Writers: Their Lives and Works

362 Pages·2018·139.81 MB·English

by  James Naughtie

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THEIR LIVES AND WORKS
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THEIR LIVES AND WORKS
Foreword by JAMES NAUGHTIE
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DK LONDON
CONTRIBUTORS
Senior Editor Angela Wilkes
Senior Art Editor Helen Spencer
Managing Editor Gareth Jones Kay Celtel Marcus Weeks
Senior Managing Art Editor Lee Grifths has a PhD in history and, after a career is a writer and musician. He has written and
US Editors Megan Douglass, Jane Perlmutter spanning publishing, training, and the auction contributed to many books on philosophy,
Jacket Designers Surabhi Wadhwa-Gandhi, business, now works as a writer, researcher, literature, and the arts, including several of
Juhi Sheth and editor. DK’s "Big Ideas Simply Explained" series.
Design Development Manager Sophie MTT
Jacket Editor Claire Gell
Pre-production Producer Helen Cleary Iain Zaczek
Dave Almond works from her home in rural South Wales, studied French and History at Wadham College,
Senior Producer Mandy Inness writing, editing, and making fne-art prints. She Oxford University. He has written more than 30
Associate Publishing Director Liz Wheeler graduated in English literature from Cambridge books on various aspects of literature, history,
Publishing Director Jonathan Metcalf University and has an MA in creative writing. and art.
Art Director Karen Self
Produced for DK by R. G. Grant Content Consultant: Peter Hulme
has written extensively in the felds of history, is Emeritus Professor in Literature at the

biography, and culture. He contributed to 1001 University of Essex, where he taught for 40

www.cobaltid.co.uk Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006) and years. His books include Colonial Encounters:
501 Great Writers (2008). Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797
Art Editors
Paul Reid, Darren Bland, Rebecca Johns (1986) and Cuba’s Wild East: A Literary
Geography of Oriente (2011).
Editors
Ann Kramer
Marek Walisiewicz, Diana Loxley,
Johnny Murray, Kirsty Seymour-Ure is a writer and historian and has written
numerous books for the general reader on FOREWORD
subjects ranging from women’s history to James Naughtie
art and literature. An award-winning radio host and broadcaster,
First American Edition, 2018
James Naughtie began his career as a
Published in the United States by DK Publishing
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 journalist before moving to radio broadcasting
Diana Loxley in 1986. For over 20 years he cohosted on BBC
Copyright © 2018 Dorling Kindersley Limited
is a freelance editor and writer, and a former Radio 4’s Today program, and he has chaired
DK, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC
18 19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 managing editor of a publishing company in Radio 4’s monthly book club since it began in
London. She has a doctorate in literature. 1998. James Naughtie has chaired both the
001-305935-Sep/2018
Man Booker and Samuel Johnson judging
All rights reserved. panels and written a number of nonfction
Without limiting the rights under the copyright Esther Ripley
books including The Rivals: The Intimate Story
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval is a writer and editor who began her career in Of A Political Marriage, The Accidental American:
system, or transmitted, in any form,or by any journalism and was a managing editor at DK. Tony Blair And The Presidency, The Making Of
means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
She studied literature with psychology and Music, and The New Elizabethans and two novels,
recording, or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of the copyright owner. Published in writes on a range of cultural subjects. The Madness of July and Paris Spring.
Great Britain by Dorling Kindersley Limited.
A catalog record for this book
is available from the Library of Congress. Kirsty Seymour-Ure
has a degree in English literature and Italian
ISBN: 978-1-4654-7477-3
from Durham University. Now living in Italy, she
DK books are available at special discounts when is an experienced freelance writer and editor.
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Markets, 345 Hudson Street, New York, Bruno Vincent
New York 10014 is an editor and author who lives in London.
CONTRIBUTORS
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CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3
Pre-19th Early 19th Late 19th
Century Century Century
008 Foreword 012 Dante Alighieri 060 J. W. von Goethe 104 George Eliot
016 Giovanni Boccaccio 064 William Wordsworth 106 Herman Melville
018 Geofrey Chaucer 068 Jane Austen 108 Walt Whitman
022 François Rabelais 072 Mary Shelley 112 Charles Baudelaire
026 Michel de Montaigne 074 Lord Byron 116 Gustave Flaubert
028 Miguel de Cervantes 076 Honoré de Balzac 120 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
032 William Shakespeare 078 Victor Hugo 124 Henrik Ibsen
038 John Donne 082 Hans Christian Andersen 126 Leo Tolstoy
040 John Milton 084 Edgar Allan Poe 130 Machado de Assis
042 Molière 086 Charles Dickens 132 Emily Dickinson
044 Aphra Behn 092 Charlotte and Emi ly 134 Mark Twain
Brontë
046 Matsuo Bashō 136 Thomas Hardy
098 Directory
048 Daniel Defoe 140 Emile Zola
052 Jonathan Swift 142 Henry James
054 Voltaire 144 August Strindberg
056 Directory 146 Guy de Maupassant
148 Oscar Wilde
150 Joseph Conrad
154 Rudyard Kipling
156 Anton Chekhov
160 Rabindranath Tagore
162 Directory
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CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6
Early 20th Mid-20th Writing
Century Century Today
168 W. B. Yeats 240 Vladimir Nabokov 304 José Saramago
170 Luigi Pirandello 242 John Steinbeck 306 Derek Walcott
172 Natsume Sōseki 244 George Orwell 308 Toni Morrison
174 Marcel Proust 248 Pablo Neruda 310 Alice Munro
178 Willa Cather 252 Graham Greene 312 Nawal El Saadawi
180 Thomas Mann 254 Jean-Paul Sartre 314 John Updike
182 Lu Xun 258 Samuel Beckett 316 Cormac McCarthy
184 James Joyce 262 Naguib Mahfouz 318 Seamus Heaney
188 Virginia Woolf 264 Albert Camus 322 J. M. Coetzee
192 Franz Kafka 266 Aimé Césaire 326 Isabel Allende
196 Ezra Pound 268 Dylan Thomas 328 Peter Carey
200 D. H. Lawrence 270 Marguerite Duras 330 Hwang Sok-yong
202 Raymond Chandler 272 Saul Bellow 332 W. G. Sebald
204 T. S. Eliot 274 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 336 Lorna Goodison
206 Jean Rhys 276 Primo Levi 338 Haruki Murakami
208 Marina Tsvetaeva 280 Jack Kerouac 340 Orhan Pamuk
210 F. Scott Fitzgerald 282 Italo Calvino 342 Mo Yan
214 William Faulkner 284 Günter Grass 344 Arundhati Roy
220 Bertolt Brecht 286 Gabriel García Márquez 346 Directory
222 Jorge Luis Borges 290 Maya Angelou
226 Ernest Hemingway 292 Milan Kundera
232 Yasunari Kawabata 294 Chinua Achebe 350 Index
234 Directory 298 Directory 359 Acknowledgments
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CONTENTS
008 FOREWORD
Foreword
A celebrated author once apologized to me for having to disappear inexplicable character of the force that propels them. When George
for a while from public view. “I’ve been arguing with a novel for six Orwell described writers as “vain, selfsh, and lazy” he went on to say
months,” he said. No further explanation was necessary. He had to that it wasn’t moral weakness of that kind that kept them at it—the
return to the fray because the argument couldn’t be put aside and business of producing a book was for him like enduring a long,
had to be settled one way or another. Pen in hand, he had to gaze painful illness—but the presence of a demon that they could neither
once more at a blank page. resist nor understand.
Imaginative writers—the novelists and poets in this volume Poets have the luxury of being more open about this than
and countless hordes of others—have all heard that insistent call novelists, of course, because in every culture they have always been
pulling them away. They have also learned, with varying degrees of expected to be in touch with some muse, in a way denied to everyone
reluctance and joy, that the place to which they are taken is the one else. In their own world. Long before the Romantics in early-
where they are meant to be. The frst act of the writer is not so much nineteenth-century England put aside the mirror that poets before
to put the frst word on the page, but to understand the obligation to them had professed to hold up to nature, and replaced it with a lamp
listen when the call comes. that would light up their own inner lives, the poem was the vehicle
This is as true for writers driven by an urge to confront the world that could take you out of the world as surely as the tale-telling of
around them—a satirist like Jonathan Swift, a Dickens, or a Kafka— an oral tradition that mingled history with mystery and fantasy
as for those who want to build a new and distant place for their when verses and stories were lovingly passed down the generations.
imaginations. They are all aware of what some poets and novelists Seamus Heaney, a Nobel laureate in literature in the last decade
have characterized as a near-priestly function, as if they are the of the twentieth century, returned to the Aeneid for his last published
interpreters of a higher truth for those who require their intervention work, translating Book VI of Virgil’s epic, which describes how the
and guidance to see it and understand it for themselves. Trojan hero Aeneas descends into the underworld, having cut
A convenient belief, you might say, because it swathes the whole the golden bough to protect him as he goes—the mythic story
business in mystery and suggests there are secrets that can never that inspired poets from Dante Alighieri in the Italian Middle
be unraveled by outsiders. Yet it’s true. Writers who don’t accept Ages, to the Anglo-American T.S. Eliot writing just after World
that they are on a journey into the unknown will never produce War I nearly six centuries later. Like Heaney, they were drawn to the
work that lasts, because it will lack the magic that can infect a oldest and most enduring stories, the ones that we want to interpret
reader’s mind. Even authors who are brutal about the day-to-day over and over again to explain to ourselves who we are and why we
struggles of their trade come back, again and again, to the behave as we do.
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