| Synopsis: |
Biographies always fascinate us: the origins of a famous figure or great artist are the stuff of hours of pleasure in a comfortable chair. David Ellis, himself a biographer of D.H. Lawrence, has created a book about how lives come to be written. As rich as it is brief, Literary Lives illuminates the process by which one writer finds the "understanding" of another literary life -- the key or point that makes it possible to hold another writer's life in one's hands.Biographers sift everything to find the key: this writer and her social scene, that writer and his body; one biographer investigates the Ancestors, another the Childhood. Many discuss money, many discuss sex. Literary Lives is packed with anecdotes, drawing upon literary biography from Dr Johnson to the present. David Ellis deftly connects us with a gallery of biographers and writers -- Sartre and Flaubert; Peter Ackroyd and Dickens; Painter and Proust; Freud, Plath, and Henry James; Hemingway and Woolf; Leon Edel and Bernard Crick, and dozens more.A book to be treasured by lovers of literary biography, Literary Lives illuminates that most delicious genre, the writer's life. |