Today’s Reading Circle Monday Recommendations are ten author biographies that are worth checking out:
· Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (on Wolff, an early twentieth-century English author whose innovative style transformed the form of the novel; especially known for To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and the essay A Room of One’s Own; Calvin T. Ryan Library Book Collection (2nd Level) PR6045.O72 Z774 1998)
· Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (on Ralph Waldo Emerson, nineteenth-century American thinker whose writings have influenced almost every major American author and poet; Calvin T. Ryan Library eBook Collection LINK)
· Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty (the prolific novelist Patchett provides an autobiographical account of her friendship with poet Lucy Grealy who died at age 39; available at the Kearney Public Library)
· Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: from Saint Louis to The Waste Land (on T.S. Eliot, the Anglo-American poet and critic whose 1922 poem The Waste Land is regarded as the most important poem of the century; recommended by Dr. Annarose Steinke)
· Mark Doty, What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (a new book by the poet Doty that weaves together a biography of Whitman, Doty’s own reading of this major American poet, and the uses of poetry in everyday life)
· Edward Wilson-Lee, Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet (on English playwright William Shakespeare’s life and how his plays have circulated across the globe, especially in Africa)
· James Boswell, Life of Johnson (the most famous English author of the eighteenth-century, Samuel Johnson, is the subject of the most famous biography ever written; Boswell, his protege, started to take notes for the book during Johnson’s life; Calvin T. Ryan Library Book Collection (2nd Level) PR3533 .B6 1960)
· Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (on the poet Phillis Wheatley who was an international sensation when she published poetry at 20 years old while being held in slavery in Boston in 1773)
· Richard Ellman, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (on Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats, founder of the Abbey Theater in Dublin and the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923; Ellman is famous for several literary biographies, including ones on James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; recommended by Dr. Rebecca Umland; Calvin T. Ryan Library Book Collection (2nd Level) PR5906 .E4 1978)
· Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (on Lucretius and the rediscovery of his poem On the Nature of Things (50 BC) in the year AD 1417 and its influence on European thinkers; Calvin T. Ryan Library Book Collection (2nd Level) PA6484 .G69 2011)
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Check back every Monday for reading suggestions from the Reading Circle. For more book ideas, see these past Monday posts:
Recommended plays that read well on the page HERE
Recent scholarly books on revolutionary movements HERE
A Literary Mystery: Who wrote The Woman of Colour (Olivia Fairfax) HERE
Foreign language films to watch this summer HERE
Fun summer books recommended by friends at the Calvin T. Ryan Library HERE
History and Literature of Spaceflight reading recommendations HERE
Memorial Day reading recommendations HERE