Secondhand Literary Biography Books

Available for the first time and collected in one volume, the letters of one of America's most beloved authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder-a treasure trove that offers new and unexpected understanding...

The father fled East Prussia to escape the 1880s pogroms and, as a penniless immigrant boy, hawked newspapers on the streets of Chicago. The son, who lives on Philadelphia's Main...

In spring 2004, Susan Sontag was diagnosed with the incurable blood cancer. She had a huge appetite for experience, and a wild, extravagant desire to live. Rieff writes movingly about...

'Absolutely exquisite . . . a contemporary classic' Dave Eggers'Death in Venice with more sex, more booze, more action.' FTBBC Radio 4 Book of the WeekOstend, 1936: the Belgian seaside...

In this biography of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) the author shows him through a life of tumultuous creativity through which he strove to bring new meaning to poetry, vision and politics....

The life of Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) was as romantic and harrowing as that of any of her fictional heroines. She enjoyed an idyllic childhood in the Thames valley, and she...

When we spend so much of our time immersed in books, who's to say where reading ends and living begins? The two are impossibly and gloriously wedded, as Hill shows...

At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied...

Experience how it feels to be the subject of a blasphemy prosecution! Find out why 'wool' is a funny word! See how jokes work, their inner mechanisms revealed, before your...

Bruce Chatwin's death in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end, since he burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia.Chatwin himself was...

'Throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten ....'Boy is a funny, insightful and at times grotesque...

The work of the poet Peter Redgrove is one of the great unexplored treasures of late twentieth century literature. His prolific output presents an intriguing variety of personae: magician, scientist,...

In this much anticipated addition to the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet...

This is an absorbing portrait of a literary genius, whose muse was the desire for wealth and fortune, and whose misplaced entrepreneurial enthusiasms more then once endandgered the very money...

Charles Dickens is the acclaimed definitive biography by bestselling author Claire Tomalin Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and...

Written in an even more vivid and direct style than her celebrated memoirs, Diana Athill's letters to the American poet Edward Field reveal a sharply intelligent woman with a brilliant...

This biography of Evelyn Waugh traces the career of a writer who, though respected, was always controversial and undoubtedly eccentric. In particular it focuses on his difficult relationship with his...

He has written a masterful biography, rich in enlivened critical detail, which more than any other study of Waugh to date, works to redress the bias against its subject that...

Vaclav Havel is one of the most important European writers of our time. In 1979 he was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labour for his involvement...

Brief Encounters describes Bill Long''s chance meetings with some of the most famous writers of our time, including Raymond Chandler and John Steinbeck.'

This record of the early life of James Joyce is based on years of research into his education, religious and sexual experiences, family life and his roamings around Dublin -...

Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeShortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography PrizeThe Number One Irish Bestseller 'Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should...

Conrad's impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point. Such phrases as "heart of darkness" and "The horror!...

Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions....

'This delicious acorn of a book is as spare, elegant and to-the-point as the literary oak it describes.'- Emma ThompsonJane Austen lived to just 41, never married, never had children,...

Necrophilia is not one of my failings, but I do like graveyards and memorial stones and such...Following the publication In My Mind's Eye, her acclaimed first volume of diaries, a...

Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee are respectively responsible for some of the great contemporary works of fiction: Auster's The New York Trilogy or Coetzee's Disgrace are only two of...

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social...

Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed on big and small screens. But who was she? And what world did she...

*The Sunday Times bestseller* 'Funny, intimate and honest' Louis Theroux 'Moving and funny. I absolutely loved it' Claudia Winkleman 'Heartbreaking, hilarious, comforting' Marie Claire Dear 2020 - can we just...