Product Description: Jill Craigie-filmmaker, writer, pioneering feminist and devoted wife to former Labour Leader Michael Foot-led an extraordinary life. Strikingly attractive, fiercely independent and politically radical, Craigie established a reputation as a filmmaker with her 1944 film, Out of Chaos, becoming the first female director to gain national attention...read more

Product Description: Carl Rollyson was Norman Mailer's first literary biographer to draw on unpublished letters and manuscripts as well as on interviews with the writer's friends and foes. Rollyson provides a full account of Mailer's college years, especially his fear of being drafted...read more

Product Description: This new edition of "Notable American Novelists" presents biographical sketches and analytical overviews of 145 of the best-known American and Canadian writers of long fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries, arranged alphabetically by name...read more

Product Description: Collection of 106 essays on playwrights ranging from ancient Greeks and Romans to contemporary dramatists taken from the recently published Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition. Each essay lists the playwright's principal dramatic works and other writings and has sections on the playwright's writings in other forms, and life...read more

Product Description: The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary seventy-one year writing career. The general introductory studies of West are outdated and do not take into account her posthumous publications, or her large literary archive of unpublished letters and manuscripts...read more

Presents a guide to the life and literary accomplishments of the American author, including analyses of the contents and characters of each of his works.

Product Description: "We used to canonize our heroes," Oscar Wilde wrote. "The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable." Since Wilde's condemnation of modern biography, the genre would appear to have accelerated its descent into bad taste...read more

Product Description: Essays in Biography is a play on words conveying Carl Rollyson's attempt to explore the nature of biography in pieces about the history of the genre and in portrayals of biographers (Plutarch, Leon Edel, and W. A. Swanberg), literary figures (Lillian Hellman, Jack London), philosophers and critics (Leo Strauss and Hippolyte Taine), political figures (Winston Churchill and Napoleon), and artists (Rembrandt and Rubens)...read more

Combines, updates, and expands two earlier Salem Press reference sets: Critical survey of drama, Rev. ed., English language series, published in 1994, and Critical survey of drama, Foreign language series, published in 1986. This new 8 vol. set contains 602 essays, of which 538 discuss individual dramatists and 64 cover broad overview topics. The dramatist profiles contain more than 310 photographs and drawings.

Combines, updates, and expands two earlier Salem Press reference sets: Critical survey of drama, Rev. ed., English language series, published in 1994, and Critical survey of drama, Foreign language series, published in 1986. This new 8 vol. set contains 602 essays, of which 538 discuss individual dramatists and 64 cover broad overview topics. The dramatist profiles contain more than 310 photographs and drawings.

Alphabetically arranged entries offer information on the Brontèes, covering their novels, poetry, articles, essays, characters, significant events and people, and travels.

Delves beneath the surface to examine the forces that made Sontag an international icon, exploring her public persona and private passions, including the strategies behind her meteoric rise to fame and her political moves.

Reading Susan Sontag is the first book to survey the broad range of Ms. Sontag's work, including full discussions of her fiction. Carl Rollyson, Ms. Sontag's first biographer, is uniquely situated to provide well-informed and clear readings of all her major work. He writes for general readers and students as well as for specialists. Each of his chapters is devoted to one of Ms. Sontag's books and is divided into three sections: synopsis, Ms. Sontag's own views of her work, and critical commentary, and thus progresses from basic knowledge to more sophisticated interpretation. In a detailed chronological overview of her work, Mr. Rollyson also describes and comments on Ms. Sontag's forays into film and theatre, showing how her interests in dance and opera, for example, are connected to her aesthetic view of the world. A helpful glossary at the end of the book defines the terms and figures of speech that characterize her essays and may inhibit readers who do not share her formidable command of world culture; it also traces her use of allusions to other writers from one essay to the next. In all, Reading Susan Sontag is an enormously useful companion to the work of one of our major writers.

Alphabetically-arranged entries in three chronological volumes discuss literary movements, characters, works, and authors from the colonial period through the twentieth century. (view table of contents)

Alphabetically-arranged entries in three chronological volumes discuss literary movements, characters, works, and authors from the colonial period through the twentieth century.

Product Description: Martha Gellhorn reported on wars from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s, and was a voice filled with outrage against the perfidy of governments and the posing of phonies. She was married to Hemingway and Colette's stepson. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)