Leí su autobiografía hace muchos años (para chusmear sobre Kerouac, obvio) y leería ésta bio sólo por el título. Best title ever, una frase típica de Vidal.
During his lifetime, Gore Vidal established a fine reputation as a very versatile, inventive writer. Novels, tele-scripts (in the early days of TV in the 1950s, Vidal made a name for himself as a scriptwriter for many of the live teledramas of the era), movie scripts, plays (one of them, "The Best M...
Poems written between 1827 and 1849, because it was difficult to write after he died. Introduction by Jay Parini, which is mostly a brief bio of Poe. Afterword by April Bernard. Poe worked with various rhyme schemes. He liked to employ repetition and adjusted (or tweaked) repetition. He had an ear...
An enjoyable, mostly sympathetic (fictional) narrative of Melville's life. This is no biography, nor does it attempt to be, but rather an attempt to blow life into a character most of us know only as a name on a book's cover (if even that). To Parini's credit, he brought us a Herman Melville who was...
I had never heard of Travels with Charlie when I first saw a second-hand audio cassette copy of it sitting on the for-sale shelf at my local library; I recognized the author, however, having read The Pearl when I was eleven. Despite never being a fan of audiobooks, I opted to give Travels a try, and...
Ah, John Steinbeck.Travels with Charley is the thirteenth work by Steinbeck that I have had the pleasure to read. Part travelogue and part rant, Travels with Charley is a very conversational piece. It is strengthened by Steinbeck’s wit and insight. No matter what he is talking about, Steinbeck is ab...
This has given me everything I could have wanted from a biography of Steinbeck. In clear and accessible prose, Parini sets out Steinbeck's family and personal history and an analysis of the writer's various works in context. In some senses, the book is also a social history of the US in the first 2/...
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