From its earliest years, Mount Pleasant was known as the "Athens of Iowa": a small town with a big story and a center of learning and culture. Even during the town's pioneer era, the citizens of Mount Pleasant championed education, establishing numerous schools and a college. Progressive ideals, including abolitionism and women's education, took root. As the home of Sen. James Harlan, an important ally of Abraham Lincoln, the city emerged as a bastion of support for the president. During t...

Married to Genius considers the emotional and artistic commitment in the marriages of nine modern writers, Tolstoy, Shaw, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lawrence, Hemmingway and Scott Fitzgerald. The book reveals the way these major writers attempted to integrate life and art and to resolve the conflict between domestic and creative fulfilment.

An extraordinary father-son biography of the scandalous life of movie star Errol Flynn and of his son's equally glamorous yet doomed career as a war photographer in Vietnam.

Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of Samuel Johnson one of the most illustrious figures of English literary tradition. Johnson was famous as a poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, critic, editor, lexicographer, conversationalist and larger than life personality. After nine years of work Johnson's, 'A dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1755. He overcame great adversity to achieve success. 'The Struggle' is a masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figur...

Scott Fitzgerald, a romantic and tragic figure who embodied the decades between the two world wars, was a writer who took his material almost entirely from his life. Despite his early success with The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald battled against failure and disappointment.This book, by the acclaimed biographer of Hemingway, is the first to analyze frankly the meaning as well as the events of Fitzgerald's life and to illuminate the recurrent patterns that reveal his inner self....

In this book, Jeffrey Meyers follows the lives of four Impressionist painters whose rebellious work was scorned by the critics and derided by their contemporaries. The French art establishment dismissed them altogether and at the time their sold for very little. Impressionist Quartet describes the relationships between these artists and how they struggle emotionally and intellectually to create a new way of seeing and representing the world.

Bram Stoker’s gothic horror masterpiece pits good against evil and life against death, all under the thrall of the original vampire....“Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!”He is a creature of darkness. His face deathly pale, his eyes ablaze with the fires of hell. He has been dead for centuries, yet he may never die. He waits in his crumbling castle in the mountains of Transylvania, as his prey draws closer and closer to...

This set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Describes a band of frustrated revolutionary exiles in Geneva. This book is a study of individuals under pressure, and it remains a telling account of the fugitive life - especially in its portrait of Razumov, heir to the long line of Russian anti-heroes in Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev.In the first decade of the twentieth century, Conrad wrote three political novels that have had constant influence on the way we look at contemporary history. The third of these, Under Western Eye...

The multifaceted, cubist, and comprehensive perspective of Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway appears on the fortieth anniversary of Meyers’s magisterial biography of Hemingway. This approach has never before been used to illustrate the complexity of his character, the range of his interests, and the brilliance of his work. This authoritative book uses sources in Italian, Spanish, French, and German. It reveals his reading of literature and history, his transformation of fri...

Parallel Lives covers the century from the birth of Sigmund Freud in 1856 to the death of Sylvia Plath in 1963. Written by the esteemed biographer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers, the book includes European, American, and Russian authors and artists, film directors and actors, children and soldiers, friends and lovers, rivals and enemies. Drawing on the bifocal principle of dual composition in Plutarch, these brief lives are arranged in pairs to interact with each other and ill...

Originally published in 1980 and nominated for the Duff Cooper Prize, this was the first biography of Wyndham Lewis and was based on extensive archival research and interviews. It narrates Lewis’ years at Rugby and the Slade, his bohemian life on the Continent, the creation of Vorticism and publication of Blast, and his experiences at Passchendaele, as well as his many love affairs, his bitter quarrels with Bloomsbury and the Sitwells, the suppressed books of the thirties, the evo...