Edward Mendelson

This book is an illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the 19th and 20th centuries -- Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts -- portray the essential experiences of life. For Edward Mendelson, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, these classic novels tell life stories that are valuable to readers who are thinking about the course of their own lives. Looking beyond theories to the individual intentions of the authors and taking into consideration their lives and times, Mendelson examines the sometimes contradictory ways in which the novels portray such major passages of life as love, marriage, and parenthood. In Frankenstein's story of a new life, we see a searing representation of emotional neglect. In Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre the transition from childhood to adulthood is portrayed in vastly different ways even though the sisters who wrote the books shared the same isolated life. In Mrs. Dalloway we see an ideal and almost impossible adult love. Mendelson leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understanding of each of the seven novels, reminding us in the most captivating way why they matter. - Jacket flap.

This book is the history of Auden's poems, and of the private and public events that went into them, from the time he moved from England to America in 1939 until his death in 1973. It completes the story begun in Edward Mendelson's Early Auden, and is even more revelatory about Auden's thought, life, and work. Later Auden links the many changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional, religious, and erotic life with his shifting public role as a representative of political causes, as a uniformed researcher working with the U.S. Army in postwar Germany, as a public moralist, and above all as a poet.

An account of Auden's work from the start of his career until his departure for America in 1939.

"Presented in one volume for the very first time, and updated with new archival discoveries, Early Auden, Later Auden reintroduces Edward Mendelson's acclaimed, two-part biography of W.H. Auden (1907-73), one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. This book offers a detailed history and interpretation of Auden's oeuvre, spanning the duration of his career from juvenilia to his final works in poetry as well as theatre, film, radio, opera, essays, and lectures. Early Auden, Later Auden begins with Auden's emigration from England to the United States. The book follows the evolution of his thought, offering a comparison of the poet's views at various junctures over a lifetime. With penetrating insight, Mendelson examines Auden's early ideas, methods, and personal transitions as reflected in poems, manuscripts and private papers. The book then links changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional and religious experience with his shifting public role--showing the depth of his personal struggles with self and with fame, and the means by which these internal conflicts were reflected in his art in later years."--

"One of contemporary America's leading critics and scholars offers a provocative reassessment of the lives and work of eight influential twentieth- century American writers: Lionel Trilling Dwight Macdonald W.H. Auden William Maxwell Saul Bellow Alfred Kazin Norman Mailer Frank O'Hara Drawing on newly published letters and diaries, Edward Mendelson explores the responses of these writers, very public figures all, to major historical events--among them the rise and fall of fascism, the cold war, the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and the sexual revolution--and shows how intensely personal concerns, relating to childhood, religion, status, sex, and money, largely shaped their views. Mendelson's vivid portraits cut to the quick, changing our perceptions of these brilliant, complicated, often deeply troubled men while offering readers a new understanding of their contributions to American intellectual and political life"--