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Günter Grass by Julian Preece
Category: Biography | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
G nter Grass was Germany's foremost writer for more than half a century, and his books were and remain best-sellers across the world. The Tin Drum was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1979, and the memoir Peeling the Onion astounded readers by revealing Grass had been drafted into the military wing of ...Show more
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) by Lara Vetter
Category: General Biography | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
A concise biography of the modernist poet and avant-garde woman. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), best known for her imagist poetry, was one of the first writers of free verse in English. For over forty years, H.D. wrote poetry about forgotten ancient goddesses and autobiographical prose about her own ...Show more
Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill
Category: Biography Memoir | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work has never been more relevant than it is today. Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt published her first book at the age of twenty-three, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with ...Show more
JOHN RUSKIN by BALLANTYNE, ANDREW
Category: Biography | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) was the most prominent art and architecture critic of his time. Yet his reputation has been overshadowed by his personal life, especially his failed marriage to Effie Gray, which has cast him in the history books as little more than a Victorian prude. In this book, Andrew Ballant ...Show more
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe by Jeremy Adler
Category: Biography Memoir | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Offering fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all Goethe's major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egm ...Show more
Langston Hughes by W. Jason Miller
Category: Biography Memoir | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
As the first black author in America to make his living exclusively by writing, Langston Hughes inspired a generation of writers and activists. One of the pioneers of jazz poetry, Hughes led the Harlem Renaissance, while Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked Hughes's signature metaphor of dreaming in his spe ...Show more
Leo Tolstoy by Andrei Zorin
Category: Biography Memoir | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, a young Leo Tolstoy set himself three immediate aims: to gamble, to marry, and to obtain a post. At that time he managed only the first. The writer's momentous life would be full of forced breaks and abrupt departures, from the death of his beloved parents and tortuous ...Show more
Leon Trotsky by Paul Le Blanc
Category: European History | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
There are few more divisive names in history than the Soviet communist Leon Trotsky. To some, he was a betrayer, a hypocrite, and a totalitarian, and yet to many others he was a revolutionary of high esteem, who battled an outdated, oppressive dynasty and helped to usher in a new political era, and whos ...Show more
Leonard Bernstein by Paul R. Laird
Category: Film | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
Leonard Bernstein was one of twentieth-century music's most successful and recognizable figures. In a career spanning five decades, he conducted many of the world's leading orchestras and composed scores for landmark musicals such as West Side Story. With an iron self-belief, he negotiated risky and cha ...Show more
Mark Twain by Kevin J. Hayes
Category: Biography | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born November 30, 1835, in Monroe County, Missouri, was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. An indefatigable inventor of tall tales, Mark Twain was a natural-born storyteller who freely adapted the incidents of his life and the tales he heard as a youth t ...Show more
Richard Owen by Patrick Armstrong
Category: General Biography | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
A biography of the provocative nineteenth-century English naturalist. Brilliant, hard-working, and immensely productive, the naturalist Richard Owen was a great ambassador for science and played an outsized role in shaping London's Natural History Museum. Still, Owen was a provocative bully, accused o ...Show more
Rosa Luxemburg by Dana Mills
Category: Biography and Memoir | Series: Critical Lives Ser.
As an economist and political theorist, Rosa Luxemburg created a body of work that still resonates powerfully today. Born in Poland in 1871, she became a revolutionary leader in Berlin, publishing works including Reform or Revolution and The Accumulation of Capital. In this account of Luxemburg's short ...Show more