Arabic and distributed in Beirut and other Arab cities in order to promote better understanding of the Jewish people's narrative of national rebirth. The English translation was done by Nicholas de Lange and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2004. The translation was praised by New York Magazine's book reviewer Boris Kacha as "preserving the author’s gorgeous, discursive style and his love of wordplay." Reception. The book was well-received, receiving several awards, and a number of positive reviews. Sales of the book were also high, with "The Guardian" Reviewer Linda Grant describing the book as the "biggest selling literary work in Israeli history." Grant describes the book as "one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read," and " a testament to a family, a time and a place." "New York" magazine reviewer Boris Kachika described the novel as very well written, though "sometimes meandering," but all in all a "sophisticated and searing memorial." The Jewish Book Council reviewer, Maron L. Waxmon called the novel a "a masterful double memoir" of both himself and "Israel's birth and early years." For Waxman, "This is an important and richly rewarding book, sensitively told and filled with memorably drawn characters." Controversy. In March 2011, Oz sent imprisoned former Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti a copy of his book "A Tale of Love and Darkness" in Arabic translation with his personal dedication in Hebrew: “This story is our story, I hope you read it and understand us as we understand you, hoping to see you outside and in peace, yours, Amos Oz”. The gesture was criticized by members of rightist political parties, among them Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely. Assaf Harofeh Hospital canceled Oz's invitation to give the keynote speech at an awards ceremony for outstanding physicians in the wake of this incident, leading to widespread criticism of the "small-minded" hospital.

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Christopher and His Kind Christopher and His Kind is a 1976 memoir by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood, originally published by Sylvester & Orphanos. In the text, Isherwood candidly expounds upon events in his life from 1929 to 1939, including his sojourn in Berlin which was the inspiration for his popular 1939 novel "Goodbye to Berlin." Background. Isherwood decided late in his life that he had a moral obligation to renounce the self-censorship that marked his early novels, specifically the excision of any hint of his homosexuality. Accordingly, in "Christopher and His Kind", he recounts his experiences as a young gay expatriate enticed by the liberated atmosphere of Weimar Berlin into a quest for sexual and intellectual emancipation. Isherwood posits that his homosexuality, far from a marginal private shame to be suppressed, was a central element in his human and creative development, an identity he cherished and shared with many others ("my tribe", "my kind") with whom he felt a special kinship. This candid autobiography was, in Isherwood's view, the way to discharge the obligation he felt due to "his kind", and thus make his own contribution to the cause of gay liberation. Reception. In his review of Isherwood's memoir, critic Peter Stansky noted that "Christopher and His Kind" unmasks Isherwood as "a good deal less dedicated to political passion than the legend has had it." Stansky asserted the memoir revealed Isherwood to be a politically indifferent hedonist whose outlook on life closely resembled his fictional character of Sally Bowles. In particular, Isherwood's "remark that the 'original' of Sally Bowles 'wasn't a victim, wasn't proletarian, was a mere self — indulgent upper middle class foreign tourist who could escape from Berlin when she chose,' comes perilously close to describing his own situation." Adaptation. A television film, "Christopher and His Kind", directed by Geoffrey Sax, and starring Matt Smith as Isherwood and Imogen Poots as Jean Ross, debuted in 2011.

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Under My Skin (book) Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (1994) was the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, covering the period of her life from birth in 1919 to leaving Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1949. Although Lessing describes her fiction as not autobiographical, in this volume she makes explicit comparisons between herself and the leading character, Martha Quest, of the Children of Violence series. The second volume of Lessing's autobiography appeared in 1997: "Walking in the Shade: Volume II of my Autobiography (1949–1962)".

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Every Man a King (autobiography) Every Man a King (1933) is an autobiography by Huey Long, who served as the 40th governor of Louisiana and as a member of the United States Senate. Aged 39 at the time, Long would be assassinated two years later. The book explores Long's rise to power. Long's posthumously published "My First Days in the White House" is sometimes referred to as his "second autobiography". Reception. The book was largely criticized by the press. "The New York Times Book Review" claimed "There is hardly a law of English usage or a rule of English grammar that its author does not break somewhere." In the "Saturday Review", Allan Nevins wrote that Long "is unbalanced, vulgar, in many ways ignorant, and quite reckless." The book had difficulty selling; only 20,000 of the 100,000 printed were sold. Long simply gave the rest away for free.

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Memoirs of My Life and Writings Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796) is an account of the historian Edward Gibbon's life, compiled after his death by his friend Lord Sheffield from six fragmentary autobiographical works Gibbon wrote during his last years. Lord Sheffield's editing has been praised for its ingenuity and taste, but blamed for its unscholarly aggressiveness. Since 1896 several other editions of the work have appeared, more in accordance with modern standards. Gibbon's "Memoirs" are considered one of the first autobiographies in the modern sense of the word, and have a secure place in the canon of English literature. Synopsis. Gibbon begins with an account of his ancestors before moving on to his birth and education, which was partly private and partly at Westminster School. He matriculated as a student at Oxford University, an institution which he found at a low ebb. To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. Of one of his tutors Gibbon says that he "well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform." Gibbon's father took alarm on learning that he had converted to Roman Catholicism and, in order to bring him back to the Protestant fold, sent him to live with a Calvinist minister in Lausanne. Gibbon made good use of his time in Switzerland, meeting Voltaire and other literary figures, and perfecting his command of the French language. He also fell in love with a Swiss girl, Suzanne Curchod, but his wish to marry her was implacably opposed by his father. "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." On returning to England he published his first work, the "Essai sur l'étude de la littérature" (Essay on the study of literature). The next major event Gibbon mentions was his taking a commission in the Hampshire militia, an experience which he tells us was later to be of advantage to him: The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire. He then details his travels through France and on to Lausanne, where he formed a friendship with John Holroyd, later Lord Sheffield, which was to last for the rest of his life. Gibbon crossed the Alps into Italy and eventually reached Rome. He had for some time wanted to begin writing a history, without being able to choose a subject, but now, he tells us, the exciting experience of walking in the footsteps of the heroes of antiquity gave him a new idea: It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. After returning to England Gibbon engaged in several other literary exercises before finally beginning to write his Roman history. The "Memoirs" now give a detailed account of the years he spent producing its successive volumes, and of the many hostile criticisms his work attracted. These labours were diversified by his experiences as a Member of Parliament, and his writing, at the request of the Government, a "Mémoire justificatif" asserting the justice of British hostilities against France at the time of the American Revolutionary War. During the course of writing the "Decline and Fall" Gibbon moved back to Lausanne. Gibbon's "Memoirs" end with a survey of the factors he considered had combined to bring him a happy and productive life. Composition and manuscripts. Gibbon wrote a short account of his life in French in 1783. For five years he made no attempt to add to this, but in June 1788, one month after the last volumes of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" were published, he began work on the "Memoirs" by writing to the College of Arms for information about his ancestry. For the remaining years of his life he struggled with the task of recording his life in a satisfactory way, and his death in 1794 came before he could resolve the problem. Six attempts at an autobiography have survived, conventionally identified by the letters A to F: A: "The Memoirs of the life of Edward Gibbon with various observations and excursions by himself" (1788–1789). 40 quarto pages (6 missing).B: "My own Life" (1788–1789). 72 quarto pages. Describes the first 27 years of his life.C: "Memoirs of the life and writings of Edward Gibbon" (1789). 41 folio pages plus insert. Describes the first 35 years of his life.D: [Untitled] (1790–1791). 13 folio pages. Describing the first 35 years of his life.E: "My own Life" (c. 1792–1793). 19 folio pages of text, and twelve of notes. Describing the first 54 years of his life.F: [Untitled] (1792–1793). 41 folio pages of text, and 7 of notes. Describing the first 16 years of his life. As the drafts of the work succeeded each other Gibbon in some passages varied the emphasis, and even changed the facts, but where he was satisfied with the words of the previous version he simply transcribed them. E is the only version to cover his whole life, and perhaps the only one he wrote with a view to publication during his own lifetime, but it omits many things included in the other versions. As he wrote to Lord Sheffield, A man may state many things in a posthumous work, that he might not in another; the latter often checks the introduction of many curious thoughts and facts. Gibbon's struggles with his autobiography were ended by his death in 1794. All six manuscripts then fell into the hands of his literary executor, Lord Sheffield, who used them to produce his own composite edition. They remained undisturbed in the possession of his family, until in 1871 his son George Holroyd, 2nd Earl of Sheffield, lent them to the medical writer William Alexander Greenhill, who established their chronological order of composition and gave them the letters by which they are now always identified. In 1895 the manuscripts were sold by the 3rd earl to the British Museum, where they were bound together. They remain in the British Library as Add. MS. 34874. Editing and publication. Attempting to bring the manuscripts into a publishable state, Lord Sheffield found himself in a quandary. Of all the versions available to him, only E could be called a complete narrative of Gibbon's life up to the 1790s, yet this one was very short on detail, and by no means a substantial work. The other manuscripts were more circumstantial, but all left the story unfinished. His solution was to produce a composite version, taking passages or individual sentences from each, especially from F, and shaping them into an artistically satisfying whole. Choosing the title "Memoirs of My Life and Writings", he made the resulting work the centerpiece of a collection of inedited Gibboniana published in 1796 in two quarto volumes as "Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon Esquire". The work was reprinted many times through the 19th century, and remained the only published form of Gibbon's autobiography until 1896, when the publisher John Murray produced an edition giving the full text of all six manuscripts. Two years later the American scholar Oliver Farrar Emerson edited the manuscripts along similar lines. In 1966 Georges Bonnard returned to Lord Sheffield’s plan of producing an eclectic edition, though with far greater scholarly conscientiousness. The last major new edition of Gibbon's "Memoirs" was the work of Betty Radice, and appeared in the Penguin English Library series in 1984. Reception. So high is the critical repute of Gibbon's "Memoirs" that "The Cambridge History of English Literature" declared it had "by general consent…established itself as one of the most fascinating books of its class in English literature". One reason for this is the candour and openness with which Gibbon speaks of himself. "Few men, I believe," Lord Sheffield wrote, "have ever so fully unveiled their own character". Again, Gibbon broke new ground in making it a truly "philosophical", that is to say analytical, autobiography; as the novelist Anthony Burgess wrote, "the sense of intellectual control, of a life somehow grasped as a concept, is unmatched". It is widely held that Gibbon's "Memoirs", along with the "Confessions" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, brought the modern autobiography into being. In recent years much has been written by critics on Gibbon's failure to reach a final recension of his autobiography. It has been explained in various ways: as a sign of Gibbon's wrestling with difficulties of literary form; as a result of disagreements between Gibbon and Sheffield as to how far the "Memoirs" should follow Edmund Burke's interpretation of the French Revolution; or in psychoanalytic terms as the reflection of an uncertainty in Gibbon's mind as to his own identity. When, with the publication of Murray's edition, it became possible to judge Sheffield's role in conflating the different versions of the "Memoirs", some critics accorded him praise moderated by their shock at finding how large a part he had played. The historian Frederic Harrison's opinion was that he had performed his task with "great skill and tact, but with the most daring freedom"; and an anonymous writer in the "Spectator" said of Sheffield that with an ingenuity which, in spite of its perversity, cannot but be admired, he concocted out of the six [manuscripts] a patchwork narrative, which has since always passed as Gibbon's autobiography. In reality it was nothing of the kind, and should have been called not "Gibbon's Autobiography" but "Selections from the Autobiographical Remains of Edward Gibbon". 20th and 21st centuries critical opinions of Sheffield's work as an editor have diverged widely. In 1913 the "Cambridge History of English Literature" called it "extraordinarily skillful", and in the 1960s Anthony Burgess wrote of "Six holograph sketches, out of which Lord Sheffield stitched not a patchwork but a tasteful and well-fitting suit of clothes." The academic W. B. Carnochan called Sheffield's editing "brilliant though high-handed", and pointed out that Were it not for his unremitting labors, we would not think of Gibbon as having written a great autobiography; rather, we would think of him as a historian who tried to write an autobiography but failed. The academic David Womersley has written in the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" that Sheffield did the job "With equal judgement, freedom, and shrewdness", but elsewhere he has conceded that "From our standpoint…Sheffield's handling of Gibbon’s manuscript was scandalous.". This last judgement has been endorsed by the historian Glen Bowersock, while the Gibbon scholar Jane Elizabeth Norton said that "By all the standards of scholarship, Lord Sheffield's conduct was deplorable."

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When I Was Young in the Mountains When I Was Young in the Mountains is a 1982 children's book. It was the first book written by Cynthia Rylant, who has written over 60 children's books such as "Missing May", which won the Newbery Medal. The book, which Rylant later said took her but an hour to complete, earned an American Book Award in 1982 and Diane Goode's illustrations won it a Caldecott Honor. Plot summary. The book tells the story of the main character's youth in West Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains. The book is based on Rylant's real life.

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Sun and Steel (essay) is a book by Yukio Mishima. It is an autobiographical essay, a memoir of the author's relationship to his body. The book recounts the author's experiences with, and reflections upon, his bodybuilding and martial arts training. The book was first published in 1968, gathering what had appeared in the Takeshi Maramatsu founded magazine "Criticism" from late 1965 on. It was translated to English by John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1970, ; New York City, Grove Press, 1970, ; London, Secker and Warburg, 1971, ; Kodansha America reissue edition, 1994, ; Kodansha International, 2003, ). In 1972, Hortense Calisher billed the book as "a classic of self-revelation" and Mishima as "a mind of the utmost subtlety, broadly educated". Calisher wrote, "To paraphrase him in words not his, [...] is to try to build a china pagoda with a peck of nails. [...] only the frivolous will not empathize with what is going on here; this is a being for whom life--and death too--must be exigeant."

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Memoirs of an Egotist Souvenirs d’égotisme (French for Memoirs of an Egotist) is an autobiographical work by Stendhal. It was written in 13 days in June and July 1832 while the author was staying in Civitavecchia. Stendhal recounts his life in Paris and London from 1821 to 1830. It includes candid and spirited descriptions of contemporaries such as Lafayette, Madame Pasta, Destutt de Tracy, Mérimée, and Charles de Rémusat. The story remained unfinished and was not published until 1892 by Casimir Stryienski. Composition and background. Stendhal began to write "Memoirs of an Egotist" on June 20, 1832, approximately one year after having taken a post as French Consul in Civitavecchia. He was forty-nine and undertook to describe his years in Paris between 1821 and 1830, but sometimes misremembered the dates of events and included incidents that happened earlier. In Paris, Stendhal was active in the literary world and wrote for London periodicals, which paid well. When his literary prospects dried up in 1826 and again in 1828, Stendhal began to look for a government post. His friends managed to secure for him a position first in Trieste and then, following a confrontation with Austrian police, in Civitavecchia. Stendhal put aside the manuscript for "Memoirs of an Egotist" for good on July 4, 1832. The approximately 40,000 words of "Memoirs of an Egotist" were therefore written in 13 days. Summary. "Memoirs of an Egotist" describes Stendhal's life in Paris and London from 1821 to 1830, after having spent 1814 to 1821 in Italy. The nine-and-a-half years that Stendhal spent in Paris were the longest he had spent anywhere except for his time in Grenoble as a child. Stendhal left Italy in 1821 for a number of reasons, including distrust from both liberals (who thought he was a spy for the police) and the police (who thought he was a dangerous liberal). Métilde Dembowski, for whom Stendhal conceived a great passion while in Milan, either did not reciprocate his love or was unwilling to consummate it. In "Memoirs of an Egotist" Stendhal portrays the situation as one of perfectly requited love that is somehow kept from fruition; the critic Michael Wood puts it, "She loved him but wouldn't sleep with him. He left." Stendhal lists his bad characteristics next to his admirable ones, and does not shrink from describing moments of humiliation or silliness, including an account of a visit to a brothel that occasioned a short-lived reputation for impotence among his friends. "Memoirs of an Egotist" describes likewise many missed opportunities for friendship or advantageous networking. Upon his arrival in Paris, he developed a friendship with a Baron de Lussinge, who was as frugal as Stendhal. But de Lussigne became rich and miserly, and patronised Stendhal's poverty. Stendhal changed his café so as not to have to see his former friend. During this time in Paris, Stendhal he was becoming known as a writer of works on music and art, but he received savage reviews, which he cushioned by musing that "one or other of us must be wrong". He was known as a liberal and "as part of Napoleon's Court". When offered by the Chief of Police in 1814 the post of food controller of Paris, he refused. The man who accepted became rich in four or five years, Stendhal says, "without stealing". Stendhal describes a handful of love affairs he declined even when the memory of his Métilde had become "a tender, profoundly sad ghost, who, by her apparitions, inclined me powerfully to ideas of tenderness, kindness, justice and indulgence." Michael Wood interprets the narrative as an account of Stendhal's recovery from his infatuation with Métilde. Stendhal says, "It was only by chance, and in 1824, three years later, that I had a mistress. Only then was the memory of Métilde less rending..." He also describes a trip to England, with which he hoped to combat his low spirits, and to see the plays of Shakespeare. Elsewhere in "Memoirs of an Egotist" Stendhal asserts that the only loves in his life have been Cimarosa, Mozart, and Shakespeare. He saw Edmund Kean in "Othello", and records his astonishment that in France and in England they used different gestures to express the same emotions; he also was impressed that Kean delivered his lines as if thinking of them for the first time.

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84, Charing Cross Road 84, Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff, later made into a stage play, television play, and film, about the twenty-year correspondence between the author and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co antiquarian booksellers, located at the eponymous address in London, England. Background. Hanff was in search of obscure classics and British literature titles that she had been unable to find in New York City when she noticed an ad in the "Saturday Review of Literature". She first contacted the shop in 1949 and it fell to Doel to fulfil her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship developed between the two and between Hanff and other staff members, as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts and food parcels to help with the post-World War II food shortages in Britain. Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the coronation of Elizabeth II. Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed in December 1970. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street". The shop's site today. The five-story building where Marks & Co. was located during the events of the book still exists . A circular brass plaque on a pilaster on the street frontage acknowledges the story and marks the site. The premises were occupied by a music and CD shop in the early 1990s, and later other retail outlets. In 2009 they housed a Med Kitchen restaurant; and now form part of a McDonald's restaurant. In New York, an apartment house on East 72nd Street, near Second Avenue, marks the building in which Hanff wrote her letters. Bibliography. Partial list of the books that Helene Hanff ordered from Marks & Co. and mentioned in "84, Charing Cross Road" (alphabetical order): Adaptations. Television. Hugh Whitemore adapted "84, Charing Cross Road" for the BBC's "Play for Today", a television anthology series. It was first broadcast on 4 November 1975, starring Frank Finlay and Anne Jackson. Theatre. In 1981, James Roose-Evans adapted it for the stage and it was first produced at the Salisbury Playhouse with a cast headed by Rosemary Leach as Hanff and David Swift as Doel. It transferred to the West End, where it opened to universally ecstatic reviews. It toured nationally and was performed by Miriam Karlin in 1990 and later by Rula Lenska and Bill Gaunt. It returned to the Salisbury Playhouse in 2015, running 5–28 February with Clive Francis and Janie Dee in the lead roles. It was also performed at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 2018 by Clive Francis and Stefanie Powers, before embarking on a UK tour. After fifteen previews, the Broadway production opened to mixed reviews on 7 December 1982 at the Nederlander Theatre with Ellen Burstyn and Joseph Maher. It ran for 96 performances. Radio. Virginia Browns adapted the story for BBC Radio drama, and it was broadcast on Radio 3 on 15 January 1976, with Margaret Robertson as Hanff and Lyndon Brook as Doel. The play was produced by Christopher Venning. James Roose-Evans again adapted the play for a 2007 radio production starring Gillian Anderson and Denis Lawson, broadcast on Christmas Day on BBC Radio 4. Film. Whitemore returned to the project to write the screenplay for the 1987 film adaptation starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. The "dramatis personae" were expanded to include Hanff's Manhattan friends, the bookshop staff, and Doel's wife Nora, played by Judi Dench. Bancroft won a BAFTA Award as Best Actress; Whitemore and Dench were nominated for Director and Supporting Actress, respectively. The Chinese-Hong Kong film "Book of Love" or "Finding Mr. Right 2" (Chinese: 北京遇上西雅圖之不二情書) (2016) references, and is loosely inspired by, "84, Charing Cross Road".

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My House Has Two Doors My House Has Two Doors (1980) is one of a multi-book autobiography by Han Suyin. It tells of her life from 1948 to 1980, including the real-life love-affair that was the basis for her 1952 novel "A Many-Splendoured Thing". She went from Hong Kong to Malaya, where she witnessed the Communist insurgency she described in her 1956 novel "And the Rain My Drink". She also tells of her return to China and her impression of the early years of Communist rule. The second half of the book is sometimes published as a separate work entitled "Phoenix Harvest".

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The World Is My Home The World Is My Home: A Memoir (1992) is an autobiography written by James A. Michener. Beginning with his time in the South Pacific, the subject of and location where he wrote his first book, Michener ranges through the course of his life by the subjects that affected him. Michener provides insight into his discovery of the locations he would later write about including Espiritu Santo and Bali Ha'i from "Tales of the South Pacific". References. Michener, James, "The World Is My Home: A Memoir", New York: Random House,1992, Print.

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The World of Yesterday The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European (German title Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers) is the memoir of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. It has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire. He started writing it in 1934 when, anticipating Anschluss and Nazi persecution, he uprooted himself from Austria to England and later to Brazil. He posted the manuscript, typed by his second wife Lotte Altmann, to the publisher the day before they both committed suicide in February 1942. The book was first published in Stockholm (1942), as "Die Welt von Gestern". It was first published in English in April 1943 by Viking Press. In 2011, Plunkett Lake Press reissued it in eBook form. In 2013, the University of Nebraska Press published a translation by the noted British translator Anthea Bell. The book describes life in Vienna at the start of the 20th century with detailed anecdotes. It depicts the dying days of Austria-Hungary under Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, including the system of education and the sexual ethics prevalent at the time, the same that provided the backdrop to the emergence of psychoanalysis. Zweig also describes the stability of Viennese society after centuries of Habsburg rule. Detailed summary. Preface. Following the terrible events and upheavals experienced by his generation, Zweig sets out to write his autobiography. He feels the need to bear witness to the next generation of what his age has gone through. He realizes that his past is "out of reach". Zweig makes it clear that his biography is based entirely on his memories. The world of security. Stefan Zweig looks back on pre-war Austrian - and especially Viennese - society and writes about a time of security. Austria had a stable political system and a currency backed by gold and everyone could see themselves comfortably into the future. Many inventions revolutionized lives: the telephone, electricity and the car. His father, originally from Moravia, made his fortune by running a small weaving factory. The author's mother comes from a wealthy Italian banking family, born in Ancona. His family represents the cosmopolitan "good Jewish bourgeoisie." But if the latter aspires to enrich themselves, this is not their purpose. The ultimate goal is to elevate oneself, morally, and spiritually. Also, it is the Jewish bourgeoisie that has primarily become a patron of Viennese culture. Vienna had become the city of culture, a city where culture was the primary concern. All Viennese had desirable tastes and were capable of making judgments of qualities. The artists, and especially the theater actors, were the only significant famous figures in Austria. Their concerns were trivialities given the events that followed which were unthinkable at that time. The school in the last century. His time in school was quite unpleasant. Sport had a minimal place, performed in a dusty gymnasium. Zweig bitterly criticizes the old way of teaching, impersonal, cold, and distant. In society, there was a certain distrust of young people.The author's father never hired young people, and the young tried to appear more mature, for example, by growing a beard. Respect for the elders was key. Zweig even claims that the school's purpose was to discipline and calm the youth's ardor. However, in the face of this pressure, the students harbored a deep hatred towards vertical authority. A turning point took place in their fortnight: school no longer satisfied their passion, which shifted to the art of which Vienna was the heart. All the pupils turned entirely to art: avid readers of literature and philosophy, listeners to concerts, spectators of plays, etc. The Viennese cafés played an essential role in the lives of these young students as a cultural center. Their passion gradually shifted away from the classics, and they became more interested in rising stars, especially young artists. A typical example of this aspiration is the case of Rainer Maria Rilke: a symbol of the whole movement of a victorious youth, completing the precocious genius Hugo von Hofmannsthal. During this time, the first mass movements began to affect Austria, starting with the socialist movement, then the Christian Democratic Movement, and finally, the German Reich's unification movement. The anti-Semitic trend began to gain momentum, although it was still relatively moderate in its early stages. Eros Matutinus. In this chapter, Zweig relates the transition to adulthood, puberty. During this phase, young boys, who until then accepted customary rules, reject conventions when they are not sincerely followed. Sexuality remains, although its century can no longer be considered pious, and that tolerance is now a central value, marred by an anarchic, disruptive aura. According to Zweig, woman's clothes were intended to distort her figure, as well as to break her grace. But, by wanting to constrain the body, by wanting to hide the indecent, it is the opposite that occurs: what one tries to hide is exhibited. Young girls were watched continuously and occupied so that they could never think about sexuality. Zweig notes that the situation has dramatically improved for both women and men. Women are now much freer, and men are no longer forced to live their sexuality in the shadows. He also recalls that venereal diseases - prevalent and dangerous at that time - fueled a real fear of infection. According to him, the generation that comes after him is much more fortunate than his in this regard. Universitas vitae. After these high school years, Zweig recounts his transition to university. At this time, the university was crowned with a particular glory inherited from ancient privileges linked to its creation in the Middle Ages. According to Zweig, the ideal student was a scarred brute, often alcoholic, member of a student body. Zweig went to college for the sole purpose of earning a doctorate in any field - to satisfy his family's aspirations - not to learn; To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, "good books replace the best universities." So he decides to study philosophy to give himself as much time as possible to discover other things. This chapter is, therefore, mainly devoted to what he did outside the university during his studies. He began by collecting his first poems and looking for a publishing house to publish them. He enjoyed some success early on, to the point that Max Reger asked him for permission to set some of his poems to music. Later, he offered one of his works to the "Neue Freie Presse" - the cultural pages of reference in Austria-Hungary at that time - and had the honor of being published at only 19 years old. There he meets Theodor Herzl, for whom he nourishes a deep admiration. Of Jewish origin, like him, Herzl who attended the public impeachment of Dreyfus had published a text promoting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine; the text was the object of intense criticism in Western Europe but was relatively well received in Eastern Europe. He decides to continue his studies in Berlin to change the atmosphere, escape his young celebrity, and meet people beyond the circle of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Vienna. Berlin began to attract and seek new talent, embracing novelty. He meets people from all walks of life, including the poet Peter Hille and anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner. He decides to translate poems and literary texts into his mother tongue to perfect his German. It is Émile Verhaeren, who is the subject of a long digression. Zweig recounts his first meeting while visiting the studio of Charles van der Stappen. After speaking at length with him, he decides to make his work known by translating it, a task he observes as a duty and an opportunity to refine his literary talents. After these many and rich encounters, he presented his thesis in philosophy. Paris, the city of eternal youth. After finishing his studies, Zweig had promised to go to Paris to discover the city. Zweig launches into a lengthy description of the Parisian atmosphere, of the state of mind of Parisians. Paris represents the city where people of all classes, from all walks of life, come together, on an equal footing, the city where good humor and joviality reign. He really discovered the city through the friendships he made, especially the one with Léon Bazalgette, to whom he was as close as a brother. He admired in him his sense of service, his magnanimity. - and also the simplest. Rilke is undoubtedly the one who impressed him the most by the aura he radiated and for whom he had tremendous respect. Zweig recounts several anecdotes about him, who takes it upon himself to paint a young man's portrait – or rather of a genius - compassionate, reserved, refined, and striving to remain discreet and temperate. His meeting with Rodin also deeply marked him. That's when he said he received a great lesson in life: the great of this world are the best. He could see it at work, and he understood that creative genius requires total concentration, like Rodin. Rodin had given him a tour of his studio and his last still unfinished creation, then had begun to retouch his creation in his presence, and he had ended up forgetting it altogether. Stefan Zweig then left Paris for London to improve his spoken English. Before leaving for London, he had the misfortune of having his suitcase stolen: but the thief was quickly found and arrested. Pity and a certain sympathy for the thief, Zweig had decided not to file a complaint, which earned him the whole neighborhood's antipathy, which he left rather quickly. Unfortunately, in London, he doesn't really have the opportunity to meet many people and, therefore, discover the city. He did, however, attend the very well organized private reading of poems by William Butler Yeats. He also took away, on the advice of his friend Archibald GB Russell, a portrait of "King John" by William Blake, which he kept and which he never tired of admiring. Bypaths on the way to myself. Zweig remembers his many travels and says that he has tried never to settle permanently in one place. If he considered this way of doing things as a mistake during his life, with hindsight, he recognizes that it allowed him to let go more quickly and accept losses without difficulty. His furniture was, therefore, reduced to what was necessary, without luxury. The only valuables he carries with him are autographs and other writings from authors he admires. Stefan Zweig nurtures an almost religious devotion to the writings that preceded great artists' masterpieces, notably Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His obsession is such that he boasts of having been able to meet Goethe's niece - on whom Goethe's gaze has lovingly rested. He shares his participation in the Insel publishing house, whose deep respect and passion for works he admires. It is with this publishing house that he published his first dramas, notably Thersites. Zweig then recounts the strange twist of fate that has fallen on him and his creations. Four times, the performances that could have quickly propelled him to glory were stopped by the star actor or director's death. Zweig initially thought he was being chased by fate, but he recognizes afterward that it was only the fruit of chance and that, very often, chance takes on the appearance of destiny. The title of the chapter then takes on its meaning: it was by chance that he did not enter the golden books of literature for his talents as writers in versified dramas - things he would have liked - but for his novels. The detours of his life finally brought him back to his first vocation, that of a writer. Beyond Europe. In retrospect, Zweig recognizes as more important to his life the men who brought him back to reality than those who turned it away for literature. This is particularly the case with Walther Rathenau, for whom he has a deep admiration. He considers him to be one of the smartest, most open, and polymath individuals. Rathenau only lacked a foundation, a global coherence which he acquired only when he had to save the German state - following the German defeat - with the ultimate aim of saving the 'Europe. He has a bad memory of India because he saw the evils of discrimination of the Indian caste system at work. However, through the meetings he has made, he says he has learned a lot; this trip helped to take a step back to appreciate Europe better. He meets Karl Haushofer, whom he regards with high esteem during his journey, although he is saddened by the recovery of his ideas by the Nazi regime. He then traveled to the United States, which left him with a powerful impression, even though many of the characteristics that made America what it is today had not yet emerged. He is pleased to see how easy it is for any individual to find work and make a living without asking for his origin, papers, or anything else. As he walks the streets, the display of one of his books in a bookstore takes away his abandonment feeling. He ended his trip to America by contemplating the Panama Canal's technical prowess: a titanic project, costly - especially in human lives - started by the Europeans and completed by the Americans. Light and shadows over Europe. Zweig understands that it can be difficult for a generation to live through crises and catastrophes to conceive previous generations' optimism. They witnessed a rapid improvement in living conditions, a series of discoveries and innovations, a liberation of mores and youth. Progress in transport had upset the maps; the air's conquest had called into question the meaning of borders. Widespread optimism gave everyone ever-growing confidence, as it thwarted any attempt to seek peace - each believing that the other side valued peace more than anything else. The artists and the new youth were devoted to the European cause, to peace between nations, but no one took seriously the gradually emerging threats. All were content to remain in a generalized idealism. Stefan Zweig strives to restore the prevailing atmosphere through the recounting of small events. The Redl affair represents the first event in which tensions were palpable. The next day, he ran into Bertha von Suttner, who foretold the turn of events: It was when he went to the cinema in the small town of Tours that he was amazed to see that the hatred - displayed against Kaiser Wilhelm II - had already spread throughout France. But he left despite everything confident in Vienna, already having in mind what he intended to achieve in the coming months. Everyone collapses with the Sarajevo bombing. The first hours of the war of 1914. According to Zweig, the summer of 1914 would have been unforgettable by its sweetness and its beauty. The news of the death of Franz Ferdinand of Austria, although it hurt the faces of those who had just learned about it at the time, did not leave lasting traces. Franz Ferdinand was hardly appreciated, and Zweig himself found him cold, distant, unfriendly. Strangely, what is the most controversial at this time is his funeral: he had entered into a misalliance, and it was unacceptable that his wife and children could rest with the rest of the Habsburgs. The world never imagined that a war could break out. Zweig had visited a few days before the declaration of war with friends in Belgium. Even seeing the Belgian soldiers, Zweig was convinced that Belgium would not be attacked. Then ominous events multiplied until the outbreak of war with the declaration of war by Austria against Serbia. The young soldiers went cheerfully to the front, to the cheers of the crowd. National solidarity and brotherhood were at their peak. In comparison with the abatement of 1939, this enthusiasm for war is explained by an idealization of war, possible by its great temporal distance, by the heightened optimism of the century, and the almost blind confidence in governments' honesty. This enthusiasm quickly turned into a deep hatred towards the enemies of the fatherland. Zweig does not take part in this widespread hatred, as he knows the now rival nations too well to hate them overnight. Physically unfit to go to the front, he committed his forces to work as a librarian within the military archives. He sees his whole country sinking in the apology of the opposing camp's deep and sincere hatred, like the poet Ernst Lissauer, author of the "Song of hatred against England". Zweig, rejected by his friends who consider him almost a traitor to his nation, for his part, undertakes a personal war against this murderous passion. The Struggle for Intellectual Brotherhood. Zweig makes it his mission, rather than only not taking part in this hatred, to actively fight against this propaganda, less to convince than to spread his message simply. He succeeded in having an article published in the "Berliner Tageblatt," urging them to remain faithful to friendships beyond borders. Shortly after, he receives a letter from his friend Rolland, and the two decide to promote reconciliation. They tried to organize a conference bringing together the great thinkers of all nations to encourage mutual understanding. They continued their commitment through their writings, comforting those who were in despair in this dark time. Zweig then took the opportunity to observe the ravages of war with his own eyes on the Russian front. He sees the dramatic situation in which the soldiers find themselves; he considers the solidarity formed between the soldiers of the two camps who feel powerless in the face of the events they are going through. He is initially shocked to see that officers far from the front can walk almost carefree with young ladies several hours by train from the front. But very quickly, he forgives them because the real culprits are those who, in his eyes, encourage the feeling of hatred towards the "enemy." He decides to fight this propaganda by writing a drama, taking up Biblical themes, particularly Jewish wanderings, trials, praising the losers' destiny. He produced this work to free himself from the weight of the censorship imposed on him by society. In the heart of Europe. When he published his drama "Jérémie" in October 1917, he expects poor reception. To his surprise, his work was very well received, and he was offered to conduct its representation in Zurich. Therefore, he decides to leave for Switzerland, a rare neutral country in Europe's heart. On his journey to Switzerland, he met two Austrians in Salzburg who would play a significant role once Austria had surrendered: Heinrich Lammasch and Ignaz Seipel. These two pacifists had planned and convinced the Emperor of Austria to negotiate a separate peace if the Germans refused to make peace. When Zweig crosses the border, he is immediately relieved, and he feels relieved of a burden, happy to enter a country at peace. Once in Switzerland, he is pleased to find his friend Rolland and other French acquaintances and feel fraternally united. During his stay, it was the figure of the director of the anti-militarist newspaper "Demain" Henri Guilbeaux who marked him deeply, because it was in him that he saw a historical law being verified: in intense periods, simple men could exceptionally become central figures of a current - here, that of the anti-militarists during the First World War. He has the opportunity to see many refugees who could not choose their camps, torn by war at the James Joyce. After the relative success of his play, he gradually realizes that Switzerland is not only a land of refuge but the theater of a game of espionage and counter-espionage. During his stay, the German and Austrian defeat becomes more and more inevitable, and the world begins to rejoice in the chorus of a finally better and more human world. Homecoming to Austria. Once the German and Austrian defeat has been confirmed, Zweig decides to join his country in ruins, driven by a kind of patriotic impulse: he gives himself the mission of helping his country accept its defeat. His return is the subject of a long preparation since winter is approaching, and the country is now in the greatest need. On his return, he attends the last Austrian emperor's departure in the station, a milestone for an Austrian for whom the emperor was the central Austrian figure. Then begins the bitter observation of a generalized regression of life; everything of value has been stolen, such as leather, copper, and nickel. The trains are in such bad condition that the journey times are considerably extended. Once at home in Salzburg, in residence he bought during the war, he must face everyday life made difficult by shortages and cold - when his roof is ripped through and repairs made impossible by the scarcity. He watches helplessly the devaluation of the Austrian crown and inflation, the loss of quality of all products, paradoxical situations, the invasion of foreigners who profit from the depreciation of the Austrian currency, etc. Paradoxically, theaters, concerts, and operas are active, and artistic and cultural life is in full swing: Zweig explains this by the general feeling that this could be the last performance. Also, the young generation rebels against the old authority and rejects everything at once: homosexuality becomes a sign of protest, young writers think outside the box, painters abandon classicism for cubism and surrealism. . Meanwhile, Zweig set himself the task of reconciling the European nations by taking care of the German side. First alongside Henri Barbusse, then alone on his side, after the communist radicalization of Barbusse's newspaper, Clarté. Into the world again. After surviving the three years after the war in Salzburg, Austria, he decided to travel with his wife to Italy once the situation improved sufficiently. Full of apprehension about the reception we reserve for an Austrian, he is surprised by the Italians' hospitality and thoughtfulness, telling himself that the masses had not changed profoundly because of the propaganda. There he met his poet friend Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and his painter friend Alberto Stringa. Zweig admits to being at that moment still lulled by the illusion that the war is over, although he has the opportunity to hear young Italians singing Giovinezza. He then goes to Germany. He has time to see his friend Rathenau, who is now Minister of Foreign Affairs, for the last time. He admires this man who knows full well that only time can heal the wounds left by war. After the assassination of Rathenau, Germany sank into hyperinflation, debauchery, and disorder. According to Zweig, this sad episode was decisive for the rise of the Nazi Party. Zweig has the chance to experience unexpected success and to be translated into several languages. He reads a lot and hardly appreciates redundancies, heavy styles, etc., preferences that are found in his style: he says he writes in a fluid manner, such as the words come to mind. He says he has carried out important synthesis work - notably with Marie-Antoinette - and sees his capacity for conciseness as a defining element of his success. He knows the pleasure of seeing Maxim Gorky, whom he already admired at school, write the preface to one of his works. While he recognizes that this success fills him with joy when he touches his works and works, he refuses to be the object of admiration for his appearance. He naively enjoys his fame at first on his travels, but it begins to weigh on him. So he wishes he had started to write and publish under a pseudonym to enjoy his celebrity in all serenity. Sunset. Zweig says that before Hitler came to power, people had never traveled so much in Europe. He himself continues to travel at this time, particularly about his career and fame as a writer. Despite his success, Zweig says he remains humble and does not really change his habits: he continues to stroll with his friends in the streets, he does not disdain to go to the provinces to stay in small hotels. If there's one trip that taught him a lot, it's the one to Russia. Russia had always been on his list, but he still did his best to remain politically neutral. He has the opportunity to officially go to Russia in an unbiased way: the birthday of Leo Tolstoy, a great Russian writer. At first, fascinated by the authenticity of the inhabitants, their friendliness, and their warm welcome, by the profound simplicity of Tosltoï's tomb, he left with great caution. Following one of the parties, he realizes that someone has slipped him a letter in French, warning him of the propaganda of the Soviet regime. He begins to reflect on the intellectual stimulation that exile can promote. Later, he had the opportunity to use his celebrity to ask a favor of Benito Mussolini, that to spare the life of Giuseppe Germani. His wife had begged the writer to intervene, to put pressure on Mussolini by organizing an international protest. Zweig preferred to send a letter personally to Duce, and Mussolini granted his request. Back in Salzburg, he was impressed by the cultural scope that the city had taken, which had become the artistic center of Europe. It thus has the opportunity to welcome the great names of literature and painting. This allows him to complete his collection of autographs and first drafts. Zweig looks back on this passion of which he boasts of his expertise and admits to seeking, above all, the secrets of the creation of masterpieces. Unfortunately, with Hitler's rise to power, his collection gradually fell apart. Before these tragic events, Zweig reveals to have wondered about his success, a success he had not ardently desired. A thought crossed him at this time, after having acquired a secure, enviable and - he believed - lasting position:" Wäre es nicht besser für mich - so träumte es in mir weiter - etwas anderes käme, etwas Neues, etwas das mich unruhiger, gespannter, das mich jünger machte, indem es mich herausforderte zu neuem und vielleicht noch gefährlicherem Kampf?"- Zweig, Sonnenuntergang, "Die Welt von Gestern" (1942)"Wouldn't it be better for me - so that thought continued within me - if something else happened, something new, something that troubles me, torments me, rejuvenates me, demanding of me a new and can -be still a dangerous fight? "His rash wish, resulting from a "volatile thought" - in his words - came true, shattering everything, him, and what he had accomplished. Incipit Hitler. Stefan Zweig begins by stating a law: no witness to significant changes can recognize them at their beginnings. The name "Hitler" has long been one agitator's name among many others in this turbulent period shaken by numerous coup attempts. However, very well organized young men had already started to cause trouble, wearing Nazi insignia. Even after their failed coup, their existence quickly faded into oblivion. It was unthinkable when Germany imagined that a man as uneducated as Hitler could come to power. Zweig explains this success thanks to the many promises he made to almost all parties; everyone thought they could use Hitler. Zweig had told his publisher as soon as the Reichstag was burnt down - something he did not believe possible - that his books would be banned. He then describes the progressive censorship set up to that of his opera ( Die schweigsame Frau ) produced with the composer Richard Strauss, whose infallible lucidity and regularity he admires at work. Due to Zweig's politically neutral writings, it was impossible to censor his opera, knowing that it was difficult to censor the most significant German composer still alive. After having read Zweig's opera, Hitler himself exceptionally authorizes the performance and attends it in person. However, after a letter - intercepted by the Gestapo - Strauss' too sincere about his place as President of the Reich Music Chamber, the opera is censored, and Strauss is forced to give up his position. During the first troubles, Zweig went to France, then to England, where he undertakes the biography of Marie Stuart, noting the absence of an objective and good quality biography. Once completed, he returns to Salzburg, where he "witnesses" the critical situation in which his country finds itself: it is at this moment that he realizes how much, even living in a city shaken by shootings, foreign newspapers are better informed than he is about the Austrian situation. He chooses to bid farewell to London when the police decide to search his residence, which was previously unthinkable in the rule of law, which guarantees individual freedom. The agony of peace. Zweig begins with a quote that sets the tone for the last chapter :<q>The sun of Rome is set. Our day is gone.</q> <q>Clouds, dews and dangers come; our deeds are done.</q>- William Shakespeare , Like Gorky's exile, his exile is not yet a real exile. He still has his passport and may well return to Austria. Knowing full well that he can't have any influence in England - having failed in his own country - he resolves to be silent no matter the trials. During his stay, he could attend a memorable debate between HG Wells and Bernard Shaw, two great men he gave a long and admiring description. Invited for a PEN-Club conference, he had the opportunity to stop in Vigo, then in General Franco's hands. He once again noted with bitterness the recruitment of young people dressed by the fascist forces. Once in Argentina, seeing the Hispanic heritage still intact, he regains hope. He praises Brazil, the last host country, a land that does not consider the origins, and says he sees Europe's future. He had the opportunity to follow Austria's annexation when his friends, then living there, firmly believed that the neighboring countries would never passively accept such an event. Clairvoyant, Zweig had already said goodbye in autumn 1937 to his mother and the rest of his family. He then embarked on a difficult period to endure both the loss - and worse - of his family in Austria surrendered to Nazi barbarism and nationality loss. From the peace negotiated with the Munich Agreements, Zweig suspected that any negotiation with Hitler was impossible, that the latter would break his commitments at the right time. But he preferred to be silent. He has the chance to see his friend Sigmund Freud again, who has managed to reach England. It is a great pleasure for him to speak with him again, a scholar whose work he admires and his entire dedication to the cause of truth. He attended his funeral shortly after. Stefan Zweig then develops a long questioning on the meaning of the trials and the horrors that the Jews - and those designated as such - go through, yet all so different. As he prepares to get married, Hitler declares war on Poland, and the gear forces England to follow, making him, like all foreigners in his case, "foreign enemies." He, therefore, prepares his affairs to leave England. He ends his work by admitting to being constantly pursued by the shadow of war, and by a sentence intended to be consoling:" Aber jeder Schatten ist im letzten doch auch Kind des Lichts, und nur wer Helles und Dunkles, Krieg und Frieden, Aufstieg und Niedergang erfahren, nur der hat wahrhaft gelebt."- Zweig, Die Agonie des Friedens, "Die Welt von Gestern" "But every shadow is ultimately also the daughter of light and only he who has known light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only this one has truly lived. " According to Zweig, earlier European societies, where religion (i.e., Christianity) had a central role, condemned sexual impulses as work of the devil. The late 19th century had abandoned the devil as an explanation of sexuality; hence it lacked a language able to describe and condemn sexual impulses. Sexuality was left unmentioned and unmentionable, though it continued to exist in a parallel world that could not be described, mostly prostitution. Fashion contributed to this peculiar oppression by denying the female body and constraining it within corsets. "The World of Yesterday" details Zweig's career before, during, and after World War I. Of particular interest are Zweig's description of various intellectual personalities, including Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, the composer Ferruccio Busoni, the philosopher and antifascist Benedetto Croce, Maxim Gorky, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Gerhart Hauptmann, James Joyce, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner, the German industrialist and politician Walther Rathenau and the pacifist and friend Romain Rolland. Zweig also met Karl Haushofer during a trip to India. The two became friends. Haushofer was the founder of geopolitics and became later an influence on Adolf Hitler. Always aloof from politics, Zweig overlooked the dark potential of Haushofer's thought; he was surprised when later told of links between Hitler and Haushofer. Zweig particularly admired the poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and expressed this admiration and Hofmannsthal's influence on his generation in the chapter devoted to his school years: Notable episodes include the Austrian public's reaction to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914, the departure from Austria by a train of the last Emperor Charles I of Austria in 1918, the beginning of the Salzburg festival and the Austrian hyperinflation of 1921–22. Zweig admitted that as a young man, he had not recognized the coming danger of the Nazis, who started organizing and agitating in Austria in the 1920s. Zweig was a committed pacifist but hated politics and shunned political engagement. His autobiography shows some reluctance to analyze Nazism as a political ideology; he tended simply to regard it as the rule of one particularly evil man, Hitler. Zweig was struck that the "Berghof", Hitler's mountain residence in Berchtesgaden, an area of early Nazi activity, was just across the valley from his own house outside Salzburg. Zweig believed strongly in Europeanism against nationalism. Zweig also describes his passion for collecting manuscripts, mostly literary and musical. Zweig collaborated in the early 1930s with composer Richard Strauss on the opera "Die schweigsame Frau", which is based on a libretto by Zweig. Strauss was then admired by the Nazis, who were not happy that their favorite composer's new opera had a Jewish author's libretto. Zweig recounts that Strauss refused to withdraw the opera and even insisted that Zweig's authorship of the libretto be credited; the first performance in Dresden was said to have been authorized by Hitler himself. Zweig thought it prudent not to be present. The run was interrupted after the second performance, as the Gestapo had intercepted a private letter from Strauss to Zweig. The elderly composer invited Zweig to write the libretto for another opera. According to Zweig, this led to Strauss's resignation as president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the Nazi state institute for music. Nothing is said of Zweig's first wife; his second marriage is briefly touched upon. The tragic effects of contemporary antisemitism are discussed, but Zweig does not analyze in detail his Jewish identity. Zweig's friendship with Sigmund Freud is described towards the end, particularly while both lived in London during the last year of Freud's life. The book finishes with the news of the start of World War II, while he was waiting for some travel documents at a counter of Bath’s General Register Office. "When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, before the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security."

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Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is a personal travel narrative by the eighteenth-century British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The twenty-five letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to philosophical questions regarding identity. Published by Wollstonecraft's career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson, it was the last work issued during her lifetime. Wollstonecraft undertook her tour of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in order to retrieve a stolen treasure ship for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. Believing that the journey would restore their strained relationship, she eagerly set off. However, over the course of the three months she spent in Scandinavia, she realized that Imlay had no intention of renewing the relationship. The letters, which constitute the text, drawn from her journal and from missives she sent to Imlay, reflect her anger and melancholy over his repeated betrayals. "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" is therefore both a travel narrative and an autobiographical memoir. Using the rhetoric of the sublime, Wollstonecraft explores the relationship between self and society in the text. She values subjective experience, particularly in relation to nature; champions the liberation and education of women; and illustrates the detrimental effects of commerce on society. "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" was Wollstonecraft's most popular book in the 1790s—it sold well and was reviewed favorably by most critics. Wollstonecraft's future husband, philosopher William Godwin, wrote: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book." It influenced Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on its themes and its aesthetic. While the book initially inspired readers to travel to Scandinavia, it failed to retain its popularity after the publication of Godwin's "Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in 1798, which revealed Wollstonecraft's unorthodox private life. Biographical background. In 1790, at the age of thirty-one, Wollstonecraft made a dramatic entrance onto the public stage with "A Vindication of the Rights of Men", a work that helped propel the British pamphlet war over the French revolution. Two years later she published what has become her most famous work, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman". Anxious to see the revolution firsthand, she moved to France for about two years, but returned in 1795 after revolutionary violence increased and the lover she met there, American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, abandoned her and their illegitimate daughter, Fanny Imlay. Shortly after her return to Britain, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide in May; Imlay, however, managed to save her. One month after her attempted suicide, Wollstonecraft agreed to undertake the long and treacherous journey to Scandinavia in order to resolve Imlay's business difficulties. Not only was her journey to Scandinavia fraught with peril (she was a woman travelling alone during a time of war), it was also laced with sorrow and anger. While Wollstonecraft initially believed that the trip might resurrect their relationship, she eventually recognized that it was doomed, particularly after Imlay failed to meet her in Hamburg. Wollstonecraft's despair increased as her journey progressed. On her return to Britain in September, Wollstonecraft tried to commit suicide a second time: she attempted to drown herself in the River Thames but was rescued by passersby. "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", which draws its material from her journal and the letters she sent Imlay during the three-month tour, was published in by Wollstonecraft's close friend and career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson. Written after her two suicide attempts, "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" frequently returns to the topic of death; it recreates Wollstonecraft's mental state while she was in Scandinavia and has been described as a suicide note addressed to Imlay, although he is never referred to by name in the published text. It is the last work by Wollstonecraft published within her lifetime: she died in childbirth just one year later. Scandinavian journey and Imlay's business interests. Although Wollstonecraft appears as only a tourist in "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", during her travels she was actually conducting delicate business negotiations on behalf of Imlay. For almost two hundred years, it was unclear why she had travelled to Scandinavia, but in the 1980s historian Per Nyström uncovered documents in local Swedish and Norwegian archives that shed light on the purpose of her trip. He revealed that Wollstonecraft was searching for a ship and cargo that had been stolen from Imlay. Imlay had authorized her to conduct his business dealings, referring to her in legal documents as "Mrs. Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife", although the two were not married. The intricate details of Imlay's business dealings are laid out clearly by Nyström. On 1794, Peder Ellefsen, who belonged to a rich and influential Norwegian family, bought a ship called the "Liberty" from agents of Imlay in Le Havre, France. It would later become clear that Ellefsen never owned the ship but rather engaged in a pro-forma sale on behalf of Imlay. He renamed the ship the "Maria and Margaretha" (presumably after Mary and her maid Marguerite) and had the Danish Consulate in Le Havre certify it so that the ship could pass through the British blockade of France (Imlay was a blockade runner). Carrying silver and gold Bourbon plate, the ship sailed from France under a Danish flag and arrived at Copenhagen on 1794. Although Ellefsen supposedly ordered the ship to continue on to Gothenburg, it never reached its destination. Imlay engaged in several fruitless attempts to locate the ship and its valuable cargo and then dispatched Wollstonecraft to negotiate an agreement with Ellefsen, who had subsequently been arrested for stealing the ship and its contents. Wollstonecraft's success or failure in the negotiations is unknown as is the ultimate fate of the ship and its treasure. To engage in these negotiations, Wollstonecraft travelled first to Gothenburg, where she remained for two weeks. Leaving Fanny and her nurse Marguerite behind, she embarked for Strömstad, Sweden, where she took a short detour to visit the fortress of Fredriksten, and then proceeded to Larvik, Norway. From there she travelled to Tønsberg, Norway, where she spent three weeks. She also visited Helgeroa, Risør, and Kristiania (now Oslo) and returned by way of Strömstad and Gothenburg, where she picked up Fanny and Marguerite again. She returned to England by way of Copenhagen and Hamburg, finally landing at Dover in September 1795, three months after she had left her home country. Structure, genre, and style. "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" consists of twenty-five letters that address an extensive range of contentious political topics, such as prison reform, land rights, and divorce laws, as well as less controversial subjects, such as gardening, salt works, and sublime vistas. Wollstonecraft's political commentary extends the ideas she had presented in "An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution" (1794); her discussion of prison reform, for example, is informed by her own experiences in revolutionary France and those of her friends, many of whom were jailed. While at first glance "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" appears to be a travel narrative, it is actually a "generic hybrid". The nature of this hybridity, however, is not altogether agreed upon by scholars. Some emphasize Wollstonecraft's fusion of the travelogue with the autobiography or memoir (a word used by Wollstonecraft in the book's advertisement), while others see it as a travelogue "cum" epistolary novel. The text, which reveals Wollstonecraft's thought processes, flows seamlessly from autobiographical reflections to musings on nature to political theories. However, it is unified by two threads: the first is Wollstonecraft's argument regarding the nature and progress of society; the second is her increasing melancholy. Although Wollstonecraft aims to write as a philosopher, the image of the suffering woman dominates the book. Travel narrative: "the art of thinking". One-half of the "generic hybridity" of "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" is the epistolary travel narrative. Wollstonecraft's conception of this genre was shaped by eighteenth-century empirical and moral travel narratives, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's "The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society" (1764), Laurence Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" (1768), Samuel Johnson's "A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland" (1775), James Boswell's "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" (1785), and Arthur Young's travel books. After reviewing twenty-four travel books for Joseph Johnson's periodical, the "Analytical Review", Wollstonecraft was well-versed in the genre. This extensive reading solidified her ideas of what constituted a good travel book; in one review, she maintained that travel writers should have "some decided point in view, a grand object of pursuit to concentrate their thoughts, and connect their reflections" and that their books should not be "detached observations, which no running interest, or prevailing bent in the mind of the writer rounds into a whole". Her reviews praised detailed and engaging descriptions of people and places, musings on history, and an insatiable curiosity in the traveller. "The art of travel is only a branch of the art of thinking", Wollstonecraft wrote. Her journey and her comments on it are, therefore, not only sentimental but also philosophical. She uses the two modes to continue the critique of the roles afforded women and the progress of civilization that she had outlined in "A Vindication of the Rights of Men" (1790), "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), and "An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution". After overturning the conventions of political and historical writing, Wollstonecraft brought what scholar Gary Kelly calls "Revolutionary feminism" to yet another genre that had typically been considered the purview of male writers, transforming the travel narrative's "blend of objective facts and individual impressions ... into a rationale for autobiographical revelation". As one editor of the "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" writes, the book is "nothing less than a revolution in literary genres"; its sublimity, expressed through scenes of intense feeling, made "a new wildness and richness of emotional rhetoric" desirable in travel literature. One scholar has called Wollstonecraft the "complete passionate traveler". Her desire to delve into and fully experience each moment in time was fostered by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly his "Reveries of a Solitary Walker" (1782). Several of Rousseau's themes appear in the "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", such as "the search for the source of human happiness, the stoic rejection of material goods, the ecstatic embrace of nature, and the essential role of sentiment in understanding". However, while Rousseau ultimately rejects society, Wollstonecraft celebrates both domesticity and industrial progress. Letter. In one of the most influential interpretations of "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", Mary Favret has argued that Wollstonecraft's letters must not only be viewed as personal correspondence but also as business correspondence, a genre that would have been ideologically ambiguous for her. According to Favret, Wollstonecraft attempts to reclaim the impersonal genre of the business letter and imbue it with personal meaning. One way she does this is through extensive use of "imaginative" writing that forces the reader to become a participant in the events narrated. Favret points out that Wollstonecraft's "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" is quite different from the despondent and plaintive love letters she actually sent to Imlay; the travel narrative much more closely resembles the personal journal in which she recorded her thoughts regarding the people she encountered and the places she visited. While her letters to Imlay contain long passages focused almost exclusively on herself, the "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" offers social commentary and sympathizes with the victims of disaster and injustice. To Imlay, Wollstonecraft represents herself as laid low by doubts, but to the world she depicts herself as overcoming all of these fears. She ruminates on them and transforms them into the basis of a letter akin to the open political letter popular during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, using her personal experience as the foundation for a discussion of national political reform. Autobiography. Heavily influenced by Rousseau's frank and revealing "Confessions" (1782), Wollstonecraft lays bare her soul in "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", detailing not only her physical but also her psychological journey. Her personal disclosures, like those of other female autobiographers, are presented as "unpremeditated self-revelations" and often appear to be "circuitous". However, as Wollstonecraft scholar Mitzi Myers has made clear, Wollstonecraft manages to use this style of writing to articulate a stable and comprehensible self for the reader. Increasingly confident in her ability as a writer, she controls the narrative and its effect on readers to a degree not matched in her other works. She transforms the individual sorrows of her trip, such as the dissolution of her relationship with Imlay, into the stuff of gripping literature. Sublimity. Wollstonecraft relies extensively on the language of the sublime in "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark". She draws on and redefines Edmund Burke's central terms in "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757). Burke privileges the sublime (which he associates with masculinity, terror, awe, and strength) over the beautiful (which he associates with femininity, passivity, delicacy, and weakness), while Wollstonecraft ties the sublime to sterility and the beautiful to fertility. For her, the beautiful is connected to the maternal; this aesthetic shift is evident, for example, in the many passages focusing on the affectionate tie between Wollstonecraft and little Fanny, her daughter. She thus claims the feminine category of the "beautiful" for the most virtuous and useful of women: mothers. Wollstonecraft also revises the conventional negative associations between the sublime and death; thoughts of death, prompted by a waterfall, for example, lead her to contemplate rebirth and immortality as well: Reaching the cascade, or rather cataract, the roaring of which had a long time announced its vicinity, my soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares – grasping at immortality – it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me – I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come. Like her other manipulations of the language of the sublime, this passage is also heavily inflected by gender. As one scholar puts it, "because Wollstonecraft is a woman, and is therefore bound by the legal and social restrictions placed on her sex in the eighteenth century, she can only envisage autonomy of any form after death". Themes. Reason, feeling, and imagination. Often categorized as a rationalist philosopher, Wollstonecraft demonstrates her commitment to and appreciation of feeling in "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark". She argues that subjective experiences, such as the transcendent emotions prompted by the sublime and the beautiful, possess a value equal to the objective truths discovered through reason. In Wollstonecraft's earlier works, reason was paramount, because it allowed access to universal truths. In "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", however, reason serves as a tool for reflection, mediating between the sensual experiences of the world and an abstract notion of truth (not necessarily universal truth). Maturation is not only the acquisition of reason—the view Wollstonecraft had adopted in "Original Stories from Real Life" (1788)—but also an understanding of when and how to trust one's emotions. Wollstonecraft's theories regarding reason, emotion, and the imagination are closely tied together. Some scholars contend that Wollstonecraft uses the imagination to liberate the self, especially the feminine self; it allows her to envision roles for women outside the traditional bounds of eighteenth-century thought and offers her a way to articulate those new ideas. In contrast, others view Wollstonecraft's emphasis on the power of the imagination as detrimental, imprisoning her in an "individualized, bourgeois desire" which can never truly embrace sociality. Favret has argued that Wollstonecraft uses the imagination to reconcile "masculine understanding" and "female sensibility". Readers must imaginatively "work" while reading: their efforts will save them from descending into sentimentality as well as from being lured into commercial speculation. Even more importantly, readers become invested in the story of the narrator. Wollstonecraft's language demands that they participate in the "plot": 'they' rescue the writer from the villain; 'they' accompany her on her flight from sorrow ... With the readers' cooperation, the writer reverses the standard epistolary plot: here the heroine liberates herself by rejecting her correspondent and by embracing the 'world' outside of the domestic circle. In giving the imagination the power to reshape society (a power suggested through numerous allusions to Shakespeare's "The Tempest"), Wollstonecraft reveals that she has become a Romantic. Individual and society. Throughout "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", Wollstonecraft ponders the relationship between society and the individual. While her earlier works largely focus on society's failings and responsibilities, in this work she turns inward, explicitly arguing for the value of personal experience. In the advertisement for the work, also published as a preface, she explains her role as the "hero" of the text: In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person – 'the little hero of each tale.' I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thoughts, my letter, I found, became stiff and affected: I, therefore, determined to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained, as I perceived that I could not give a just description of what I saw, but by relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings, whilst the impression was still fresh. Throughout the book, Wollstonecraft ties her own psychic journey and maturation to the progress of civilizations. Nations, like individuals, she maintains have, as Wollstonecraft scholar Mary Poovey describes it, "a collective 'understanding' that evolves organically, 'ripening' gradually to fruition". However, Wollstonecraft still views civilization's tragedies as worthier of concern than individual or fictional tragedies, suggesting that, for her, sympathy is at the core of social relations: I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; — I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself—not, perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping the thread of an existence which loses its charms in proportion as the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the heart. Nature. Wollstonecraft dedicates significant portions of "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" to descriptions of nature and her emotional responses to it. One of her most effective tactics is to associate a set of thoughts and feelings with a specific natural formation, such as the waterfall passage quoted above. Nature, Wollstonecraft assumes, is "a common reference point" between readers and herself, therefore her letters should generate a sense of social sympathy with them. Many of the letters contain these "miniature Romantic excursus" which illustrate Wollstonecraft's ideas regarding the connections between nature, God, and the self. The natural world becomes "the necessary ground of speculation and the crucial field of experience". Gender: "Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!". All of Wollstonecraft's writings, including the "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", address the concerns of women in eighteenth-century society. As in previous works, she discusses concrete issues such as childcare and relationships with servants, but unlike her more polemical books such as "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters" (1787) or the "Rights of Woman", this text emphasizes her emotional reactions to nature and maternity. Yet she does not depart from her interest in promoting women's education and rights. In Letter 19, the most explicitly feminist letter, Wollstonecraft anticipates readers' criticisms: "still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim – How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel." Wollstonecraft comes to the realization that she has always been forced to experience the world as a woman—it is the defining feature of her sense of self. Throughout "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", Wollstonecraft comments on the precarious position women occupy in society. She defends and sympathizes with Queen Caroline of Denmark, for example, who had been accused of "licentiousness" for her extra-marital affair during her marriage to the insane Christian VII. (Wollstonecraft herself had had unorthodox love affairs and an illegitimate child.) Wollstonecraft describes this royal, who was also a progressive social reformer, as a woman of courage who tried to revolutionize her country before it was prepared. Such examples fuel Wollstonecraft's increasing despair and melancholy. At one point, she laments the fate of her daughter: You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her – I feel more than a mother's fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard – I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit – Hapless woman! what a fate is thine! Wollstonecraft's anger and frustration over the secondary status afforded women compels her to define herself in antithesis to conventional images of femininity. In the first letter she proudly announces "at supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him "men's questions"" (emphasis Wollstonecraft's). Wollstonecraft casts the female imagination as the productive counterpoint to destructive masculine commerce, a feat she achieves primarily through her use of the genre of the letter. While the "Rights of Woman" argued that women should be "useful" and "productive", importing the language of the market into the home, "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" adopts the values of the domestic space for the larger social and political world. Commercialism. Although Wollstonecraft spends much of "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" musing on nature and its connection to the self, a great deal of the text is actually about the debasing effects of commerce on culture. She argues, for example, that the damage done to Hamburg and France by mercenaries and an increasingly commercial culture is far greater than the damage caused by the violence of the French revolution, writing that "the sword has been merciful, compared with the depredations made on human life by contractors, and by the swarm of locusts who have battened on the pestilence they spread abroad". Wollstonecraft believed that commerce "embruted" the mind and fostered a selfish disposition in its practitioners. Commerce should be, she thought, "regulated by ideas of justice and fairness and directed toward the ideals of independence and benevolence". Wollstonecraft had become disenchanted with Imlay not only because of his dismissive attitude towards her but also because of his greed. Throughout "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark", she attaches criticisms of commerce to the anonymous lover who has betrayed her: A man ceases to love humanity, and then individuals, as he advances in the chase after wealth; as one clashes with his interest, the other with his pleasures: to business, as it is termed, every thing must give way; nay, is sacrificed; and all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names. Throughout the text, she contrasts the constructive, creative imagination with destructive commerce. By associating commercialism with the anonymous lover in the text, Wollstonecraft was also directly censuring Imlay, who she believed cared more for his business speculations than for her and their child. Revolution and progress. Wollstonecraft spends several large sections of "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" speculating about the possibilities of social and political revolution and outlining a trajectory for the progress of civilization. In comparing Norway with Britain and France, for example, she argues that the Norwegians are more progressive because they have a free press, embrace religious toleration, distribute their land fairly, and have a politically active populace. However, her description of Norway's "golden age" becomes less rhapsodic after she discovers that the country has no universities or scientists. In many ways Norwegian society embodied the British radical ideal of "a small-producer society, its wealth sufficiently dispersed to ensure rough equality", similar to what Wollstonecraft had outlined in "A Vindication of the Rights of Men" (1790). After careful consideration of how to improve the social and political problems in the places she visited, Wollstonecraft came to the conclusion that social progress must occur at a measured and "natural" rate. She argues that each country has to find its own way to improve, that democratic revolution cannot be foisted upon a people. She believed that the lower classes and the yeomen were the most promising "potential source of revolutionary social transformation". Implicit in her assessment, however, was a bourgeois condescension; she viewed the lower classes as a group separate from herself, at one point describing their behavior as "picturesque". Reception and legacy. Wollstonecraft was prompted to publish "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" because she was heavily in debt. The successful sales of this, her most popular book in the 1790s, came at an opportune moment. Well-received by reviewers, the work was translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese; published in America; and reissued in a second edition in 1802. Amelia Alderson praised the work, separating the philosopher from the woman: "As soon as I read your Letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher had excited was lost in the tender sympathy call'd forth by the woman." William Godwin, Wollstonecraft's future husband, wrote in his "Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" that reading "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" caused him to fall in love with Wollstonecraft: If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment. Connecting the work to Wollstonecraft's first novel, "" (1788), he celebrates its sensibility and "eroticizes the condition of feminine sorrow"; for Godwin, the work was an epistolary romance, not a work of political commentary. After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, Godwin published her original letters to Imlay (destroying the originals in the process). He deleted all references to contemporary political events and her business negotiations, emphasizing the romantic connection between the two sets of letters. Favret contends that Godwin wanted the public to see Wollstonecraft's affair as a sentimental romance akin to that between Charlotte and Werther in Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774). For a woman, a one-year-old child, and a maid to travel to Scandinavia without the protection of a man was unprecedented in the eighteenth century. The book resulting from the trip also seemed highly unusual to readers at the time: details of Wollstonecraft's travels to a rarely visited area of the world, what one editor of the "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" describes as "a boreal wilderness", intrigued and even shocked contemporary readers. The unorthodox theology of the book also alienated some readers. The " Monthly Magazine and American Review" wrote: [She] discarded all faith in christianity. ... From this period she adored [God] ... not as one whose interposing power is ever silently at work on the grand theatre of human affairs, causing eventual good to spring from present evil, and permitting nothing but for wise and benevolent purposes; but merely as the first great cause and vital spring of existence. "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" retreated from Wollstonecraft's earlier focus on God as judge to God as mere creator, shocking some conservative readers who were not prepared to accept anything akin to deism. Worried more about Wollstonecraft's promotion of sensibility, fellow feminist and author Mary Hays criticized the book's mawkishness. A professor of moral philosophy, Thomas Brown, published a poetic response to the book, "The Wanderer in Norway" (1816). Rather than rejoicing in the freedom that Wollstonecraft argued the connection between nature and emotion offered, however, Brown represented her work as a failure and Wollstonecraft as a tragic victim. He read the book as a cautionary tale, whereas Wollstonecraft had intended it as a description of the possibilities of social and personal reform. As Favret argues, almost all of the responses to "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" placed the narrator/Mary in the position of a sentimental heroine, while the text itself, with its fusion of sensibility and politics, actually does much to challenge that image. After the publication of Godwin's "Memoirs", which revealed and endorsed Wollstonecraft's love affairs and illegitimate child, her works were scorned by the majority of the public. Nevertheless, "the book was to arouse a passion for travel among cultivated people in Europe". Intrepid nineteenth-century British female travel writers such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley still read it and were inspired by Wollstonecraft's pioneering efforts. "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" was republished at the end of the nineteenth century and Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of "Treasure Island", took a copy on his trip to Samoa in 1890. "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" was a powerful influence on Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley. In 1817, Shelley would publish "History of a Six Weeks' Tour", a narrative of her travels through Europe and to Lake Geneva which was modeled after her mother's work. Romanticism. The Romantic poets were more profoundly affected by "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" than anyone, except perhaps Godwin. The poet Robert Southey, for example, wrote to his publisher: "Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft's [travel book]? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight." The book's combination of progressive social views with the advocacy of individual subjective experience influenced writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wollstonecraft's "incarnational theory of the creative imagination" paved the way for Wordsworth's thorough treatment of the imagination and its relation to the self in Book V of "The Prelude" (1805; 1850). Her book also had a significant influence on Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1797–99) and Percy Shelley's "Alastor" (1815); their depictions of "quest[s] for a settled home" strongly resemble Wollstonecraft's. The most striking homage to Wollstonecraft's work, however, is in Coleridge's famous poem "Kubla Khan" (1797; 1816). Not only does much of his style descend from the book, but at one point he alludes to Wollstonecraft as he is describing a cold wasteland:

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The Days of My Life The Days Of My Life [TDOML for short] He wrote it in 1910–12 but did not publish it until his death – he made express allowance for this in his will.

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God and Man at Yale God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom" is a 1951 book by William F. Buckley Jr., based on his undergraduate experiences at Yale University. Buckley, then aged 25, criticized Yale for forcing collectivist, Keynesian, and secularist ideology on students, criticizing several professors by name, arguing that they tried to break down students' religious beliefs through their hostility to religion and that Yale was denying its students any sense of individualism by making them embrace the ideas of liberalism. Buckley argued that the Yale charter assigns oversight authority of the university to the alumni, and that because most alumni of Yale believed in God, Yale was failing to serve its "masters" by teaching course content in a matter inconsistent with alumni beliefs. Buckley eventually became a leading voice in the American conservative movement in the latter half of the twentieth century. Reviews and legacy. "God and Man at Yale" received some mixed or harsh reviews when it was first published, including those of Peter Viereck and McGeorge Bundy. Many American academics and pundits underestimated the ultimate impact that the book and Buckley would have on American society, thinking that it would quickly fade into the background. Quite the opposite happened, as Buckley used it as a launching pad into the public eye. Buckley himself credited the attention his book received to its introduction, written by John Chamberlain, saying that it "chang[ed] the course of his life" and that the famous "Life" editorial writer had acted out of "reckless generosity." Buckley went on to be an active force in the conservative movement through the political magazine he started, "National Review", and his television show "Firing Line". The book and its author played a crucial role in tying together the different factions of the arising conservative movement to form a potent political force. George Will called the book "a lovers' quarrel with his "alma mater"." In 2002, the work was featured in the C-SPAN original series "", which focused on American writers of significance over the society's first 400 years, in an episode entitled "Writings of Kirk and Buckley". Assessments in 2011, sixty years after publication of the book include:

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Always Running Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. is a 1993 autobiographical book by Mexican-American author Luis J. Rodriguez. In the book, Rodriguez recounts his days as a member of a street gang in Los Angeles (specifically, East Los Angeles and the city's eastern suburbs), has been highly acclaimed and contrasted to the works of Louis-Ferdinand Celine and George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" in its description of the lives of desperate, impoverished individuals in big cities.

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The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is the 1951 autobiography of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, an Indian writer. Written when he was around 50, it records his life from his birth in 1897 in Kishoreganj, a small town in present-day Bangladesh. The book relates his mental and intellectual development, his life and growth in Calcutta, his observations of vanishing landmarks, the connotation of this is dual—changing Indian situation and historical forces that was making exit of British from India an imminent affair. The book is divided into four books, each of which consists of a preface and four chapters. The first book is entitled "Early Environment" and its four chapters are: 1) My Birth Place, 2) My Ancestral Place, 3) My mother's Place and 4) England. Over the years, the autobiography has acquired many distinguished admirers. Winston Churchill thought it one of the best books he had ever read, according to his daughter, Mary Soames. V. S. Naipaul remarked: "No better account of the penetration of the Indian mind by the West - and by extension, of the penetration of one culture by another - will be or now can be written." In 1998, it was included, as one of the few Indian contributions, in The New Oxford Book of English Prose.

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Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. The "Confessions" was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one that won him fame almost overnight". First published anonymously in September and October 1821 in the "London Magazine", the "Confessions" was released in book form in 1822, and again in 1856, in an edition revised by De Quincey. Synopsis. As originally published, De Quincey's account was organised into two parts: Though De Quincey was later criticised for giving too much attention to the pleasure of opium and not enough to the harsh negatives of addiction, "The Pains of Opium" is in fact significantly longer than "The Pleasures". However, even when trying to convey darker truths, De Quincey's language can seem seduced by the compelling nature of the opium experience: Style. From its first appearance, the literary style of the "Confessions" attracted attention and comment. De Quincey was well read in the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and assimilated influences and models from Sir Thomas Browne and other writers. Arguably the most famous and often-quoted passage in the "Confessions" is the apostrophe to opium in the final paragraph of "The Pleasures": De Quincey modelled this passage on the apostrophe "O eloquent, just and mightie Death!" in Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World". Earlier in "The Pleasures of Opium" De Quincey describes the long walks he took through the London streets under the influence of the drug: The "Confessions" represents De Quincey's initial effort to write what he called "impassioned prose", an effort that he would later resume in "Suspiria de Profundis" (1845) and "The English Mail-Coach" (1849). 1856 revision. In the early 1850s, De Quincey prepared the first collected edition of his works for publisher James Hogg. For that edition, he undertook a large-scale revision of the "Confessions", more than doubling the work's length. Most notably, he expanded the opening section on his personal background, until it consumed more than two-thirds of the whole. Yet he gave the book "a much weaker beginning" and detracted from the impact of the original with digressions and inconsistencies; "the verdict of most critics is that the earlier version is artistically superior". "De Quincey undoubtedly spoiled his masterpiece by revising it... anyone who compares the two will prefer the unflagging vigour and tension of the original version to the tired prosiness of much of the revised one". Influence. The "Confessions" maintained a place of primacy in De Quincey's literary output, and his literary reputation, from its first publication; "it went through countless editions, with only occasional intervals of a few years, and was often translated. Since there was little systematic study of narcotics until long after his death, De Quincey's account assumed an authoritative status and actually dominated the scientific and public views of the effects of opium for several generations." Yet from the time of its publication, De Quincey's "Confessions" was criticized for presenting a picture of the opium experience that was too positive and too enticing to readers. As early as 1823, an anonymous response, "Advice to Opium Eaters", was published "to warn others from copying De Quincey." The fear of reckless imitation was not groundless: several English writers—Francis Thompson, James Thomson, William Blair, and perhaps Branwell Brontë—were led to opium use and addiction by De Quincey's literary example. Charles Baudelaire's 1860 translation and adaptation, "Les paradis artificiels", spread the work's influence further. One of the characters of the Sherlock Holmes story, "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891), is an opium addict who began experimenting with the drug as a student after reading the "Confessions". De Quincey attempted to address this type of criticism. When the 1821 original was printed in book form the following year, he added an Appendix on the withdrawal process; and he inserted significant material on the medical aspects of opium into his 1856 revision. More generally, De Quincey's "Confessions" influenced psychology and abnormal psychology, and attitudes towards dreams and imaginative literature. Edgar Allan Poe praised "Confessions" for its "glorious imagination—deep philosophy—acute speculation". The play "The Opium Eater" by Andrew Dallmeyer was based on "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater", and has been published by Capercaillie Books. In 1962, Vincent Price starred in the full-length film "Confessions of an Opium Eater" which was a reimagining of De Quincey's "Confessions" by Hollywood producer Albert Zugsmith. In the 1999 documentary "Tripping", recounting Ken Kesey's Further bus and its influence, Malcolm McLaren refers to De Quincey's book as the influence for the beatnik generation before Jack Kerouac's popular "On the Road" was written.

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The Year of Magical Thinking The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), by Joan Didion (b. 1934), is an account of the year following the death of the author's husband John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003). Published by Knopf in October 2005, "The Year of Magical Thinking" was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography. Structure and themes. The book recounts Didion's experiences of grief after Dunne's 2003 death. Days before his death, their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne Michael was hospitalized in New York with pneumonia which developed into septic shock; she was still unconscious when her father died. During 2004 Quintana was again hospitalized after she fell and hit her head disembarking from a plane in Malibu. She had returned to Malibu, her childhood home, after learning of her father's death. The book follows Didion's reliving and reanalysis of her husband's death throughout the year following it, in addition to caring for Quintana. With each replay of the event, the focus on certain emotional and physical aspects of the experience shifts. Didion also incorporates medical and psychological research on grief and illness into the book. The title of the book refers to magical thinking in the anthropological sense, thinking that if a person hopes for something enough or performs the right actions that an unavoidable event can be averted. Didion reports many instances of her own magical thinking, particularly the story in which she cannot give away Dunne's shoes, as he would need them when he returned. The experience of insanity or derangement that is part of grief is a major theme, about which Didion was unable to find a great deal of existing literature. Didion applies the reportorial detachment for which she is known to her own experience of grieving; there are few expressions of raw emotion. Through observation and analysis of changes in her own behavior and abilities, she indirectly expresses the toll her grief is taking. She is haunted by questions about the medical details of her husband's death, the possibility that he sensed it in advance, and how she might have made his remaining time more meaningful. Fleeting memories of events and persistent snippets of past conversations with John take on a new significance. Her daughter's continuing health problems and hospitalizations further compound and interrupt the natural course of grief. Writing process. Didion wrote "The Year of Magical Thinking" between October 4 and December 31, 2004, completing it a year and a day after Dunne died. Notes she made during Quintana's hospitalizations became part of the book. Quintana Roo Dunne Michael died of pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, before the book's publication, but Didion did not revise the manuscript. Instead she devoted a second book, "Blue Nights", to her daughter's death. Reception. In 2019, the book was ranked 40th on "The Guardian"'s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. The play. On March 29, 2007, Didion's adaptation of her book for Broadway, directed by David Hare, opened with Vanessa Redgrave as the sole cast member. The play expands upon the memoir by dealing with Quintana's death. It ran for 24 weeks at the Booth Theatre in New York City and the following year Redgrave reprised her role to largely positive reviews at London's National Theatre. This production was set to tour the world, including Salzburg, Athens, Dublin Theatre Festival, Bath and Cheltenham. The play was also performed in the Sydney Theatre Company's 2008 season, starring Robyn Nevin and directed by Cate Blanchett. Also in 2008, it was performed in Barcelona at the Sala Beckett, directed by Òscar Molina and starring Marta Angelat. The play was performed in Canada at the Belfry Theatre in 2009 and at the Tarragon Theatre by Seana McKenna. This production was also mounted in January 2011 as part of English Theatre's season at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. On October 26, 2009 Redgrave reprised her performance again in a benefit production of the play at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. In January 2010, the play was mounted at the Court Theater in Chicago, starring Mary Beth Fisher. Fisher won the 2010 "Jeff" (Joseph Jefferson equity) Solo Performance Award for her performance. The play was mounted in April 2011 by Nimbus Theater in Minneapolis, MN, starring Barbra Berlovitz and directed by Liz Neerland. In 2011, Fanny Ardant played a French translation of "The Year of Magical Thinking" in Théâtre de l'Atelier, Paris. The play opened in May 2015, at Teatro Español y Naves del Español in Madrid (Spain), produced by Teatro Guindalera. Starring Jeannine Mestre, directed by Juan Pastor Millet. The Norwegian translation of the play premiered in September 2015 at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen, directed by Jon Ketil Johnsen and starring Rhine Skaanes. On November 3, 2017, Stageworks Theatre in Tampa, Florida, opened a production of the play featuring Vickie Daignault. Writing in the "Tampa Bay Times", Colette Bancroft noted Daignault's "skill and subtlety" and the exploration of grief in Didion's play that was "raw and refined at once."

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The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is a 2011 non-fiction book containing the published selections of a journal kept by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, in which he documented and explored his religious and visionary experiences. Dick's wealth of knowledge on the subjects of philosophy, religion, and science inform the work throughout. Background to the journals. Dick started the journal after his visionary experiences in February and March 1974, which he called "2-3-74." These visions began shortly after Dick had two impacted wisdom teeth removed. When a delivery person from the pharmacy brought his pain medication, he noticed the ichthys necklace she wore and asked her what it meant. She responded that it was a symbol used by the early Christians, and in that moment Dick's religious experiences began: In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called "anamnesis"—a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true. For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation were boundless. In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, including a hallucinatory slideshow of abstract patterns and an information-rich beam of pink light. In the "Exegesis", he theorized as to the origins and meaning of these experiences, frequently concluding that they were religious in nature. The being that originated the experiences is referred to by several names, including Zebra, God, and the Vast Active Living Intelligence System. From 1974 until his death in 1982, Dick wrote the "Exegesis" by hand in late-night writing sessions, sometimes composing as many as 150 pages in a sitting. In total, it consists of approximately 8,000 pages of notes, only a small portion of which have been published. Besides the "Exegesis", Dick described his visions and faith in numerous other works, including "VALIS", "Radio Free Albemuth", "The Divine Invasion", "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer", one brief passage in "A Scanner Darkly", and the uncompleted "The Owl in Daylight", as well as many essays and personal letters. "In Pursuit of Valis: Selections From the Exegesis" was published in 1991. Further volumes. In April 2010, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced plans to publish further excerpts from the "Exegesis" in two volumes. The first, 1056 pages long, would have been released in 2011, and the second (a volume of the same length) in 2012. Editor Jonathan Lethem described the upcoming publications as "absolutely stultifying, brilliant, repetitive, and contradictory. It just might contain the secret of the universe." The plan was changed to publish the "Exegesis" as one large book. "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" was ultimately published November 2011.

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Mari Hakikat Mari Hakikat () is the autobiography of Narmadashankar Dave, popularly known as Narmad, a Gujarati author from Surat in 19th century India. It was the first autobiography to be written in the Gujarati language. Written in 1866, it was published posthumously in 1933 on the centenary of Narmad's birth. Origin and publication history. Narmad wrote "Mari Hakikat" in 1866. He explained his intentions at the start of his autobiography; He added that his life will give some message to people. Narmad was candid and outspoken and he believed that his thoughts and works are exemplar. To give insights in his mind and world around him, he chose to write as openly as possible about events in his life, people connected with those events, his relations with those people and the results of those relationships. Narmad had published a collection of his essays as "Narmagadya: Book 1" in 1865. "Suratni Mukhatesar ni Hakikat" was published as "Narmagadya: Book 2: Issue 1" in 1866 from page 1 to page 59. He had intended to publish "Mari Hakikat" as "Narmagadya: Book 2: Issue 2," but later changed his mind. After his death in 1886, his friend Navalram Pandya published a biography of Narmad, "Kavijivan" (1880) which was based on the autobiography. He wrote that Narmad had only two to five copies printed, which were given to close friends, and had requested it be published only after his death. Natwarlal Desai, his editor and son of another close friend Ichchharam Desai, also corroborated this. But later research found that Narmad had printed 400 copies of the autobiography; it is mentioned in "Narmakavita" (1866–67), in which he had included a list of all his books along with the number of published copies of each. Narmad may have destroyed all but a few copies but there has been no firm proof of it. The limited print copy had 73 pages of two columned Royal size pages. It was page number 60 to 132 of "Narmagadya: Book 2: Issue 2," printed by Union Press, owned by his friend Nanabhai Rustomji Ranina. As Narmad's only son Jayshankar died in 1910 without any heir, he had assigned the management of his father's works to his friends, Mulchand Damodardas Mukati and Thakordas Tribhuvandas Tarkasr. They had transferred copyrights of these works to Gujarati Press in 1911. Kanaiyalal Munshi had published a few chapters in "Gujarat" magazine in 1926, but stopped when the copyright holder, Gujarati Press objected. Gujarati Press published some excerpts from "Mari Hakikat" in the Diwali editions of "Gujarati" in 1930 and 1931, finally publishing the full version in 1933, the birth centenary of Narmad. Later in 1939, they also published "Uttar Narmad Charitra" which included some notes and letters as a followup to the autobiography. "Mari Hakikat" is not in continuous prose and includes many notes. Narmad had started keeping notes in 1854, and written the first draft based on information told to him by his father and relatives, papers available in his home, his expense book and his memory. He organised all available information into a timeline and filled in gaps with other information. He had described his autobiography as 'incomplete' and a 'draft' and intended to rewrite it at some future date. His prime motive for writing was self encouragement. Other motives were to popularize autobiographies in Gujarati, to give insight into his life to his friends and clarify truths about his life and leave a record of them after his death. He had decided to write as truthfully as possible about his life and his relatives, friends and foes. He did not intended to hurt anybody, and later decided not to publish publicly as he intended it only for his own encouragement. When Gujarati Press closed operations, they deposited one of his limited copies printed in 1866, with proofreading notes by Narmad himself, at M. T. B. College, Surat. The first edition published in 1933 had several omissions and misprints. A later edition was edited by Dhirubhai Thaker. After the Kavi Narmad Yugavart Trust was established they decided to republish Narmad's entire works. They researched original manuscripts, limited copies and earlier editions, also examining all the literature of Narmad and extracting writings and letters that were autobiographical in nature. This critical edition consisting of the autobiography, autobiographical notes and letters was edited by Ramesh M. Shukla and published by the Trust in 1994. Contents of critical edition, 1994. The critical edition is divided in four sections. The first section covers the autobiography written in 1866. It consists of his birth to 1866, divided into ten subsections, or "Viram". All titles and subtitles of the "Viram"s were given by his editor Natwar Desai. It covers his life from 3 September 1833 to 18 September 1866. It covers his birth, his parents and relatives, his education, his formative years, his reformist stand, his rise and career. The second section covers essays and notes written by him which are autobiographical in nature. It includes notes and thoughts on his personal life, his family, and his own works. The third section covers letters written to various relatives, friends and people of his time. The fourth section covers appendices which include scans of his and his companions' writings, legal documents, notes and timeline. In the beginning of the book Narmad write: And apparently, he has frankly written about his cowardice, his calf love, his attempts to attract women, his dislike of his contemporary poet Dalpatram and their clash, his conflict with his father, how he once arranged a musical concert at his residence under depression and spent five hundred rupees for it, his financial crisis, betrayal by friends, his private love affairs, etc. The book gives clear picture of Narmad's personality, his egoism, hypersensitive nature, generosity and extravagance. There are attempts of self glorification, and attitude of self-righteousness. The language he used has a ting of Surati dialect and the style is fully reflective of his personality. Reception. Chandrakant Topiwala has highlighted candidness, honesty at the expense of narrative and efforts of introspection as major elements of the autobiography. He has also praised its prose. Dhirubhai Modi has criticised its language without beauty but praised its truthfulness and honesty. He has also praised it for its accuracy and the efforts of writing it. Chandravadan Mehta gave tribute to author by writing, Gulabdas Broker described it as 'very bold, sincere and beautiful autobiography'. However Gujarati critic, Vishwanath M. Bhatt noted that Narmad's autobiography lacks coherence, order and the sense of discrimination about what to write. Adaptation. "Narmad: Mari Hakikat" or "Narmad: My Life", a soliloquy based on his autobiography and life, was written and directed by Harish Trivedi. It was performed by Chandrakant Shah. It was premiered in Dayton, Ohio, US in 1995 and later toured India, United Kingdom and France. It was critically acclaimed.

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Around the Day in Eighty Worlds La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos is a two-volume collection of short pieces by Julio Cortázar, which was published by Siglo XXI Editores in 1967. Portions of the collection, along with portions of Cortázar's later two-volume collection "Último round," were translated by Thomas Christensen and published by North Point Press in 1986 under the title "Around the Day in Eighty Worlds." The contents of the North Point volume match the selection (made by the author) for the corresponding French-language edition, "Le Tour du jour en quatre-vingt mondes" (1980).

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Sometimes the Magic Works Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life is a book by Terry Brooks. First published in 2003, it seeks to give advice to aspiring writers, often telling some of the stories behind Brooks' own literature as an example.

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The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is a collection of extracts from the journals of Charles Bukowski, spanning 1991 to 1993. The book was first published in 1998 with illustrations by Robert Crumb. The diary entries record the last few years of Bukowski's life, in which he talks about drinking, gambling, aging, fame, and his mundane day-to-day activities.

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Such, Such Were the Joys "Such, Such Were the Joys" is a long autobiographical essay by the English writer George Orwell. In the piece, Orwell describes his experiences between the ages of eight and thirteen, in the years before and during World War I (from September 1911 to December 1916), while a pupil at a preparatory school: St Cyprian's, in the seaside town of Eastbourne, in Sussex. The essay offers various reflections on the contradictions of the Edwardian middle and upper class world-view, on the psychology of children, and on the experience of oppression and class conflict. It was probably drafted in 1939–40, revised in 1945–46, and not completed until May or June 1948. It was first published by "Partisan Review" in 1952, two years after Orwell's death. The veracity of the stories it contains about life at St. Cyprian's has been challenged by a number of commenters, including Orwell's contemporaries at the school and biographers, but its powerful writing and haunting observations have made it one of Orwell's most commonly anthologised essays. Summary and analysis. The title of the essay is taken from "The Echoing Green", one of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" which Orwell's mother had read to him when they lived at Henley: The allusion is never explained in Orwell's text, but it is grimly ironic, since Orwell recollects his early boarding school experiences with unvarnished realism. St Cyprian's was, according to him, a "world of force and fraud and secrecy," in which the young Orwell, a shy, sickly and unattractive boy surrounded by pupils from families much richer than his own, was "like a goldfish" thrown "into a tank full of pike." The piece fiercely attacks the cruelty and snobbery of both his fellow pupils and of most of the adults connected with the school, — particularly the headmaster, Mr. Vaughan Wilkes, nicknamed "Sambo," and his wife Cicely, nicknamed "Flip". Orwell describes the education he received as "a preparation for a sort of confidence trick," geared entirely towards maximising his future performance in the admissions exams to leading English public schools such as Eton and Harrow, without any concern for actual knowledge or understanding. He describes the approach as amounting to being cynically 'crammed', as a 'goose is crammed for Christmas'. The process is exemplified by the 'date learning' teaching of history in which boys were encouraged to learn dates, without any understanding of 'the mysterious events they were naming.' "1587? "Massacre of St. Bartholomew (there is a mistake here in the book, in fact 1572)"! 1713? "Treaty of Utrecht" – 1520? "Field of the Cloth of Gold"! and so on." Orwell also claims that he was accepted as a boarder at St Cyprians—at half of the usual fees—so that he might earn a scholarship that would look good in the school's publicity, and that his training relied heavily on the use of beatings, while the rich boys received preferential treatment and were exempted from corporal punishment. The essay lashes out at the hypocrisy of the Edwardian society in which Orwell grew up and in which a boy was "bidden to be at once a Christian and a social success, which is impossible." A chapter is devoted to the puritanical attitudes towards sex at the time and to the frightful consequences of the discovery of what appears to have been a case of masturbation among a group of boys at the school. On the other hand, Orwell describes the actual "pattern of school life" as Orwell's story is punctuated by anecdotes about the dirt and squalor surrounding him, such as the porridge at the dining hall containing "more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose," a human turd floating in the Devonshire Baths, and a new boy's teeth turning green because of neglect. According to the essay, the main lesson that Orwell took away from St Cyprian's was that, for a "weak" and "inferior" person such as himself, "to survive, or at least to preserve any kind of independence, was essentially criminal, since it meant breaking rules which you yourself recognized," and that he lived in a world "where it was "not possible" [for him] to be good." In the piece, Orwell also seeks to illustrate the reflection that children live "in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination," and he wonders whether even in more modern times, without "God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos," it might still be normal for schoolchildren to "live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings." Background. Secondary education for the dominant classes in England since the early 19th century has been provided mainly by the fee-paying public schools. These have selective entrance by examination and offer scholarships by competitive examination, which offset all or part of the fees. The curriculum in Orwell's time, and for long after, centred on the classics. Prep schools were established from the 19th century to prepare students for these examinations and to provide a broader-based education than the traditional crammer, offering sports and additional subjects. Prep school children were often boarders, starting as early as five or as late as twelve. Boarding was, and still is, for terms of three months. Eastbourne was a popular town for preparatory schools at the turn of the 20th century because its bracing sea air was believed to be healthy, and by 1896, "Gowland's Eastbourne Directory" listed 76 private schools for boys and girls. An Eton scholarship was most highly prized, not just for its financial value but because it provided access to the elite intellectual cadre of King's Scholars. One of the leading prep schools of the time, Summer Fields School, set in the university town of Oxford and with which St Cyprian's eventually was to merge, won every year at least five of the available Eton scholarships. Orwell's mother sent him (as Eric Blair) to board at St Cyprian's School at the age of eight in 1911. The school had been founded twelve years earlier by the headmaster, Vaughan Wilkes, and his wife Cicely. It had moved into newly built facilities in extended grounds in 1906. Although able to charge high fees for better-off parents, the Wilkeses supported traditional families on lower incomes, particularly in the colonial service, by taking their children at considerably reduced fees. Orwell was one of several beneficiaries, who also included Cyril Connolly, Alaric Jacob, and Walter Christie. Mrs Wilkes spotted Orwell looking sad on his arrival and tried to comfort him, but noted "there was no warmth in him". Nor did he respond positively to being taken on a picnic the following day. Senior boys in Orwell's first year included Ian Fraser and Bolo Whistler. His early letters home report a normal catalogue of class placings, results of games, and school expeditions. In September 1914 Cyril Connolly arrived at the school and formed a close friendship with Orwell. The First World War had just broken out, and Orwell's patriotic poem written at school was published in the "Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard". The war made life difficult for the school – most of the teaching staff left to fight, although one staff member Charles Edgar Loseby, later a Labour MP, returned for a period while recovering from being gassed in the trenches. The First World War had a significant effect in other ways – there was the increasing roll call of old boys killed in the trenches, Mr Wilkes spent his summer holidays driving ambulances in France, the boys knitted and put on entertainments for the injured troops camped nearby, and food shortages made feeding a challenge. Classics was taught by Mr Wilkes, while the formidable Mrs Wilkes taught English, history and scripture. The long-serving deputy, Robert Sillar, taught geography, drawing, shooting and nature studies and was highly regarded in old boys' accounts. Outings on the South Downs were a regular part of school life, and Sillar led the boys on nature study expeditions. The school had instituted a Cadet Corps, in which Orwell was an active member. Orwell recalls stealing books off Connolly and Connolly describes how they reviewed each other's poetry. Cecil Beaton vaguely recalled working on the school's war-time allotments with Orwell. During his time at school, Orwell surreptitiously collected the saucy seaside postcards that were later to figure in his essay "The Art of Donald McGill". In 1916 Orwell came second in the Harrow History Prize, had another poem published in the "Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard", and with Connolly had his work praised by the external examiner Sir Charles Grant Robertson. In 1916 Orwell won a scholarship to Wellington College, a school with a military background appropriate for colonial service. Mr Wilkes also believed Orwell could win an Eton scholarship and would benefit from Eton College life and so he sat the Eton exam as well. Orwell headed the school prize list in 1916 with Classics, while Cyril Connolly won the English prize, Cecil Beaton won the drawing prize, Walter Christie won the history prize and Rupert Lonsdale won the scripture prize. Henry Longhurst, Lord Pollington and Lord Malden were among the winners of other class prizes. Other activities in which Orwell was involved included narrowly missing winning the diving competition, playing the part of Mr Jingle in the school play, and being commended as a useful member of the 1st XI cricket team. Although he had won an Eton scholarship, this was subject to a place becoming available. Instead of going to Wellington he stayed at St Cyprian's for an additional term in the hope that a place at Eton would materialise. As this had not happened by the end of term, he went on to Wellington in January. However, after he had been there for nine weeks, an Eton place became available, which Orwell took. Publication. On sending a version of the essay to Warburg, in May 1947, Orwell stated that he had written the "long autobiographical sketch" partly as a "sort of pendant" to the publication in 1938 of "Enemies of Promise", an autobiographical work by Cyril Connolly, and at Connolly's request. Connolly, who had been Orwell's companion at St Cyprian's and later at Eton, had written an account of St Cyprian's which, though cynical, was fairly appreciative compared to Orwell's. In his letter to Warburg, Orwell wrote that he thought his essay "really too libellous to print", adding that it should be printed "when the people most concerned are dead". The libel report for Secker & Warburg, compiled after Orwell's death, judged that well over thirty paragraphs were defamatory. Sonia Orwell and Warburg both wanted to publish "Such, Such Were the Joys" immediately after Orwell's death, but Sir Richard Rees, who was Orwell's literary executor violently disagreed. He considered the work "grossly exaggerated, badly written, and likely to harm Orwell's reputation" and when Sonia insisted, he told her, "You’re completely nutty about St Cyprian's". Thereafter, Rees had no further involvement in publishing decisions. In 1952, within two years of Orwell's death a version was published in the United States in the "Partisan Review". In this version the school was referred to as "Crossgates" and the names of the headmaster and his wife altered to Mr and Mrs Simpson ("Sim" and his wife "Bingo"). Following Mrs Wilkes' death in 1967, "Such, Such Were the Joys" was published in the UK, but with only the name of the school and the proprietors in original form – the real names of his fellow pupils were still disguised. In the "Completed Works" edition (2000), the original text including all names has been restored. Most biographers have to a greater or lesser extent concluded that "Such, Such Were the Joys" significantly misrepresents the school and exaggerates Orwell's suffering there. David Farrer, partner of Orwell's publishers, considered it a "gross distortion of what took place". Reaction from contemporaries. Of his contemporaries, Cecil Beaton wrote of the piece "It is hilariously funny, but it is exaggerated". Connolly, on reviewing Stansky & Abraham's interpretation, wrote "I was at first enchanted as by anything which recalls one's youth but when I went to verify some references from my old reports and letters I was nearly sick... In the case of St Cyprian's and the Wilkes whom I had so blithely mocked I feel an emotional disturbance... The Wilkeses were true friends and I had caricatured their mannerisms (developed as a kind of ritual square-bashing for dealing with generations of boys) and read mercenary motives into much that was just enthusiasm." Walter Christie and Henry Longhurst went further and wrote their own sympathetic accounts of the school in response to Orwell's and voiced their appreciation for the formidable Mrs Wilkes. Robert Pearce, researching the papers of another former pupil, made a comprehensive study from the perspective of the school, investigating school records and other pupils' accounts. While some features were universal features of prep school life, he concluded that Orwell's depiction bore little relation to reality and that Orwell's defamatory allegations were unsupportable. Davison writes "If one is looking for a factual account for life at St Cyprian's, this is not the place to seek it." On Orwell's claimed state of misery, Jacintha Buddicom, who knew him well at the time, also raised a strong challenge. She wrote "I can guarantee that the 'I' of "Such, Such were the Joys" is quite unrecognisable as Eric as we knew him then", and "He was a philosophical boy, with varied interests and a sense of humour—which he was inclined to indulge when referring to St Cyprian's in the holidays."

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The Italics are Mine The Italics are Mine is the autobiography of Nina Berberova. It was first published in the 1960s. It was re-issued in 1992 following the success of her novellas and short story collections, written in the 1930s, which had been rediscovered in the mid 1980s and published by French publishing house "Actes Sud". Berberova was born in Saint Petersburg in 1901. She left Russia in 1922. She and her partner, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich spent time in Czechoslovakia and Berlin before settling in Paris. She left Khodasevich in the mid-1930s. "He fears the world. I do not. He fears the future. I rush towards it." She was part of a circle of literary Russian exiles, and the book has a number of portraits of them, including Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Marina Tsvetaeva and Andrey Bely. She is critical of Mayakovsky's suicide: "He did not just shoot himself. He shot a whole generation." She left for the United States in 1950 where she found life freer than in Europe. She became a lecturer in Russian at Princeton University. Criticism. Clive James has called the book "the best single book written about Russian culture in exile." "Nina Berberova left the Soviet Union the year that Nikolay Gumilev was shot and Anna Akhmatova was proscribed - Berberova's delightful book about her life in the Russian emigration traces the whole tragically fascinating experience of exile far into her old age."

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Teacher Man Teacher Man is a 2005 memoir written by Frank McCourt which describes and reflects on his development as a teacher in New York high schools and colleges. It is in continuation to his earlier two memoirs, "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis". Prologue. The book begins with a Prologue, in which the author acknowledges the changes that took place in him because he wrote the first memoir. He became famous, the book sold in the millions and in many languages, a wholly unexpected result. He met many new people in his fame, especially other authors. He demonstrated the changes in himself by listing all the people and institutions that made his childhood so difficult leaving burdens of guilt he thought were his alone, and forgave them one by one. He had a "second act" in his life, and writing the first book, more so than telling the stories to students or putting them on stage, brought him to a point of maturity, able to shed the pain and guilt that impeded his happiness in life. Synopsis. The memoir describes Frank McCourt's pedagogy, which involves the students taking responsibility for their own learning, especially in his first school, McKee Vocational and Technical High School, on Staten Island in New York City. On the first day he nearly gets fired for eating a sandwich, which a boy had thrown in front of his desk, and the second day he nearly gets fired for joking that in Ireland, people go out with sheep after a student asks them if Irish people date. Much of his early teaching involves telling anecdotes about his childhood in Ireland in response to questions from his students, which incidents were mainly covered in his earlier books "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis". He explains the continuing effort of adolescents to divert him from the lessons he wants to teach; he slowly realizes the stories can be part of teaching English, as the stories have structure just like the novels the students are reading, and he uses the stories to segue into the course material. It benefits him to verbalize his upbringing and hear the reactions of the students, a topic he expected to leave behind him when he sailed to America. McCourt then teaches English as a Second Language, and also a class of predominantly African-American female students, whom he took to a production of "Hamlet". He writes about his teacher certification test when he was asked about George Santayana, of whom he was ignorant, but later gives an excellent lesson to a class on the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, whose poems he knew well. Other highlights include his connection between how a pen works and how a sentence works; he did not feel strong in the topic of diagramming sentences, but did want to get across the basics. The school administration was impressed with this idea and some of the students grasped the point. His use of realia such as using students' forged excuse notes as a segue to writing with scenarios is another highlight of his teaching style, keeping the students involved. At his wife's request, he undertakes therapy, one on one and then a few sessions in group therapy. He was uncomfortable in the group and stopped attending it. The only breakthrough noted by the therapist was McCourt's statement that he is at ease in the classroom but not comfortable outside the classroom, and wants the ease in social situations that his wife has, that his brother Malachy has. His restlessness continues. Before his daughter is born in 1971, McCourt goes to Trinity College for a doctorate degree, living in Dublin for two years with a break in between to vacation with his wife. He did not expect how much he would be an outsider in Dublin, both as an American and his roots in Ireland being in Limerick. He finds it hard to connect with the people living there, as he had connected in New York City. He had a topic for a dissertation. He researches his topic extensively, with organized notes. He comes home as the birth of Maggie nears. He is unsettled about life, about himself, and cannot complete the dissertation by continuing the work in New York City, so he goes back to teaching. After returning to New York, his daughter changes his views on life, giving him much happiness. When his daughter is 8 years old, he and his wife separate and divorce, with Frank moving out on his own as he continues teaching at Stuyvesant High School. Frank is still unsettled, working hard to figure out what he needs to do to achieve peace. He is hard on himself, for how hard it is for him to grow as he wants to grow, how many things he realizes as an adult that he suspects most teens know already. He stays strong in teaching, and as much as he can, sees how he can grow as a teacher and a person, even as his main goal is teaching his students. He taught from the time he was twenty-seven and continued for thirty years. He spent most of his teaching career at Stuyvesant High School, where he taught English and Creative Writing with success for the students and a good experience for him, the teacher. His classes at Stuyvesant were popular with students and the school administration supported him in his developing approach to teaching, which included many creative turns, such as having the students read restaurant reviews for their structure, and then writing reviews of their school cafeteria and local eateries. On another day, students brought foods from home, enough for all in the class, and had their vocabulary lessons in the park near the school. The students have varied backgrounds and the foods they bring reflect the cuisines of the world. Next they read recipes from cook books, which turns into an event with musical accompaniment, as many students can play instruments well. One student realizes and shares with the class how the recipes are like poetry. The theme through all those experiences in his classes is that writers are always observing, seeking what is happening around them so they can both decide their own next actions and describe what they see in straightforward language. Reception. Literary critic Michiko Kakutani writing in "The New York Times" found text to like in this book, but finds it lacking the charm of the first memoir, and better organized than the second. McCourt exhorts his students in the writing class at Stuyvesant High school when he interrogates them about their dinner the night before, which is "an exercise in observation and family dynamics, of course - a lesson to his students that "you are your material."" The reviewer feels that McCourt succeeded in this in his first memoir, but it is "a lesson he tries to resurrect, with less success, in this tepid new book." The review in "Kirkus Reviews" is more positive, finding rich material in McCourt's growth as a teacher of high school students in New York City. Recalling the prior book "'Tis: A Memoir" and its style, "The same dark humor, lyric voice and gift for dialogue are apparent here". McCourt begins with the scary first day of teaching his own class at a vocational high school. After many years in vocational high schools, he gains a position at another public school, Stuyvesant High School, which had much competition for entry. The reviewer felt that "McCourt’s self-deprecating tone diminishes in this section, for now this innovative teacher is given free rein, and it is clear that he’s having a grand time.", citing one of the more memorable vocabulary lessons. The review is summed up by saying that "The teaching profession’s loss is the reading public’s gain, entirely." Thomas Hansen, a former teacher who moved up to the Illinois State Board of Education, reviewed this book and found it "a wonderful one if people are into teaching". McCourt "includes some of the funniest passages I have ever seen in a book. His style and his ability to manipulate the reader—through the use of sardonic and twisting adventures—are enthralling aspects of his writing." Regarding McCourt himself, says that "Teachers will all see through a lot of his yarns and predicaments … discovering underneath a lot of the foolishness of everyday life the author’s ability to teach. ... he is always a teacher." Rebecca Seal in "The Guardian" concludes that "At times McCourt can be a deeply frustrating protagonist, but this is, none the less, a really good read." Where the experienced teacher reviewing the book sees through every device, this reviewer notes that "The only place he [McCourt] ever seems to have belonged was in front of a class, ... although it's difficult to know whether his self-deprecation is disingenuousness or exaggeration, or if he really was as shy, miserable and irrational as he portrays himself to be." The contrast of reviews may point up that those who have been teachers can see through the devices of his style to understand the quality of this teacher. The memoir has "the lilting style and phonetic writing that marked out his last two books". Hillel Italie in the "Los Angeles Times" describes Frank McCourt, writing "Teacher Man" as his third and probably last memoir "proved with "Angela’s Ashes" that publishing was not just a young person’s game and that you didn’t need to be famous to get millions to care about your story." This third memoir continues his story, describing his development as a teacher, including many anecdotes from his classes, and the work to teach five classes of high school students every day, always regaining their attention if some slip of his tongue caused them not to pay attention. McCourt was asked if he would have liked to have been an author earlier in his life, not teaching five classes a day for so many years. His reply begins as he "quickly shakes his head. On the good days, and there were many, he never felt so alive, caught up in the currents of adolescent energy. And McCourt brought his own spark, like having the students write each other’s obituaries or set recipes to music." Italie interviewed a student of McCourt from his years at Stuyvesant High School who is now an author herself: "Susan Gilman, remembers McCourt as an innovative and charismatic teacher so popular that students would “forget their program cards” to get in his class. For Gilman, the McCourt legend preceded meeting him." She went on to describe McCourt as "“a very quiet guy, unlike the rest of the rabble,” Hamill says with a laugh. “He had a low-key, wicked sense of humor." Jacki Lyden interviewed Frank McCourt and referred to "Teacher Man" as an "amusing and grim chronicle" of his life as a high school teacher; she remarked favorably on his use of language in the book, mentioning one phrase about the students "turning pages like lead" when they were not happy. The title of the book emerges from his second day of teaching at McKee Vocational High School, when one student both asked a question that framed McCourt's teaching style for the next 30 years, and then would not pick up on and use McCourt's name, but called him, "yo, teach" and then "yo, teacher man", when asking his question. The prologue from "Teacher Man" is reprinted at the web page; the interview is audio.

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Images and Shadows Images and Shadows is a book by Iris Origo, the Irish-American writer who spent most of her life in Italy. She owned and lived in the Tuscan estate of La Foce. It was first published by John Murray in 1970. The autobiography encompasses Origo's affluent New York/Long Island background, her childhood in Villa Medici in Fiesole and her progression to the Anglo-American artistic coterie in Florence; it then goes on to her marriage to an Italian (Antonio Origo) and, after the war, her life as an established author.