From Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, delve into more than 100 biographies of the world's greatest writers. Introduced with a stunning portrait of each featured novelist, playwright, or poet, biographical entries trace the friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired each individual and influenced their work, revealing insights into the larger-than-life characters, plots, and evocative settings that they created. Lavishly illustrated with photographs and paintings of writers' homes, studies, and personal artefacts - along with pages from original manuscripts, first editions, and their correspondence - this book introduces the key ideas, themes, and literary techniques of each writer, revealing the imaginations and personalities behind some of the world's greatest novels, short stories, poems, and plays. With a foreword introduction by James Naughtie, and covering an eclectic range of authors from the Middle Ages to the present day, Writers provides a compelling glimpse of the lives and loves of each great writer.

At a time when he is coming up to the fantastic achievement of 100 million copies sold worldwide across all his books, his fans will be delighted with the first ever official biography of Paulo, an in-depth look at his life and work, and what makes him the much-loved author he is today

This book lifts the lid on Agatha Christie's biggest secret - how her pencilled notes, lists and drafts led to her many successful books, plays and stories.

Nobel Laureate for Literature, campaigner for human rights, advocate of free speech and merciless critic of the Soviet system, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has lived a life which will serve as a permanent reminder of the crimes committed in the name of Communism. A completely absorbing portrait of one of the few defining figures of the 20th century. D.M. Thomas's biography is the story not just of one of the century's most influential writers but the history of Russia itself.

When she disappeared in 1937 over a shark-infested sea, Amelia Earharthad lived up to her wish - internationally famous, a daring and pioneering aviator, and ambassador extraordinary for the United States. Married to a man with a genius for publicity, her life was crowded, demanding and adventurous. Mary S. Lovell's superb biography examines a legend to reveal the pressures and influences that drove Amelia, and shows how her life, career and manner of death foreshadowed the tragedies and excesses of a media-dominated age.

Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976, having become the best-selling novelist in history. Her autobiography, published in 1977 a year after her death, tells of her fascinating private life, from early childhood through two marriages and two World Wars, and her experiences both as a writer and on archaeological expeditions with her second husband, Max Mallowan. Not only does the book reveal the true genius of her legendary success, but the story is vividly told and as captivating as one of hernovels.

The last six US Presidents have all claimed C. S. Lewis to be one of their favourite writers (as have Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair). He was an acclaimed academic, a renowned Christian thinker and apologist, the author of dozens of non-fiction books and a founder member of The Inklings (with J.R.R. Tolkien).Lewis fought in the First World War trenches and became a famous broadcaster known as 'the apostle to sceptics' during World War II: his newspaper articles and radio programmes were well known. He led what was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a rather bohemian life in Oxford, living with a much older woman, a widow named Janie Moore.

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Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books. Careless People tells the true story behind F.Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail its relation to the extravagant, scandalous, and chaotic world in which the author lived.With wit and insight, Sarah Churchwell traces the genesis of a masterpiece, mapping where fiction comes from, and how it takes shape in the mind of a genius. Careless People tells the extraordinary tale of how F. Scott Fitzgerald created a classic and in the process discovered modern America.

'Fear makes me a writer, fear and a lack of confidence'
Charles Bukowski chronicled the seedy underside of the city in which he spent most of his life, Los Angeles. His heroes were the panhandlers and hustlers, the drunks and the hookers, his beat the racetracks and strip joints and his inspiration a series of dead-endjobs in warehouses, offices and factories. It was in the evenings that he would put on a classical record, open a beer and begin to type...

In this groundbreaking and unconventional biography, Lyndall Gordon dismantles the insistent image of Charlotte Bronte as a modest Victoria nlady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones, revealing instead astrong and fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art.

Agatha Christie's memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan Agatha Christie was already well known as a crime writer when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s. She took enormous interest in all his excavations, and when friends asked what her strange life was like, she decided to answer their questions in this delightful book

Unpublished in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson's, intensely personal lyrics have been much admired and very influential since.

George Orwell was one of the greatest writers England produced in the last century. He left an enduring mark on our language and culture, with concepts such as 'Big Brother' and 'Room 101.' His reputation rests not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires (Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four) but also on his marvellously clear style and superb essays, which rank with the best ever written. Gordon Bowker's new biography, written to coincide with Orwell's centenary, includes fascinating new material which brings his life into unfamiliar focus.

Goodbye Christopher Robin: A.A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh is drawn from Ann Thwaite's acclaimed biography of A. A. Milne, one of the most successful English writers ever, and the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, and of Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and Christopher Robin.But the fictional Christopher Robin was based on Milne's own son. This heart-warming and touching book recounts the true story that inspired the film Goodbye Christopher Robin, directed by Simon Curtis and starring Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie and Kelly Macdonald, and offers the reader a glimpse into the relationship between Milne and the real-life Christopher Robin, whose toys inspired the magical world of the Hundred Acre Wood.

This beautifully illustrated biography follows Jane Austen's life and work (which includes Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility and Emma) and celebrates the legacy of the much-loved literary icon. It also explores Austen's inspirations and influences, her domestic life and the society she lived in.

Born into a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1919 yet through his work he is one of the most modern of writers. While previous works have concentrated on Kafka and his women, Nicholas Murray will concentrate on his extraordinary relationship with his father which found its most eloquent literary expression in the story 'The Judgement' written in 1912 when Kafka was twenty-nine:in a reverse Oedipal move, the father condemns his son to death by drowning.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil his friend's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to editing, publishing and canonizing Kafka's work. By betraying his friend's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal was also eventually to lead to an international legal battle: as a writer in German, should Kafka's papers come to rest in Germany, where his three sisters died as victims of the Holocaust? Or, as a Jewish writer, should his work be considered as a cultural inheritance of Israel, a state that did not exist at the time of his death? Alongside an acutely observed portrait of Kafka, Benjamin Balint also traces the journey of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939 and offers a gripping account of the Israeli court case that determined their fate. He tells of a wrenching escape from the Nazi invaders of Czechoslovakia; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and of two countries whose national obsessions with the past eventually faced off in the courts.

Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come to us as an odd and helpless woman living a life of self imposed seclusion. Lyndall Gordon sees instead a volcanic character living on her own terms and with a steely confidence in her own talent;a woman whose family feuded over a hothouse of adultery and devastating betrayal and a woman who had her own secret.

In this fascinating, informative, and entertaining collection, internationally acclaimed, award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his attention to the intricacies of family relationships in literature and writing. In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also, with wit and rare tenderness, articulates the great joy of reading their work. In the piece on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Tóibín reveals an artist "alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish" and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, or Thomas Mann and his children, or J.M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibín makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children.The majority of these pieces were previously published in the Londron Review of Books, the New York Review Review of Books, and the Dublin Review. Three of the thirteen pieces have never appeared before.

Deric's gentle tales of life in Huddersfield with his wife Aileen and their menagerie of playful cats have won him thousands of loyal fans. And after a few years break Deric returns with the latest, and eagerly awaited, instalment of his memoirs. Deric is getting on a bit now and so are his cats. Life chez-Longden has adjusted to a slower pace, but everyday is still full of opportunities for the sort of mischief, mishaps and adventures that come with sharing your house and life with a troop of small cats with big personalities. Paws in the Proceedings has all of Deric's trademark charm, homespun wisdom and gentle wit. His remarkable eye for the humorous detail and the keen observation are very much in evidence, and this is another comic gem that will delight Deric's loyal fans and bring him to a bigger audience than ever before.

When Cosmo Landesman's American parents decided to move their young family to London in the swinging sixties, it was not to pursue a quieterlife on this side of the pond. Quite the reverse: it was out of unbridled, unashamed lust for fame and fortune. But things did not go according to plan, and as a child Cosmo found himself charged with raising his startstruck parents and trying to cope with the publicity stunt of their 'open marriage'.

The story of the tragic Bronte family is familiar to everyone: we all know about the half-mad, repressive father, the drunken, drug-addicted wastrel of a brother, wild romantic Emily, unrequited Anne and 'poor Charlotte'. Or do we? These stereotypes of the popular imagination are precisely that - imaginary - created by amateur biographers from Mrs Gaskell onwards who were primarily novelists, and were attracted by the tale of an apparently doomed family of genius.

This prize-winning biography, newly revised, sees Virginia Woolf as she saw herself. The first to set out the private life behind the well-known facts of her public career, A Writer's Life rocks back and forth between memories and art to reveal an explorer of 'the infinite oddity of the human position'. Instead of the doom-and-death often imposed on women of genius, here is the robust walker and seeker for what was fertile in her intimacies, in women's nature, and in resistance to power.

This volume in the Writers Lives series offers a reassessment of Shakespeare and his creative output from his earliest work through his 'mature' drama and the late plays, taking into account our current knowledge of Shakespeare's biography and consensus on key textual, critical and theatrical issues.William Baker offers a comprehensive but accessible introduction to Shakespeare's work and places it in the contexts of what is known of his life and activities. Avoiding speculation of a biographical, critical or textual nature, he focuses instead on an account of what is known of Shakespeare and his achievement at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Charles Dickens's experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. His intelligence works intuitively rather than conceptually and ideas about imagination often emerge informally in personal letters and implicitly through characters, language and story. His self-analysis and reflexive tendency are embedded in his styles and forms of narrative and dialogue, images of normality, madness, extremity, subversion and disorder, poetry and inter-textuality, anticipating and shaping the languages of modernism, influencing James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as traditionalists like H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh. Discussing Dickens's novels and some of his letters, sketches, essays and stories, Barbara Hardy offers a fascinating demonstration of creativity.

Alexander Pushkin is considered by many to be Russia’s greatest poet, and through his poems as well as his experimentation with other genres—dramas, short stories, prose novels—he influenced generations of Russian and international writers. This exquisite biography examines Pushkin as writer, lover, and public figure, exploring his relationship with politics and providing a fascinating glimpse of the turbulent history that surrounded Pushkin’s life. This is a succinct and sympathetic guide to understanding Russia’s most celebrated literary figure.