The story of an apprentice chemist whose uncle's worthless medicine becomes a spectacular marketing success, Tono-Bungay earned H. G. Wells immediate acclaim when it appeared in 1909. It remains a sparkling chronicle of chicanery and human credulity, and is today regarded by many as Wells's greatest novel. As Andrea Barrett observes in her Introduction, "Through its detailed, often brilliant descriptions and powerful imagery, [Tono-Bungay] slyly satirizes...

The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood, in 1952. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships--with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, and James Dickey among others--and her...

Thomas De Quincey was an obsessive. He was obsessed with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose Lyrical Ballads provided the script to his life. Running away from school to pursue the two poets, De Quincey insinuated himself into their world. Basing his sensibility on Wordsworth's and his character on Coleridge's, he forged a triangle of unusual psychological complexity.

Published in 1870, this was the first full-length biography of Jane Austen. Written by her nephew, it is filled with loving family remembrances as well as details of social and domestic life in rural England. Austen-Leigh's biography is the most influential source on Austen scholarship outside of Austen's own writings.

Sportsman, womanizer, naval commander, world-traveler, spy, the creator of the Cold War's archetypal secret agent was infinitely more complicated and interesting than his major fictional character, Agent 007, as Lycett shows in this full-length biography of Ian Fleming.

Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life is the first book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter's love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work. The book begins with a gardener's biography, highlighting the key moments and places throughout her life that helped define her, including her home Hill Top Farm in England's Lake District. Next, the reader follows Beatrix Potter through a year in her garden, with a season-by-season...

This is more than a biography of the great humorist from Niles, Michigan. In a penetrating full-length portrait, Donald Elder has explored Ring Lardner's whole world-the vibrant and inventive times in which he lived, the unforgettable people who surrounded him, and the impudent words that came from his typewriter. At the height of Lardner's fame in the middle twenties he was known simultaneously as a baseball reporter unlike any the world had ever...

The Late John Marquand is an engrossing and well-studied literary biography of one of twentieth century America's finest writers of fiction, by the bestselling protégé who took up his mantle.

A portrait of the author of "Alice in Wonderland" analyzes contradictory aspects of his character, tapping recently discovered sources to set Carroll's life in the context of Victorian England, and assesses his financial difficulties and his relationship with the real Alice.

Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud owners of a near-derelict croft house—a farmer's stone cottage—on "a small acre" of land. Mary assumed duties as the island's district nurse. Call...