THE WORLDS OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye by Jeremy Dauber - 2013

THE WORLDS OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye by Jeremy Dauber - 2013

This is the first ever comprehensive biography of Sholem Aleichem, one of the greatest short story writers.

1859 Born in The Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire

1916 Dies in New York City, then part of The U.S.A.  His funeral is attended by 250,000

To most people, certainly me a few years ago, Yiddish writers were divided into two categories, Sholom Aleichem and a bunch of authors I have never heard about who i would never have read were it not for Yale University Press giving me a full set of The Yale Yiddish Library.  These nine volumes, introduced by top authorities in Yiddish Studies, include some of the great classics.

Among the works were two totally marvelous novels  by Sholom Aleichem.  All of the works were pre-Holocaust, written in Eastern Europe and Russia.  All were by men.  As Yiddish speakers left Europe, mostly to NYC then Toronto and Montréal women writers like Blume Lempel and Chava Rosenfarb began publishing in Yiddish.  I have talked a bit about the history of Yiddish Literature (running from around 1875 to maybe 2004 with the passing of the last of the emigrated writers) in prior posts.  My perception is most seriously into Yiddish Literature, a huge treasure trove of Short Stories, are “heritage readers” seeking ties with the world of their ancestors in Eastern Europe.  Behind it is also a powerful message to those who would destroy Jewish Culture, you lose, we win.  I read in this area because it is an incredibly wonderful literature.  The stories range from heart breaking to funnier than a Mel Brooks movie.  Yiddish scholarship has very strong support and thanks to the internet, and maybe especially The Yiddish Book Center, interest is rapidly growing.  YouTube has lots of good videos and readings of stories.

Anyway Sholom Aleichem is by far now most known Yiddish writer.  He is most famous from the movie Fiddler on the Roof based on his Tevye Cycle, centering on a Russian dairyman and his relationship with his daughters.  So far I have read only one story in the series, “Chava”.  For sure I agree with those who see it as great literature, perhaps high art.  

THE WORLDS OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye by Jeremy Dauber is a very delightful literary biography.  Dauber very much brings Sholom Aleichem to life.  He presents the Life of the author almost as if were a Yiddish novel.  Every chapter title refers to him as “our hero”.  Dauber does a wonderful job of blending cultural history, an account of a very event filled life along with commentary about his writings, stories, novels, and plays.  He skillfully shows us how his life experiences influenced his work.

Sholom Aleichem married rich, lost a fortune, at times he made very good money from his works.

Dauber helped me understand the economics of the Yiddish Publishing in the period.  Aleichem was not just a writer, for a while he published a journal and he when he could supported other writers.  We follow him as he moves around in Russia, inspite of Tsarist sponsored anti-Semetic laws and pograms, Aleichem never lost his fondness for Russia, travels all over Poland, then onto New York City.  He idolized Charles Dickens and like him he turned to lectures and Public readings to support his family.  We see a very complex publishing business in NYC and Warsaw, some publishers were honest and generous, some published his work without permission or compensation.  In a good year he made about, in 2018 money, $125,000.  

Aleichem in his final years was a super star of the huge New York City and Warsaw Yiddish world.  Toward the end of his life efforts were initiated by major main stream publishers to go big time with English translations of his work. 

Dauber treats us to ten accounts of the impact of his work, from right after his death up to the story behind the production of the plays and then the Fiddler on     the Roof movie.  I wished he could have basked in the glory.  

Sholem Aleichem, the pseudonym of a Russified Jewish intellectual named Solomon Rabinovitz (1859–1916), created many of the most enduring works of modern Yiddish fiction. Born in Pereyaslav, Ukraine, he received a traditional education and lived in Kiev and Odessa before immigrating to New York City. Upon his death in 1916, the New York Times published a front-page obituary, memorializing him as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” More than 100,000 people attended his funeral procession, making it the largest New York City had ever seen. His humorous representations of the rhythms of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish life have had a lasting influence on modern Jewish literary traditions... From The Yiddish Book Center

JEREMY DAUBER is a professor of Yiddish literature at Columbia University, where he also serves as director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and teaches in the American Studies program. His previous books include In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern and Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature. He lives in New York City. From Penguin Books.

I give my total endorsement to this book.  If you are into Yiddish Literature you will be fascinated.  If you are not yet a reader, maybe if you are lucky and open to new experiences you will be started on a  life time reading experience in Yiddish Literature.

http://sholemaleichem.org/

A great resource

Georges Perec by David Bellos - 1994 - 824 pages

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to acquire this wonderful biography 

George Perec’s parents immigrated to France from Poland in 1924.  His father was killed in 1940 serving in the French Army.  His mother died at Auschwitz in in 1940. The great  Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz was a distant relative.  Perec spoke some Yiddish but had little sense of being Jewish.

March 1, 1936. Born in Paris

1958 to 1959. Served as a Paratrooper in the French Army

1961 to 1978. Worked as an archivist for The Hospital Saint Antoine in 

Paris

1969 La Disportier, a 300 page novel without an “E” Is published 

1978 Life a User’s Manual is published, to great acclaim 

March 3, 1982 dies. Paris

Last month Amazon recommended Life a User’s Manual by Georges

Perec, translated from the French by David Bellos.  I had never heard of the author but the book did sound interesting to me so I took a gamble and acquired it.  Now I regard Life A User’s Manual as one of the very best novels I have ever read as well as being just a delight to experience.  I was stunned by the creativity and brilliance behind this book and wanted to learn more about the author as was very happy to learn Bellos has written an 824 page biography of him

David Bellos is considered the authority on Perec.  His book starts with Perec’s grandparents back in Poland.  It is very detailed on all aspects of the life of Perec, from his long career as an archivist, his marriage and romances, his role in French intellectual life and his prolific literary output.  (A comprehensive bibliography is included). He offers very insightful commentary on his fictions and his work in the cinema and theater.  His long commentary on Life A User’s Manual for sure increased my understanding of the complex fascinating structure of this marvellous novel.  I hope to reread it pretty soon and will, I hope, see deeper into this very Parisian book because of the guidance of Bellos.

I offer my appreciation to Bellos for making Georges 

Perec available to the Anglophone Reading Life World.

DAVID BELLOS is Professor of French at Princeton University. He won the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie for Georges Perec and has been chiefly instrumental in introducing this author to an English-language public. He is the English translator of Life A User’s Manual (for which translation he won the IBM-France Prize). Things: A Story of the Sixties, W or The Memory of Childhood, and “53 Days”, all by Georges Perec. He has also published studies of Honoré de Balzac. His biography of Jacques Tati is also published by Harvill in 1999...from the publisher 

Mel u

J. D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski (2015)

Born - January 1, 1919 - New York City

Catcher in the Rye - published 1951, Over 65,000,000 copies sold

Died -  January 27, 2010, Cornish, New Hampshire 

I read Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger probably around fifty years ago.  A few months ago my youngest daughter, 19, said one of her friends advised her she must read the book so I bought her a copy.  All I knew about Salinger before I read the best selling biography by Kenneth Slawenski J. D. Salinger: A Life was that he became a recluse, shielding himself from the public in a country house in rural New Hampshire.  

Slawenski does a wonderful job bringing the legend to life.  His biography was a delight to read, with an elegant prose style.  I throughly enjoyed this book.

We see Salinger was born  into an affluent New York City family.  His mother totally doted on him and he got pretty much anything he wanted.  When he told his parents he wanted to be a professional writer, his father was skeptical but his mother supported the idea.  Salinger never finished college.  He had some limited early success selling a couple of stories.  After the United States entered World War II, Salinger joined the army.  He scored high on various tests and tried to become an officer but did not succeed.  After about a year on various American bases in training Salinger was part of the invasion force that went ashore in France on D Day. Salinger spent three years in the army, conducting himself with great fortitude.  He experienced massive death rates among his comrades.  He was designated as  an intelligence official.  His job was to question captured German troops and citizens in towns the Americans occupied.  He was in Paris after the liberation, where he made a life time friend, Ernest Hemingway who helped him deal with the horrors of war.  Perhaps the most traumatic of his experiences was at the liberation of concentration camps.  Slawenski lets us see how all this death, cruelty and violence impacted the raised in a pampered way Salinger.  He often received gift baskets from his mother and he wrote a few short stories about his war experiences.

Salinger was so happy to return home, he was kept for about six months in Germany as his intelligence skills were needed.  Salinger was what would have in 1946 been called "a ladies man".  He had numerous girl friends and like to hang out at elite places in NYC.  He began writing again and Slawenski lets us follow closely the career

Path of Salinger.  He knew he had succeeded when after numerous rejections the super prestigious New Yorker offered him a $30,000 yearly contract to have first refusal rights on all his work.  Salinger struggled with editors and mentors but The New Yorker became his literary home and the editorial staff a second family.

Slawenski shows us the very long genesis of The Catcher in the Rye.  We see Salinger becoming more demanding about the way his work was published and more difficult personally.  He became interested in Zen Buddhism and later was very influenced by the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, a Hindu religious teacher.  

Slawenski devotes a great deal of space to explicating Salinger's short stories, letting us she the impact of Salinger's experiences and his spiritual beliefs.  Along the way we learn a lot about the business side of Salinger's career.  We are there for his three marriages and a late life affair.  As he became more famous reporters sought him out.  I was surprised to learn that the man who murdered John Lennon was reading calmly a copy of Catcher in the Rye when the police arrested him.  He said he was inspired by the lead character Holden Caulfield to kill Lennon.  Also the attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan had a copy of the book in his back pack.  The book in spite of being a great commercial and literary success began to be banned in schools.  

There is much more in this book.  We see Salinger settle in on his 90 acre property in New Hampshire, follow decline of his second marriage, his first was a one year fiasco with a French woman he met while in Europe who some say was a gestapo agent, we admire what a devoted father he became.  We see him become more and more private. His third  marriage was the best.  He had a strange late life affair that Slawenski details.  

This is a first rate literary biography. Slawenski totally knows the work of Salinger.  I for sure want to reread Catcher in the Rye and read the rest of his work.  

Kenneth Slawenski is the author of J. D. Salinger: A Life, on which he worked for eight years, and the creator of the New York Times recommended Web site DeadCaulfields.com.

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The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography by A. J. A. Symons (1934)

Corvo top 

Baron Curso - A K A Frederick Rolfe (1860 to 1913, born England, died in Italy) published Hadrian the Seventh in 1904

Alphonse James Albert Symons (1900 to 1941, England, the son of Russian Jewish Immigrants, remembered primarily for this book
Not long ago I read and posted upon a book that will doubtless become required reading for those interested in the art of literary biography, The Long Pursuit:  The Romantic Biography by Richard Holmes.  Holmes taught a Masters class in writing biographies for years at the University of East Angelia.  For that he prepared a list of what he considered "canon status" biographical works that he wanted his students, all aspiring biographers, to read.  Among the seven from the 20th century was The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography by A. J. A. Symons.  I fell in love with this book five pages in!

The Quest for Corvo is widely regarded as one of the best of literary biographies.  Symons has given the world a biography of the author of Hadrian the Seventh written in exquisite prose.  His every sentence is a polished gem.  We also see how he came to write the biography and his methods of research.

Hadrian the Seventh is the story of how a sexually depraved poverty stricken Englishmen became pope and ended up dying in abject poverty in Venice.

Symons was given lots of papers and a copy of Hadrian the Seventh by a friend.  On reading the novel he was determined to find out all he could about the author.  He discovered both a con man and a genius, living from borrowing money and art projects and some money from writing.  He was Gay and the book is considered an early GLBT classic.  We follow along as Symons contacts through letters initially friends and family of Corso.  He had assumed the title Baron, claiming with no substantiation he had been awarded the honor, and tried to live like royalty.  He died in the gutters of the bad side of Venice.

This book is worth reading just for the prose style, the many people we meet and for an appreciation of how hard serious biographical research in pre-internet days.  I guess no more books like this will probably be written, more the pity.

The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon (2016

 

Angela Carter 1940 to 1992, England, died of lung cancer

I have read only a few of Angela Carter's dark and wonderful short stories, mostly from her now most read work, The Bloody Chamber (1979).

The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon is a first rate literary biography. As I read on I came to like both the book and Carter so much that I was sad upon completion, maybe my feelings were amplified by her way to early death at fifty two.

Gordon shows us at least three processes of invention.  We see Angela inventing her persona.  Gordon does a very good job detailing the people in Carter's life, starting with her parents and then her first husband, Paul Carter.  Carter was a musician, the marriage failed not due to any villainy on either side, he simply did not fulfill her needs and I think he came to bore her.

Angela won the Somerset Maugham award, a grant for travel expenses.  Angela decided  to go to Japan and this opened up her creativity and lead to two important romances, one with a Japanese man, one a Korean.  Carter had a very strong, by her own acknowledgement, sex drive and her relationships were strained at best. Carter struggled to make a living in Japan and eventually got homesick and accepted a secure job offer in England.  By age 32 she had written five novels.  She also wrote reviews and such for income.  As she became more famous she worked as a visiting professor in New York City, Adelaide Australia (which she loved) and several English schools.

Gordon spends a lot of time detailing Carter's life style at the time of writing of her more famous works, The Bloody Chamber (1979), Night at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991).  He shows how she employed her life experience and her extensive reading in her works.

A few years after divorcing Paul Carter, Angela fell in love with a man younger than her by a good bit who was doing some repair work on her house.  They married after few years, had a son, and he seems to have made her happy.  She was the primary earner in the family.

Gordon brings to life the many friends in Angela's life, from famous writers, publishers and intellectuals to ordinary people.

Gordon talks about how feminist and folk scholars approached her work.

We learn a lot about the business side of her publishing career.

There is a lot more in The Invention of Angela Carter than I have mentioned.  It for sure made me want to expand my reading of her work.  I greatly enjoyed this elegant insightful erudite biography.

Edmund Gordon studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and English literature at University College London, and since 2011 has been a lecturer in English at King's College London. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, he has also written for a variety of other publications in Britain and the US, including Bookforum and The Guardian.  The Invention of Angela Carter is his first book.

Mel u

Ted Hughes The Unauthorized Biography by Jonathan Bate (2015)

Born August 17, 1930, died October 28, 1998- U. K.

Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom December 28, 1984 to death

Married Sylvia Plath June 16, 1956 to February 11, 1963 

Ted Hughes The Unauthorized Biography by Jonathan Bate is one of the best literary biographies I have so far read.  I think in the broader culture he is probably best known as the husband of Sylvia Plath.  Her suicide became a dominating event in his subsequent Life history.  

As of this moment I am dealing with a painful strength depleting lingering illness.  Ordinarily I would try to do a post worthy of this great book about a greater poet.  Hughes was a larger than life figure, two women in his life killed themselves as did his oldest son.  He was deeply into the reading life, a good friend of Seamus Heaney, close to the Queen of England.  He was a man of great depth.  Bate quotes generously from his poetry.  Hughes left an archive of over 100,000 pages.  He loved fishing, nature, farming, Ovid and Shakespeare.  He loved women and the feeling was reciprocated.  Bate takes us far into the world of Hughes.  We see him as a father, a husband, a teacher, a reader, a business man managing the estate of Sylvia Plath, and a friend.  We see him struggle to write and continually revising his work.  He created some of the most powerful poetry of the English language.

I am very glad I read this book.

Mel u

Orwell: The Life by D. J. Taylor (2002)

I was delighted to learn that 1984 was the best selling book on Amazon last week. Seems I'm not the only one seeing the relevance of Orwell to the world of Trump's America
  Note added January 26, 2017
 

Born 1903, died 1951 (England)

Animal Farm - 1945

1984 - 1949

As I read Orwell: The Life by D. J. Taylor I could not help but wonder how he would react to Donald Trump ascending to the most powerful position in the world.  An ego mad buffoon who thrives on the worship of his idiot followers, who lies without even knowing it can now destroy civilization on a whim.  A man who surrounds himself with billionaires and claims to be the champion of the masses.

I am still in remote Philippines a place even more remote than the Burma of Orwell's novel Burmese Days,based on his five years as an imperial policeman. I have read Animal Farm numerous times, 1984 long ago and a bit more.  As to Taylor's bio, it is a good straightforward telling of the facts of his life.  He does not probe really deeply into Orwell's psyche but for sure you will be grounded in his life by this biography.



Mel u

Manderlay Forever by Tatiana de Rosnay (2016)

Daphne du Maurier on The Reading Life

Born: May 13, 1907, London, United Kingdom

Died: April 19, 1989, Fowey, United Kingdom

Rebecca, 1938

Mandalay Forever by Tatiana de Rosnay is a delightful, beautifully written, very emphatic biography of the beloved English author of Rebecca, The Jamaica Inn and the short story "The Birds", Daphne du Maurier.  

De Rosnay is a highly regarded commercially successful French novelist.  In her preface she tells us that she has chosen to tell du Maurier's life story as if she 

Writing a novel,rather than a documented and foot noted academic work.  She tells the story in the present tense, entering into the consciousness of du Maurier into her consciousness in the style of an omniscient narrator.  I admit I was a little put off in the opening section devoted to du Maurier as a young child in which we are told how the author at age four felt about family events.  Much of the childhood narrative is taken up with the role of her father Gerald du Maurier in her life.  He was considered one of England's best actors and the house was often full of theater people. The family was very affluent from his earnings and from 

inheritances.   As the girls matured, James Barie, author of Peter Pan, was a frequent visitor.  Her father was very much seeable as a Peter Pan figure.  He had frequent romances with young actresses, his daughters knew all about them and as they came and sent they were figures of fun between Gerald and the girls.   

I do not wish to relay the life history of du Maurier.  I will just talk about some of the things that most struck me about her  as I read this wonderful biography. Du Maurier's first crush was on her French teacher.  Daphne's parents approved her going on trips with the tutor on the idea it would improve her French.  I am quite sure it did.  It is made clear this was the first of numerous same sex physical and intensely emotional relationships Daphne would have throughout her life.  Among them was at least a love for Ellen Doubleday, wife of her American publisher.  De Rosnay, as have other biographers, make us see the greatest love of Daphne's life was an old Mansion on the Cornish Coast in which she lived for about twenty five years.  Daphne was very into boats and sailing.  One day she and her sisters saw in the bay an incredibly handsome man on a small sail boat.  Daphne found a way to meet him and fell head over heels.  He was from a good family and they married.  He eventually became a major general in the British Amry, serving with distinction in India and France.  He was close to general Montgomery.  I was intrigued to learn that wherever he went he took with him eight prized teddy bears he had cherished since childhood.  This gave me something to think about. Their relationship had good and bad periods, they were separated for years and it seems he had other romances.

De Rosnay spends a lot of time on her relationships with her siblings, each with their own literary or artistic endeavors.  Daphne became rich through very high book sales, especially for Rebecca. From the movie rights, Hitchcock greatly admired her work, she got what would be millions of pounds today.  She was very generous with her family and friends though not a great money manager.

We learn a lot about the business and social side of being a famous novelist.  We see how she totally loved Paris, as did Nancy Mitford.  

I love this book.  Normally I E Read but if I had a hard copy of this book, I would enjoy just looking at and remembering how much I enjoyed ready this wonderful literary biography.

,

Mel u

Beryl Bainbridge A Biography Love By All Sorts of Means by Brendan King(2016)

Dame Beryl Bainbridge is regarded as one of the greatest and most prolific British novelists of her generation. Consistently praised by critics, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and twice won the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year.   She was born in Liverpool in 1932 and died in London in 2010.

Beryl Bainbridge On The Reading Life

Works Read to Date

Harriet Said

The Bottle Factory Outing

According to Queenie

Young Adolf

Sweet William 1976

An Awfully Big Adventure 1989

Birthday Boys 1991

Brendan King was Beryl Bainbridge's secretary and literary assistant for the final  23 years of her life.   Additionally he had unprecedented access to her letters and was on close terms with many of her friends, lovers, and publishers.   

Bainbridge's life was chaotic, full of excesses, lots of lovers, financial ups and downs, a good bit of whiskey.  Not to long ago I decided to read all of Bainbridge's seventeen novels.  So far I have read eight.  King devotes a lof of space to showing how about half of her novels arose from her early years working in the theater, The Bottle  Factory, one of my favorite of her novels, was inspired. by her work in such a place, and her romances.  (She at one point complied a list of seventeen lovers). We learn she liked sex, in addition to the lovers, it appears there may have been some same sex relations also there were a good number of no name one time encounters.  About half of her novels were contemporary set in England.  King tells us that about half way through her literary career Bainbridge felt she had fully mined her personal life and began to write historical fiction.  

King lets us see the importance having a good and caring publisher became to Bainbridge.  Her publisher even gave her a make work job in their office.  King shows us she was not a great money manager.  Some of her novels sold well and movies were made from a few of her books.  

King devotes a lot of space to explaining how her life produced her books,  we learn about her very serious research methods for her novel about Robert Scott's expedition to the South Pole, Birthday Boys.  Kings takes us deeply into Bainbridge's time working in regional British theater. 

Brendan King has written an illuminating highly emphatic very detailed biography.  He had intimate knowledge of her life and I felt I knew her through King's account of her life.  

Bainbridge was a warm, wise, and witty writer, best shared with a generous shot of rye whiskey.

Beryl Bainbridge A Biography Love By All Sorts of Means by Brendan King is s not just a  very good biography, it is a first rate social history and a brilliant account of a woman's struggling to make a living through her writings.  Bainbridge had her demons and King kelps us understand them.  He takes us through her most important relationships, her trials as a mother and a wife.  Bainbridge was also a painter it was a great pleasure to learn of this.

I am very glad I read this book.  I recommend it to all lovers of literary biographers and of course to fans of Dams Bainbridge.

Mel u 

Thackeray The Life of a Literary Man by D. J. Taylor. (2001, 494 pages)

Born 1811 Calcutta

Died 1863. London

Vanity Fair 1848

I first became aware of William Makepeace Thackeray through reading The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman in the long ago, his Vanity Fair was among the enshrined works.  When I finally completed Vanity Fair earlier this year it was as my last to be read work of English language fiction on Fadiman's list. I admit I was put off by the thought of a thousand plus page Voctorian novel.  I should have known  to trust Clifton Fadiman.   It was a great delight to read Thackeray's depiction of the vanities of England in the early 19th century.  Becky Sharp, the lead character of the novel, is 

A wonderful creation,  in her anything goes drive to rise from poverty to high society.  I next read his Barry Lyndon, remembering what a great movie was made from the novel. 

I have read a number of biographies of well known writers over the last few years.  No one can really explain how one person's life experiences lets them write masterworks but from these biographies something of the well springs of creativity can be discovered. .   Some writers have fascinating tumultuous lives and  produce works of genius, other live completely bland existences and do the same.  Of course Hart Crane's chaotic life is easier to make exciting than that of an insurance company executive like Wallace Stevens.  William Thackeray's life, viewed externally, was not all that exciting once he began to be a famous writer and that makes it challenging to write  an interesting biography about him.  D. J. Taylor has done a very good job of giving us details and a real feel for his day to day existence.

Taylor did a very good job of talking about the lives of English civil servants and merchants when they return from India.  A ten or twenty year tour with the Crown or the Company could, with a little  luck and guile, could return you to England rich.  Thackeray was born into an Anglo Indian family and we learn a lot about this milieu.  Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Thackeray's life was his marriage.  In this late twenties he fell madly in love with a 17 year old girl.  Sadly after bearing him two daughters who were to become the emotional center of Thackeray's life, she went insane.  Before this he spent time in Paris and Weimer, gambling and spending time and his father's money in dissipation.

Thackeray struggled to make a living as a writer until he began to publish serials of his novels.  Vanity Fair made him truly famous.  Taylor goes into a lot of detail on Thackeray's friendship and feud with Charles Dickens.  We also go along on his very lucrative lecture tours to America,  

As he aged Thackeray began to gain a lot of weight.  He also developed a never consummated emotional relationship with a married woman, his wife being confined for years to asylums or in the homes of paid care givers.  He was very concerned with providing for the care of his wife and his daughters.  One of his daughters became the first wife of Leslie Stephens who 

during a subsequent marriage become the father of Virgnia Woolf.   Literary London was a small world.

This biography brings Thackeray to life.  We see his ups and downs.  We learn about the business side of being a Victorian novelist.  Thackeray was heavily involved with the vital periodic world and Taylor  gives us a lot of details about this.

We see Thackeray struggle to write, never coming again close to his peak work.

Thackeray was a decent man, very devoted to his children and doing his best for his wife.

I am glad I read Taylor's biography.  

I was given this  book by the publisher.  I was also given his biography of George Orwell and hope to read it soon.  

D. J. Taylor is the author of eleven novels, including Kept (2006), which was a Publishers Weekly Best Book, Derby Day (2011), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and The Windsor Faction (2013), a joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. His nonfiction includes a biography of Thackeray and Orwell: The Life (2003), which won the Whitbread Biography Award. His journalism appears in a variety of newspapers and periodicals, including the Independent, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Wall Street Journal.

Mel u 

Kenneth Clark Life, Art and Civilization by James Stourton 496 pages, forthcoming November 1, 2016)

13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983. England

Kenneth Clark Life, Art and Civilization by James Stourton is an elegant biography of Kenneth Clark. Clark was director of The National Gallery of the Arts at 29.  His biggest contribution was his 13 part TV series Civilization (it is all on You Tube)) he produced for the BBC in 1969 which is generally credited with showing how culture could be presented in an interesting way on television.  

I loved the first quote from Clark when he said his patents were "idol rich" and he said "there were many people richer than his parents but none more idol".  

Clark dominated the art world for almost fifty years.  He controlled what the major museums of England purchased and which living srtists were favored. 

During World War Two he supervised the removal of almost all the works from the national museum, storing them in an abandoned mine in Wales.  During the war he work d for the Ministry of Information. His primary responsibility was to recruit artists to make posters to raise morale.  He helped many artists stay out of combat.

Clsrk is as a noted art historian and author of several highly regarded works.  He was greatly in demand as a lecturer.  During the war in order to keep spirits up in London he organized classical music events and lecturers the museum.  He became convinced of the importance of bringing the arts, without condescension, to as many people as he could.  He saw it as a way of fighting the barbarism threating to destroy European civilization.  Clark was more into art and architecture than literature.  He was a bibliophile and accumulated a wonderful collection.

We learn a lot about his marriage, his parenthood, his numerous girl friends.  There is a lot of detail on the art community and the business of art in the book which i found fascinating.  We learn about Clsrk's numerous homes and activities.  

Kenneth Clark Life, Art, and Civilization is a very well researched and beautifully narrated work.  

JAMES STOURTON, the former chairman of Sotheby’s U.K., is the author of many books, including Great Houses of London and Great Collectors of Our Time. A lecturer on history, he is also a senior fellow of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

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