Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977

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If Vladimir Nabokov's fiction merits any criticism, it is for its iciness. The master himself declared in a 1977 BBC interview, "My characters cringe as I come near them with my whip. I have seen a whole avenue of imagined trees losing their leaves at the threat of my passage." Nabokov's correspondence, however, reveals a far warmer individual, though one ever-ready with a verbal shiv. This volume begins with a 1923 letter to his mother, written while he was a farmhand in the French Alps, and ends with a 1977 letter sent to his wife, Vera, for Mother's Day: "My dearest, your roses, your fragrant rubies, glow red against a background of spring rain..."

Nabokov's son, Dmitri, and Matthew Bruccoli have created the fullest, and by far the most amusing, portrait of the serious artist as trickster. There's the famous letter to Burma-Vita, in which Nabokov offers the company an advertising jingle (alas, they turned him down). There's the best, and most amusing, account of "l'affaire Lolita." Here is his response to his New Yorker editor, Katharine White: "Let me thank you very warmly for your frank and charming letter about LOLITA. But after all how many are the memorable literary characters whom we would like our teen-age daughters to meet? Would you like our Patricia to go on a date with Othello? Would we like our Mary to read the New Testament temple against temple with Raskolnikov? Would we like our sons to marry Emma Rouault, Becky Sharp or La belle dame sans merci?"

In another letter, however, he takes care to thank White for a "chubby check." (One wishes this phrase had gained greater circulation.) Nabokov again and again comes off as a difficult author, challenging his publishers left, right, and center over issues large (and there were many) and as well as those that were niggling. Calling the British paperback cover of Laughter in the Dark "atrocious, disgusting, and badly drawn besides having nothing to do whatever with the contents of the book," he tells his U.K. publisher, "I would appreciate if you would use your influence and have them substitute a pretty dark-haired girl, or a palmtree, or a winding road, or anything else for this tasteless abomination." Still, one is most often convinced that he's right, even when he makes the large claim that the French film Les Nymphettes infringes on his rights, "since this term was invented by me for the main character in my novel Lolita."

Not only is this volume endlessly quotable, it also reads like a great epistolary novel--fraught with high thought, high drama, and the delightfully unexpected. Who would have guessed that Nabokov would ask Hugh Hefner, "Have you ever noticed how the head and ears of your Bunny resemble a butterfly in shape, with an eyespot on one hindwing?"

Book Description

Over four hundred letters chronicle the author's career, recording his struggles in the publishing world, the battles over "Lolita," and his relationship with his wife.

Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of America)

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U.S. Grant in his own words...
Review of Memoirs of US Grant
A Masterpiece
A History Buff's Wet Dream...
essential

Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of America)
Ulysses S. Grant
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0940450585

Book Description

Grant wrote his "Personal Memoirs" to secure his family's future. In doing so, the Civil War's greatest general won himself a unique place in American letters. His character, sense of purpose, and simple compassion are evident throughout this deeply moving account, as well as in the letters to his wife, Julia, included here.

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U.S. Grant in his own words..........2007-06-26

U.S. Grant is often said to have been a failure at everything in his life except his marriage, war, and his memoirs. The latter, written as he was dying of throat cancer in 1884-1885, provide a straightforward account of his years in uniform during the Civil War.

Grant passes quickly over his Ohio boyhood and time at the United States Military Academy. His service in the Mexican War and his financial misfortunes out of uniform between the wars get only slightly more coverage. His story really begins with his return to uniform in 1861 as a commander of Illinois volunteers. The narrative follows Grant's campaigns in Missouri, Tennessee, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, his elevation to supreme command of the Union Armies, and the final grinding agony of the war in Virgina. The account ends with the cessation of hostilies in 1865.

Grant's memoirs are remarkable reading for a number of reasons. First, they provide insight into the first-rate military mind of a consistantly successful general. Grant's ability to determine the essentials of a situation and remain focused on them are evident. Second, the memoirs are a classic example of clear, simple, English narrative. Third, they display the considerable modesty of a naturally reserved man, a departure from the egotism often found in the personal memoirs of famous men. Grant himself continues to be something of a mystery to historians; these memoirs do not really lift the veil of his sense of privacy.

The Union Army of the Civil War had more than its fair share of politicians in uniform and politically-minded generals. Grant was not immune to spinning history his way; careful-eyed scholars have found more than a few instances where Grant remembered only part of the story or settled a few scores with old opponents. Nevertheless, Grant's memoirs are a valuable resource for understanding the conduct of the Civil War, not least because Grant became such a key figure in the winning of it.

Grant's memoirs are highly recommended to students of the Civil War, and to scholars seeking to understand the art of war in the midst of rebellion.

Review of Memoirs of US Grant.......2006-07-10

General Grant's use of the English language is very interesting and informative. Absolutely a pleasure to read.

A Masterpiece.......2006-02-22

This book is a must-read for any Civil War or American history buff. Grant's writing is consistently clear, elegant, beautiful. He gives an engaging account of his wartime experiences that are accurate to the best of his ability, and he writes with introspection and humility. The personal letters at the end of the volume reveal much about this fascinating man, and are a welcome addition. Please read this one! Another wonderful book in this series is the volume containing Frederick Douglass's autobiographical works.

A History Buff's Wet Dream..........2006-01-17

This is certainly a great book, and in parts, it is a good book. Grant has a very terse, matter-of-fact style, which makes for easy reading. The bulk of the book is devoted to the Civil War, and there are dry patches, and multitudes of "We went to the ridge, and then to the river, and moved our artillery up to the picket" and such-like. But that is what happened, and so you can't fault Grant for his meticulous detailing of troop movements, correspondence with fellow officers, etc. As I said, the great majority of the book is devoted to the Civil War, and there is not a word about Grant's tenure in the White House. Personally, of all topics covered by Grant, I find him to be most fascinating on the subject of the Mexican-American War of 1847. This is not something commonly focused on in history classes, but Grant's account is riveting. Additionally, Grant's remembrances of Lincoln are very interesting, as is his almost awed reverence for the military abilities of Sherman. The book is long, but it doesn't seem long, and if you have a love of history, this is indispensable stuff.

essential.......2005-10-04

A unique chronicle of one who saved the Union. Lucid, entertaining, and expansive. A rare view of one of the most important lives in the 19C. Highly recommended

Hart Crane Complete Poems and Selected Letters (Library of America)

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I didn't have time to make it shorter
A brilliant lyric poet who died far too young
A Poetry of Vision -- A Life of Excess

Hart Crane Complete Poems and Selected Letters (Library of America)
Hart Crane
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1931082995

Book Description

No American poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of poetry as Hart Crane. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day.

This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time.

This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane's life by editor Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University and a biographer of Crane, as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents.

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I didn't have time to make it shorter.......2006-11-29

As an American boy growing up in Normandy, I would sit for hours, homesick, on the cliffs overlooking the Channel, thinking that if the fog ever lifted I could see Manhattan. And I would recite from WHITE BUILDINGS for hours, crying out to the fates that had separated me from my homeland, as Hart Crane had bubbled his way to the bottom of a purple sea some miles away I assumed. "As bells off San Salvador/ Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,/ In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--/ Adagios of islands, O my prodigal,/ Complete the dark confession her veins spell." I hardly knew what I was saying, but some charms really do work and it wasn't long before I was repatriated, mouth first. I hope it's not heretical to suggest that Hart Crane's letters, while never less than interesting and often amusing, aren't that superb, and the book seems padded out in consequence to fit the desired "heft" of Library of America volumes. The Board might as well get used to the notion that not all poets have written thousands of pages, and for every Whitman you get a Hart Crane, who just didn't write very much. Does he deserve a place on the shelf with his 144 pages of poetry? Maybe there are some packing issues I don't understand, but otherwise, sure, throw in four hundred pages of Crane's letters.

Though nothing could really top the exquisite if critical presentation that the late Thomas Parkinson gave to his edition of the Crane-Yvor Winters correspondence, Langdon Hammer is able, through the sheer gift of size, to expand upon what we've had and complicate our hitherto too perfect picture of Crane. Crane's letters to Slater Brown and Wilbur Underwood are the liveliest, perhaps, but women also animate him and a recent biography that excoriated Crane for his misogyny seems sadly off the mark. However some biographers will do anything to create a scandal. One might profitably read through these letters to find out what Crane recommends in the way of early American modernism, his peers, because in general his taste is pretty good (and his dismissals of overrated trash are classics of vinegary invective). Of course he can sometimes gild the lily when praising, say, Harry Crosby's poems in a letter to his putative patron.

The index may be the single most useful feature of the poems + letters arrangement, for the index will help us find what Crane had to say about X or Y of his poems as he was writing them. He wrote, for example, a wonderfully impassioned letter to Otto Kahn, the industrial magnate who financed the writing of THE BRIDGE, outlining the different sections he had already finished and those still in the pipeline. Kahn also helped to finance the Metropolitan Opera, and Crane asks Kahn's help in finding employment there as a copywriter. He had the personality of a basso profundo; I wonder if the opera world would have changed if Hart Crane had been more in it.

A brilliant lyric poet who died far too young.......2006-10-20

Hart Crane is one of those powerful poetic voices that is its own style and immensely attractive. As others have noted, he was modern for his time, clearly American, and yet full of the great poetic traditions of the English language. His influences are identified directly in his works. He talks to Walt Whitman and discusses Emily Dickinson, Chaplin, Poe, and others. His early death was a great loss to English letters and the American voice in the 20th Century.

This wonderful volume from the Library of America (remember to thank them with your purchases and donations - they are non-profit after all) is more than eight-hundred pages, but only a few more than one-hundred of them contain all of Crane's poetry (including fragments). A few more have some essays and prose. The rest are filled with more than four hundred letters that Crane wrote to his parents, his friends, his literary associates, and others. The letters help us put Crane's work into a richer context, allow us to see some of the published works in earlier states, and make us ache and wonder what might have been if he hadn't jumped off the deck of the "Orizaba" into the Caribbean in 1932.

To provide just one tiny sample that amazed me from "Cape Hatteras" in "The Bridge" (Crane's great work) [the ellipsis in the second line is in the poem]:

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space . . .
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers!
There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk
Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;
Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered
Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun
What ciphers risen from prophetic script,
What marathons new-set between the stars!
The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches
Already knows the closer clasp of Mars, --
New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!

We can hear his lyric voice, see his fresh images, and his ability to form the words into powerful energy. This is the result of great talent married to hard work and a special sensitivity to the language. Harold Bloom call's Crane "our Pindar". Now, I think there is more to this image than the linking of two lyric poets. Most of Pindar's poetry is lost to us. One set of odes is complete, and the others survive as fragments. Even though Pindar died old and Crane died young, we wonder about what we might have had from both if Pindar's work had found a way to survive and Crane had found a way to live.

Some say that it was the oppression society put on Crane because of his homosexuality (bi-sexuality?). However, almost all the homosexuals in Crane's time did not commit suicide, and a fair percentage of the people that did commit suicide were heterosexual. The poet grew up in a chaotic family. Yes, his father became a successful businessman with his syrup factory (he also invented and sold the rights to Life Saver candies for a pittance), but Crane's mother and father fought constantly and melodramatically. So much so that Crane dropped out before finishing high school and moved away to New York. The poet's own emotional life was harsh and prone to self-destructive behavior including alcoholism. After 1927 his drinking became much worse. When you combine the home life that formed his emotional responses with his parents divorcing, his father dying suddenly, his mother's neediness, his failure to produce much work during his year in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship, the affair with Peggy Baird Cowley (the soon to be ex-wife of a friend), his discovery that the inheritance from his maternal grandmother that had been held in trust for him was gone because of a loan his father guaranteed with it, along with being beaten up aboard ship for making a pass at one of the crew and then getting seriously drunk, well, stepping off the boat into the sea in front of witnesses while exclaiming, "Good-bye, everybody!" isn't as big a leap as one might at first suppose.

But what a loss to us all.

This is a fine volume. The editor has provided biographical material for the people mentioned in the letters, notes on sources, notes for the text (including a fine foreword), and an especially helpful chronology of Crane's too brief life.

Hart Crane is a poet I did not know anything about until I had read Harold Bloom's introduction to his "American Religious Poems". Then I knew I had to get this volume and learn more about this important and brilliant poet. You might want to get to know his work and his life, as well.

A Poetry of Vision -- A Life of Excess.......2006-10-17

"Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board."

In a short, tumultous life, Hart Crane (1899 -- 1932) wrote two of the greatest books of 20th Century American poetry: White Buildings (1926) and the Bridge (1930) as well as some splendid individual poems. His poetry is collected in this outstanding volume of the Library of America, edited by Langdon Hammer of Yale University.

Of the 850 pages of this book, only 144 are devoted to Crane's poetry. Most of the remainder of the text consists of 14 short essays by Crane and of 412 letters from his extensive correspondence written between 1910 and his suicide in 1932. These letters, together with Professor Hammer's notes and biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents, offer the reader a good portrait of Crane's troubled life, and they read with more immediacy and poignancy than any biography.

Crane dropped out of high school and left an unhappy home in Cleveland at the age of 17 to try to make his way as a poet in New York. Many of the letters in this collection detail Crane's stormy relationship with his parents, his father Clarence ("C.A.") Crane, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, and his mother Grace Hart Crane. Crane was also close to his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Belden Hart. In the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge, Crane said that the he had to "Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage". His difficult, shifting relationship with his family is amply chronicled in these letters.

But this collection includes much more than correspondence with a broken family. They offer insight into Crane's poetic ambitions and into the composition of The Bridge and of the shorter poems. They offer a view of New York City, seen through Crane's eyes, and of his literary friends and contemporaries, including Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley, Peggy Cowley, Crane's patron Otto Kahn, and many others. The letters give the reader a portrait of a complex, troubled person who from late adolescence lived life hard and on the edge. Crane was promiscuous with a lengthy series of mostly homosexual affairs together with longer-term relationships with men and women. Crane's most intense male relationship was with a sailor named Emil Opffer (none of his letters to Opffer survive) and, just before his death, he had a passionate heterosexual relationship in Mexico with Peggy Cowley, as she was divorcing Malcolm Cowley. From his mid-20s Crane had deep problems with alcoholism which greatly hindered his ability to write. He was perpetually short of money and cadged and borrowed extensively from his friends and family. He fought constantly and was jailed several times. In a fit of depression -- when his life superficially seemed to be looking up he committed suicide by jumping off a ship, the Orizaba, en route from Cuba to New York City.

Read as a whole, this collection of Crane's correspondence and poetry raises difficult and probably unanswerable questions about the relationship between Crane's life and his work. Crane's excesses and passions in fact are an important component of his poetry. But while the life was a failure, Crane was a poet of romantic vision. Crane struggled for years to complete "The Bridge", a work which remains controversial and not unqualifiedly successful. In this poem, Crane took the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol and tried to create a myth, in the machine age, that would unite America's past with its future and also give meaning to his own life. (Much of The Bride is autobiographical.) The Bridge is a work of difficult optimism as Crane traces America back to the voyages of Columbus and the days of Pocahontas with Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe as guides. The poems ends on a note of affirmation and hope, as The Bridge becomes a path to transcendence and to the overcoming of materialism and lifeless routine through love and brotherhood.

Crane's short poems are higly concentrated and difficult. The poems I find most rewarding in "White Buildings" include "Voyages" a six-poem sequence detailing an intense love affair and "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" which is a predecessor of "The Bridge." The shorter poems include "At Mellvile's Tomb", the subject of an exchange with Harriet Monroe included in this collection, and "Chaplinesque."

One of Crane's masterpieces is his final poem "The Broken Tower" which describes how "I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind." The Broken Tower ends on a note on the redemptive power of love while, soon after completing the poem, Hart Crane would commit suicide.

This is a volume that will bring Hart Crane to his readers. The letters chronicle a sad life cut short by excess. But Hart Crane's poetry, brief in amount though it is, has stayed with and inspired me for many years. Hart Crane holds a high place in America's literary heritage. He deserves his place in the Library of America.

The quotation at the beginning of this review is from Robert Lowell's sonnet "Words for Hart Crane" in his collection "Life Studies".

Robin Friedman

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Hammett's Interests & Values in His Own Words. An Excellent Supplement to a Biography.
Looking over the Thin Man's Shoulder

Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett , Richard Layman , and Josephine Hammett Marshall
Manufacturer: Counterpoint Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1582430810

Amazon.com

Penzler Pick, April 2001: What seems a long overdue volume is finally making its appearance. (After all, The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler was published 20 years ago.) Here, in more than 600 pages crammed with important as well as intimate letters, is a view into the mind of the most important American mystery writer of the 20th century. While I don't believe Hammett could carry Chandler's pen when it came to literary excellence, it's fair to say that Chandler couldn't have published much had Hammett not made the private eye novel both popular and acceptable in the world of American letters.

While I don't recommend starting at the beginning and reading straight through to the end, you can dip into virtually any letter and find an interesting sentence, a fresh way of looking at something seemingly familiar, or learn something you didn't know about Hammett and the people he knew. Take, for example, this brief note to his publisher, Alfred Knopf, in October 1934. The Thin Man had been published in January of that year and was by far Hammett's most successful book. Knopf wanted to capitalize on that success and attempted to get a sixth novel out of his author. Hammett wrote back: "Dear Alfred--So I'm a bum--so what's done of the book looks terrible--so I'm out here (Beverly Hills) drowning my shame in M-G-M money for 10 weeks."

And isn't this interesting? Hammett was stationed in Alaska during World War II and had an active correspondence with Lillian Hellman but also with Prudence Whitfield, the wife of Raoul Whitfield, a fellow Black Mask writer and one of Hammett's closest friends. So Hammett writes to Hellman on May 6, then again on June 3, saying "I know I'm a lowdown bastard not to have written you in all this time..." Well, he was probably right. In the interim, he'd written to Prudence, signing off with "Good night, darling, and much love..." Is there anyone out there who doesn't believe there may have been a bit of hanky-panky with his best friend's wife while darling Lillie remained sublimely unaware?

There's so much more here I could quote for pages. Nice letters to his daughters, Josephine (who wrote an introduction to this book) and Mary; correspondence with other famous writers, his publisher, the editor of Black Mask, etc. There is also a splendid editing job by Richard Layman, probably the country's leading authority on Hammett. His expertise as Hammett's biographer and bibliographer has made his footnotes useful in putting into context the references that may be obscure to some readers.

Here is a book worthy to stand right next to The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, Red Harvest,The Dain Curse, and The Thin Man on your bookshelf. --Otto Penzler

Book Description

A literary event: the letters, both private and professional, of Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade and father of the hardboiled crime novel.

In his five great crime novels, all of them written in a magnificent burst of creativity between 1927 and 1935, Dashiell Hammett gave America a cast of immortal characters-Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charles, mold-breaking, red-blooded alternatives to Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey. In the words of Raymond Chandler, Hammett "gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols." A popular writer from the start, he aspired to a higher goal. As he was working on his classic The Maltese Falcon, he wrote a letter to his publisher about the potential of the detective-story form: "Someday somebody's going to make 'literature' out of it...and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes."

Though Hammett's work is admired by millions, the man himself has always been an enigma. Now, at last, comes a volume of his letters, revealing not only the private man but also the hard-working-and hard-living-professional. Yes, he was part cynical tough guy, like Sam Spade; he was part sophisticated inebriate, like Nick Charles. But the character of Dashiell Hammett was too complex to be easily categorized. His letters to his family, lovers, and colleagues show his personal warmth, his political commitment, his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. With wit, intelligence, and style, these letters further confirm Hammett's extraordinary talent as writer and observer.

Customer Reviews:

Hammett's Interests & Values in His Own Words. An Excellent Supplement to a Biography........2006-08-22

"Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett" includes 950 letters that Dashiell Hammett wrote between 1921 and 1960, spanning most of his adult life, from before his marriage to Josephine Dolan to just months before his death in 1961 -though the meaty correspondence stops a few years before that. Daughter Josephine Hammett Marshall started the project, and she nicely summarizes what these letters say about her father in the book's foreword. Editor (and Hammett biographer) Richard Layman discusses the sources in the preface. The letters were addressed to at least 17 different people plus some miscellaneous correspondence, but the most frequent recipients, in descending order, are: Hammett's friend and companion, the playwright Lillian Hellman; daughter Mary Hammett; daughter Josephine Hammett; wife Josephine Dolan Hammett; girlfriend Pru Whitfield; and Hellman's secretary Nancy Bragdon. End notes identify people and other references in each letter where needed.

The letters are organized chronologically into 5 sections, each introduced by an explanation of the circumstances of Hammett's life during the relevant time period. Part 1 (1921-1930), entitled "Writer", spans Hammett's married life, often strained by his tuberculosis and efforts to make ends meet, and the bulk of his literary achievement, beginning with early Black Mask magazine correspondence and ending with editing frustrations at Knopf. Part 2 (1931-1942), entitled "Celebrity", introduces paramour Lillian Hellman, to whom Hammett wrote longer, more formal letters than he did to his wife, discussing literature, career, and mutual friends. Teenaged daughter Mary engaged her father by asking him about the Spanish Civil War and emerging Nazi power, subjects for which he held passionate opinions, so Hammett's letters to Mary reveal his politics and values.

Part 3 (1942-1945), entitled "Soldier", is the longest section but spans the shortest period of time. Dashiell Hammett enlisted in the Army at the age of 48, eager to serve his country in its fight against fascism. He was stationed in the Aleutian islands, where he edited "The Adakian", a camp newspaper with distribution of 3,000-5,000. Perhaps due to Army discipline or the scarcity of alcohol, Hammett was a prolific correspondent during this time. He writes mostly of daily camp life and most frequently to Lillian Hellman, whose secretary provided Hammett with material for his newspaper. Part 4 (1945-1951), entitled "Activist", finds Hammett with a new sense of purpose after the War. He taught mystery writing at the Jefferson School for Social Science in Manhattan, campaigned for civil rights, and became active in communist organizations. Daughter Josephine Marshall was married by this time and a frequent correspondent -also during the 5 months Hammett spent in jail for contempt of court in connection with the Civil Rights Congress bail fund.

Part 5 (1952-1960), entitled "Survivor", is a miscellany of letters that reveal a man with diminishing vigor. He seems to have little strength left for discussions or details but always a warm, supportive word for his family. In the back of the book, there is a list of the books to which Hammett refers and an index (mostly people and titles). I have read 2 Dashiell Hammett biographies. These letters don't change my impression of Hammett, but reinforce it. They flesh out his personality a good deal. He was a talented writer, a loving but absent father, a man of strong convictions (some naive), who never complained through his share of hardships. Constant financial difficulties and frequent talk of writing projects that never materialize may seem pitiful. But they are reminders of Hammett's nagging faults, the sort that every life has.

Looking over the Thin Man's Shoulder.......2001-08-27

Reading this collection of letters by the author of "The Maltese Falcon" and other great mystery novels provides a revealing insight to the thoughts and feelings of this intensely private man. Peppered with delightful sides of humor it is easily readable. One can dip into one or another of the phases of his life: the early short story years, his service in World War I, fame and fortune in books, radio, and film; marriage, fatherhood, divorce, romances, chiefly with Lillian Hellman, service in Alaska in WWII, his jailing for defying the anti-communism of the 50's, his final illness, poverty, and death. In letters to Hellman, and his own daughters, Mary and Josephine he comments with a a few words on hundreds of books he read. A compendium of the books fills five and one-half pages at the end of the book. There is no explicit explanation of why his voice fell silent after his brilliant novels, but the perceptive reader is given clues in the man's own words, written with no intention to have them preserved for history but fortunately available to us now.

Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz: With Selected Prose

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Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz: With Selected Prose
Bruno Schulz , and Jerzy Ficowski
Manufacturer: Harpercollins
ProductGroup: Book
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ASIN: 0060158964

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961

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A writer's writer
A look behind the curtain!
As fascinating as any novel or story he wrote...

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
Ernest Hemingway , and Carlos Baker
Manufacturer: Macmillan Pub Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades
Hemingway
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ASIN: 0684169614

Book Description

The death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 ended one of the most original and influential careers in American literature. His works have been translated into every major language, and the Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1954 recognized his impact on contemporary writing.

While many people are familiar with the public image of Hemingway and the legendary accounts of his life, few knew him as an intimate. With this collection of letters, presented for the first time as a Scribner Classic, a new Hemingway emerges. Ranging from 1917 to 1961, this generous selection of nearly six hundred letters is, in effect, both a self-portrait and an autobiography. In his own words, Hemingway candidly reveals himself to a wide variety of people: family, friends, enemies, editors, translators, and almost all the prominent writers of his day. In so doing he proves to be one of the most entertaining letter writers of all time.

Carlos Baker has chosen letters that not only represent major turning points in Hemingway's career but also exhibit character, wit, and the writer's typical enthusiasm for hunting, fishing, drinking, and eating. A few are ingratiating, some downright truculent. Others present his views on writing and reading, criticize books by friend or foe, and discuss women, soldiers, politicians, and prizefighters. Perhaps more than anything, these letters show Hemingway's irrepressible humor, given far freer rein in his correspondence than in his books. An informal biography in letters, the product of forty-five years' living and writing, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters leaves an indelible impression of an extraordinary man.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. At seventeen he left home to join the Kansas City Star as a reporter, then volunteered to serve in the Red Cross during World War I. He was severely wounded at the Italian front and was awarded the Croce di Guerra. He moved to Paris in 1921, where he devoted himself to writing fiction, and where he fell in with the expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.

Customer Reviews:

A writer's writer.......2004-12-09

Two authors of the 20th century whose letters go beyond fascination are James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. This volume is an excellent example of just how committed Hemingway was not only to writing, but to getting as close to the action of his writing. Once the reader emerses themselves into his letters, one sees the true Hemingway, not the mythological one created by critics (mostly those who were not fans of the writer).

It is almost unimaginable that someone in his time or any other could be so well connected and intimate with other artist: Joyce, Pound, McLeish, Fitzgerald, Picaso, and so on. If you're a writer this collection is wonderful. It shows the day to day dealings with drafting, editing, publishing, and the intimate relationships between writer and publisher, though this relationship is almost non-existent today.

I found Hemingway through his letters to be someone who is passionate about life and equally compassionate about friends. He tells it the way it is, not the way politically correct messengers do. It is an education in itself to read this collection.

A look behind the curtain!.......2004-12-05

I miss old fashioned letters, now that we live in the age of email. Frotunately, I still have 'real' letters saved that have now collected dust from my parent's generation, and from a time gone by.

Occasionally I stumble over published letters of famous writers in antique bookstores: Last time, it was a 800 page volume of some of Ernest Hemingway's personal letters; the first edition of this Amazon edition. They were published posthumeously, and not intended by EH for publication.
We get a peek behind the curtain, and learn among other things that Ernest Hemingway was addicted to letters, wrote lots and lots, starting in his teens; and that he was really depressed when he didn't receive replies; or when there were days when the postman brought no letters. Waiting for transatlantic mail added to his sense of loneliness. Letters were a lifelong passion of his, continuing up to the day when he took his own life. These private letters weren't meant to be published, and they are raw, but very honest.
When you read them, you are in no doubt that the writer is a true artist, and an original!
They stretch over the span of his productive life, and they are varied: addressed to family (his parents, his children), his ex, to friends, including famous contemporaries, such as Marlene Dietrich (just one of them), his agent(s), his publishers, and many more.

I have a hunch EH must have been hard to keep up with, but his letters are fun to read; even though, in my view, his novels are mixed: Some great, and some I don't care for.

Guess, EH's life was bizare too. The private letters are consistent with that. And yet, they exude a special warmth; both gentelness and passion.
Reviewed by Palle Jorgensen. December 2004.

As fascinating as any novel or story he wrote..........2003-06-03

This collection of letters serves as the closest thing to a Hemingway autobiography we have. It is certainly must reading for the student or researcher, and I would highly recommend it for even the casual Hemingway fan.

Hemingway often wrote letters to either warm up for a day of writing or cool off afterward, and in these letters you see him at his unguarded, intellectual, humorous best. The style of his letter writing is often much freer than the tightly crafted prose style of his fiction...it's almost like watching a classical musician break into some improvisational jazz.

Customer Reviews:

Can someone explain to me why this is out of print?.......2004-06-06

Unbelieveable. There is no doubting that James Joyce was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. His contribution to modern literature is still being felt 60 years after his death. And, yet, his letters, which are as close as we will ever get to knowing what he was thinking while composing his great works, are no longer available in print?

Thank God I purchased this book years ago! Richard Ellmann had done a tremendous job of sorting and compiling Joyce's letters in a way that shows us Joyce's thinking as he put together "Dubliners", "Exiles", "Stephen Hero", "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Ulysses", and "Finnegan's Wake". While some (back when the book first came out) questioned the extremely private/sexual communications that Ellmann included, no one doubted the importance of all the other selected letters. This is a remarkable look into the mind of a great writer, and I hope some publisher will pick it up and reprint it. In the meanwhile, try to get a used copy through Amazon.

Quite unique and absolutely fascinating........2003-02-08

This book contains a suite of new letters to Joyce's wife Nora and another to his benefactress Harriet Weaver, which have been abridged or excluded from previous editions. The explicit nature of these love letters makes them unlike anything you have read before. This book delivers the full Joyce - unabridged and uncensored.

Not Your Usual Founding Father: Selected Readings from Benjamin Franklin

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Not Your Usual Founding Father: Selected Readings from Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0300113943

Book Description

This engaging book reveals Benjamin Franklin’s human side—his tastes and habits, his enthusiasms, and his devotion to democracy and the people of the United States. Three hundred years after his birth, we may remember Franklin’s famous Autobiography, or his status as framer of the Declaration of Independence and the peace with Great Britain, or his experiments in electricity, or perhaps his sage advice on diligence and thrift. But historian Edmund S. Morgan invites us to meet the man himself, a sociable, good-natured, and extraordinary human being with boundless curiosity about the natural world and a vision of what America could be.

Drawing on lifelong research in the vast Franklin archives, Morgan assembles both famous and lesser-known writings that offer insights into this founding father’s thinking. The book is organized around four major themes, each with an introduction. The first section includes journal excerpts and letters revealing Franklin’s personal tastes and habits. The second is devoted to Franklin’s inexhaustible intellectual energy and his scientific discoveries. The third and fourth chronicle his devotion to serving the people who became the United States both before and after the Revolution and to advancing his democratic vision of their future. Franklin’s humanity and genius have never seemed more real than in the pages of this appealing anthology.

Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Modern Library Classics)

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Excellent For College Study or Independent Reading

Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Modern Library Classics)
John Keats
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0375756698
Release Date: 2001-02-13

Book Description

'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness. Indeed, his work has survived better than that of any of his contemporaries the devaluation of Romantic poetry that began early in this century. This Modern Library edition contains all of Keats's magnificent verse: 'Lamia,' 'Isabella,' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'; his sonnets and odes; the allegorical romance Endymion; and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho the Great. Presented as well are the famous posthumous and fugitive poems, including the fragmentary 'The Eve of Saint Mark' and the great 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' perhaps the most distinguished literary ballad in the language. 'No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perception of loveliness,' said Matthew Arnold. 'In the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare.'

Customer Reviews:

Excellent For College Study or Independent Reading.......2002-03-18

In his short life John Keats created some of the finest poetry in the English language. I have read his shorter poems and odes many times, not for study, but simply for enjoyment. I am not a Keats expert, but I can now easily recognize quotations from Keat's odes, sonnets, and other poems. I especially like "The Eve of St. Agnes", a story of romance and danger in a medieval setting that illustrates Keats' remarkable command of language.

Keats is not difficult, but footnotes help with archaic words and references to more obscure Greek mythology. I prefer to read Keats unaided, then read the footnotes (best if tucked away in an appendix), and then return and read the poem again. For longer poems I jump to footnotes more quickly.

Initially, the inexpensive Dover edition "Lyric Poems", was exactly what I needed. Later, as I tackled longer poetry like "Endymion", I migrated to more complete collections with commentary and footnotes.

Keats" works are widely available in hardcover and paperback. Which collection is best for college study or independent reading? I have two favorites, one by Penguin Classics and the other by Modern Library. Both are available in softcovers.

The first is "The Complete Poems" by Penguin Classics, edited by John Bernard and a standard choice for college classes. I have the second edition, 1977. Barnard's extensive footnotes and commentary are quite good and offset his somewhat brief introduction. Additionally, the appendix discusses textual variations in Keats' manuscripts and has a useful guide to Greek mythology names. The third edition, 1988, adds 20 pages of selected letters, Keats' notes on Milton's Paradise Lost, and his notes on a Shakespearean actor.

The second choice (my favorite) is the newly published "Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats", Modern Library 2001 edition (not the earlier 1994 hardcover version). Apparently as a direct challenge to Penguin Classics, this edition offers a longer introduction (22 pages) by Edward Hirsch and excellent footnotes (not too many, nor too few) by John Pollock. Also, as the title implies, it has selected letters by Keats, some 25 pages in total. Somewhat hidden in the appendix is commentary by six well-known literary critics such as T. S. Eliot, Mathew Arnold, and Keats' biographer Walter Jackson Bate. Lastly, the font is larger and more crisp in the Modern Library version (but is still quite acceptable in the Penguin edition).

Overall, I prefer Hirsch to Barnard, but both are good choices. Both are 5-stars.

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