Secondhand Literary Biography Books

Maryann Burk Carver married Raymond Carver in 1957, when she was sixteen-years-old and he nineteen. Over the next twenty-five years, as Carver's fame grew, the couple and their two children...

This biography of Byron (by Byron's own publisher John Murray) attempts to reinterpret Byron's life and poetry for a new generation. Fiona MacCarthy has had access to the full John...

The artistic work of Leo Tolstoy has been described as 'nothing less than one tremendous diary kept for over fifty years'. This particular 'diary' begins with Tolstoy's first published work,...

With an introduction by Virginia NicholsonSaturday 2 February 1918. The first walk we've had for ever so long. Damp, mild vaporous day. Funeral bells tolling as we went out, &...

A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist - and prolific correspondent - Penelope Fitzgerald. Acclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels - including the Booker Prize-winning 'Offshore' -...

Ranulph Fiennes has travelled to the most dangerous and inaccessible places on earth, almost died countless times, lost nearly half his fingers to frostbite, raised millions of pounds for charity...

Doris Lessing's long-awaited follow-up to the first part of her autobiography, the hugely successful Under My Skin. In Walking in the Shade we move into the dazzling heyday of Lessing's...

Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It is largely political (while remaining personal). It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the...

Kathleen Tynan traces her husband's life from his illegitimate birth, through his rebellious years at Oxford, to his career as the "first post-war British myth" - actor, director, writer, flamboyant...

A concise biography of one of the most popular of Victorian novelists.

A loving homage to one of the world's greatest writers. In this first-ever tribute to her grandfather, Mariel opens the family album to reveal all aspects of the man. More...

Long-awaited and comprehensive biography of the great Irish author James JoyceJames Joyce was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, but he was not immediately recognised as such;...

In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a 'Surbiton of the...

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was born at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when the world was beginning to be discovered and carved up by navigators, geographers and cartographers. Mercator...

Philip Davis tells the story of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), the self-made son of poor Jewish immigrants who went on to become one of the foremost novelists and short-story writers of...

Edwin Williamson's major new biography is the first in any language to encompass the entire span of Jorge Luis Borges's life and work. Drawing upon previously unknown or unavailable sources,...

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed... In Levels of Life Julian Barnes gives us Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and...

Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romantic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His...

A brilliant, controversial and insightful biography. Fifteen years ago, Iris Murdoch asked A. N. Wilson to be her biographer. This book is a tribute to the novelist he knew for...