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Jan 1, 1859 — Jan 1, 1929· 70 yrs

UNITED STATES AUTHOR · HISTORY AND CRITICISM · POETRY

Katharine Lee Bates

Also known as: Katharine Lee Bates, Katherine Lee Bates

16
BOOKS
3.3
AVG RATING (3)
0
READERS

Wellesley College professor and author of "America the Beautiful"

Falmouth, United States
Wikipedia

Shakespeare's life began near the reflecting, gleaming river Avon, which today flows past Stratford's Church of the Holy Trinity where he lies buried, and past a theatre where his dramas are seen and heard by visitors from all nations.

— from Shakespeare, 1977

Most acclaimed

#1

Shakespeare

1977

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Shakespeare has been the lodestar of English literature, not only to our finest biographers & critics but to our greatest imaginative writers as well. Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain & James Joyce have all written of the man— as enigma, ancestor or phantom. In Shakespeare Burgess, whose Nothing Like the Sun Harold Bloom called "the only successful novel ever written about Shakespeare," takes up that daunting challenge once again, reimagining the actual world of Shakespeare the author, actor & man. Burgess is mindful of the few facts we have about Shakespeare & handles them with great dexterity. But this isn't a mere recounting of facts. It's an attempt by one virtuoso writer to capture the likeness of the supreme virtuoso, to locate him exactly & take his measure. It's also an attempt to present him —as only a gifted professional writer can —as a working writer among others, a man of his time in his own milieu. Shakespeare the Elizabethan upstart? Literary genius without peer? The representative man? The actor among actors, businessman among businessmen? What Burgess so skillfully gets across —alongside what he calls "the main facts about the life & society from which the poems & plays arose"— is a genuine feel for who Shakespeare was & where he was. In the end, Burgess claims for himself the right of every Shakespeare-lover: "to paint his own portrait of the man."

#2

Once upon a time

1994

3.0 (1)

From master storyteller and National Book Award winner John Barth comes a bravura performance: a memoir wrapped in a novel and launched on a sea voyage. A cutter-rigged sloop sets sail for an end-of-season cruise down into the "Chesapeake Triangle." Our captain: a middle-aged writer of some repute. The sole crewmate: his lover, friend, editor, and wife. The journey turns out to be not the modest three-day cruise it at first seems. As we sail through sun and storm, our skipper spins (and is spun by) the Story of His Life - an operatic saga that's part Verdi, part Puccini, and more than a dollop of bouffe, a compound narrative voyaging through the imagination. Crisscrossing the past, mixing memory with desire, our narrator navigates among the waypoints of his life, beguiling us with tales of adventure and despair, love and marriage, selves and counterselves, aging and sailing, teaching and writing - steering always by the polestar of Vocation, the storyteller's call. With all the narrative verve, playful flourishes, and dazzling prose that made works like The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Giles Goat-Boy, and The Sot-Weed Factor so memorable, Once Upon a Time is a mesmerizing and entertaining performance from one of the most important writers of our time.

#3

American literature

1898

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Katharine Lee Bates (August 12, 1859 – March 28, 1929) was an American author and poet, chiefly remembered for her anthem "America the Beautiful", but also for her many books and articles on social reform, on which she was a noted speaker. Bates enjoyed close links with Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she had graduated with a B.A., and later became a professor of English literature, helping to launch American literature as an academic speciality, and writing one of the first-ever college textbooks on it. She never married, possibly because she would have lost tenure if she had. Throughout her long career at Wellesley, she shared a house with her close friend and companion Katharine Coman. Some scholars have assumed that this was a lesbian relationship, considering some exchanges of letters sufficient proof; others believe their relationship may have been a platonic "Boston marriage" in the contemporary phrase.

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