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Summary
Summary
Which playwright spent two years copying old masters in the Louvre to sell to tourists? Which poet was arrested and charged with obscenity for the publication of Howl? Which writer described her ideal life as "lying on a pink fur rug doing absolutely nothing"? Who was sacked from a newspaper for "coming in late and crying about a love affair"? zho declared (with some justification) that she may have been married three times, but that her husbands were "all geniuses"? Who claimed that his first book sold only eight copies?
A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers provides answers to these and many other questions. With biographical entries for over 1,000 novelists, short-story writers, poets, and playwrights from the United States and Canada, Britain and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, India, Africa, and the Caribbean, the Guide is an essential and entertaining handbook of the lives and work of the century's English-language writers. Readers will find profiles of all the major literary figures of the period, including James Joyce, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and Samuel Beckett, as well as James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Frost, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kazuo Ishiguro, Derek Walcott, Gertrude Stein, and those who have been undeservedly neglected or have fallen out of fashion.
Each entry provides a biographical outline and critical assessment as well as a full bibliography of the writer's work, covering honors, awards, and other successes as well as literary brawls, libel actions, and assorted difficulties with money, drink, drugs, husbands, wives, lovers, and publishers. We read that Harper Lee grew up alongside Truman Capote, whom she depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird as the precocious Dill; that Chinua Achebe narrowly missed assassination during the Nigerian Civil War when his home was bombed; and that Amy Lowell demanded that twelve pitchers of iced water be on hand wherever she went, and guarded her house with seven savage sheepdogs (which she killed, however, when they became a nuisance). We learn that one writer's work (Richard Kostelanetz's) includes a story with only single-word paragraphs and a "novel" of 1,000 blank pages, and that Louise Erdrich worked as a sugar-beet hoer, Edward Albee worked as a messenger for Western Union, and Richard Ford worked briefly for the CIA.
A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers is an invaluable and highly readable reference book, which celebrates the lives and works of the best writers of our age. It has been written by the same team of contributors, made up of biographers, critics, novelists, historians, academics, and literary journalists, that produced A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel. Together these two volumes form the liveliest, as well as the most comprehensive, encyclopedia of twentieth-century literary life currently available.
Author Notes
About the Editors:
Peter Parker is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos and a biography of J.R. Ackersley. He has written reviews and articles for numerous journals, including The New York Times, TLS, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent.
Frank Kermode is a co-editor of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, with John Hollander, and contributes to The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and Partisan Review.
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
Although this compilation was published in England in 1995 as The Reader's Companion to Twentieth-Century Writers, Oxford has altered the title, presumably to avoid confusion with volumes in its highly respected Companion series. It is intended to complement A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel (Oxford, 1995), which was also edited by Parker and Kermode, both British literary critics. However, the approximately 1,000 writers featured in this volume include not just novelists but also short story writers, playwrights, and poets. The majority of the authors treated are from Great Britain or the U.S., but other Anglophone writers are also represented. Contributed by 41 critics, biographers, academics, and other literary writers, the unsigned entries average 1xba columns in length. In addition to providing information on the author's life and works, each entry offers a brief overall critical assessment. All entries conclude with a bibliography of the author's works, categorized by genre, and a reference to a full-length biography, if one is available. Although many entries reflect events and publications through mid-1995, others are not that current: A. S. Byatt's bibliography does not include any of her publications since 1991, and the 1991 death of Howard Nemerov is not noted. While the major figures of the century are certainly here, some of the editors' inclusions and exclusions are puzzling. For instance, Don DeLillo and Sara Paretsky are included, but John Hersey and Wallace Stegner are not. In addition, the coverage of living American playwrights and poets is particularly spotty. Among those overlooked are Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Beth Henley, Wendy Wasserstein, and August Wilson. Oxford was prudent in changing the title of this work, for these lively articles are a far cry from the staid, conventional sketches in the Oxford Companions. In a refreshing--but often ruthless--warts-and-all style, contributors seem to revel in the details of authors' personal lives, particularly those involving unhappy childhoods, sexual predilections, and various addictions. At times, there is an almost tabloidlike fascination with sordid or gruesome details. For instance, the reader is not simply informed that Richard Brautigan committed suicide, but that he shot himself in the head and his body was not found for four weeks. Other articles reveal that Alice Walker had an abortion and that Truman Capote escorted the nearly blind James Thurber to his amorous trysts with a New Yorker secretary. Sometimes, interesting trivia about an author's life seems to take precedence over important information about his or her writing. For example, we learn that Derek Walcott has been married three times, but not that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. There is no question that the inclusion here of personal details generally revealed only in full-length biographies results in a livelier and more entertaining compendium. Because its fresh approach complements more traditional reference sources, it should be of particular interest to large academic and public libraries. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1996)