Frederick R. Karl's magisterial biography of George Eliot proves her to be one of the most fascinating and iconic individuals of her time. Born in 1819 as Mary Anne Evans, she grew up near rural Coventry when the pastoral life was being destroyed by the rapid rise of industrialism. Her father, Robert Evans, took care of an estate, where the family lived. Eliot, his youngest child, absorbed the world around her, its beauty and its delicate sense of stability, which was about to be thoroughly disrupted. Eliot thrived on learning while she stayed home, taking care of her aging father. Upon his death, she began her long process of emergence and change. Her unusual intelligence and literary capacity brought her to the attention of John Chapman, who enlisted her to work on the intellectual Westminster Review in London. While there she met some of the leading thinkers of her era, including Herbert Spencer. Karl focuses on her relationships with these men in a way earlier biographers have been unable, using many letters and documents previously unavailable.
The definitive life of one of America's most important writers--for the first time, here are the connections between Faulkner's private life and public work, his influence on other writers, and the effect of America on his themes and preoccupations. Here, too, are the riveting details about his alcoholism, his troubled marriage, and stint as a Hollywood writer.
In Out of My System (1975), the influential literary critic, Frederick Crews, documented the erosion of his Freudian sympathies. Now, in his latest carefully reasoned study, he reveals where that reappraisal took him and why he has come to regard himself as an opponent of all "self-validating" doctrines. Presenting a searing critique of pretension and folly in the literary academy, Crews applies his skepticism to such diverse figures as Joseph Conrad, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Leslie Fiedler.
This full biography comes at a time when interest in Eliot's work is high. The author has previously written biographies of Conrad, Faulkner and Kafka.
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