Bøger af Jeffrey Meyers

"Biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers knew the novelist James Salter (1925-2015) during the last decade of his life, visited him twice on Long Island, and received eighty letters from him. Meyers's friendship and knowledge of Salter's life provide many new insights about the personal, cultural, and historical background of his work. This appreciative book, the first full-length study in twenty-six years, is intended to introduce Salter to new readers, and to show his achievement as a writer of novels, stories, screenplays, memoirs, and travel essays. Salter had an extraordinary range of experience as West Point graduate; fighter pilot in the Korean War; downhill skier, rock climber, and mountain climber; screenwriter and film director; connoisseur of food and wine; world traveler and sophisticated observer. Across eleven chapters, Meyers discusses Salter's family and friends; the significance of his book and chapter titles; characters' names and cultural allusions; literary influences, especially Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald; development of his fictional style and techniques; awareness of weather and light; supreme delineation of sexual ecstasy; recurrent themes of war and love; strange career and late recognition. A detailed chronology tracks key dates and events in Salter's life, while a chronological bibliography shows the development of his literary reputation. For Meyers, Salter's lyrical evocation of people and places, of luxurious decadence and the danger of death, are unsurpassed in contemporary literature. This elegant blend of biography, literary criticism, and memoir reveals why"--

Jeffrey Meyers' Resurrections: Authors, Heroes-and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he writes in the preface, "e;The chapters in this book represent in miniature my career as a life-writer. My biographies have always been driven by fascination with the source of artistic creativity, with people who wrote or painted and with the worlds they inhabited."e; Ian Watt, who taught Meyers at Berkeley, struggled with the legacy of his ordeal as a Japanese prisoner of war, and with its depiction in the film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. The story of Paul Theroux's feud with Sir Vidia Naipaul is well known, but Meyers finds greater meaning in their quarrel through the lens of his own long friendship with Theroux. While James Salter, fighter pilot and brilliant stylist, epitomizes Meyers' heroic ideal, the fiction writer also responds with an epistolary friendship, punctuated by visits, and Meyers is delighted by Salter's great reputation late in life. Anthony Blunt, art historian and communist spy, fascinates the biographer for a darker reason: the depth of his capacity for intellectual and personal deceit. The feckless, lesser-known Hugh Gordon Porteus, told Meyers many revealing and amusing stories about his friends Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In the process of writing these profiles, Meyers discovers a common thread relating to himself: not only do these subjects provoke a kind of personal testing, they also represent his search for the ideal father in his vivid intellectual and imaginative inquiry.

The work of Alex Colville, O.C. (1920-2013), one of the great modern realist painters, combines the Flemish detail of Andrew Wyeth, the eerie foreboding of George Tooker and the anguished confrontations of Lucian Freud. Behind the North Americans stands their common master, Edward Hopper. Colville's works are in many museums in Canada and Germany. He has affinities with Max Beckmann and appeals to the German "e;secondary virtues"e;: cleanliness, punctuality, love of order. In a long life he resolutely opposed the fashionable currents of abstract and expressionistic art. In contrast to Jackson Pollock's wild action painting, Colville created paintings of contemplation and reflection. As Jeffrey Meyers writes: I spent several days with Colville on each of three visits from California to Wolfville. I received seventy letters from him between August 1998 and April 2010, and kept thirty-six of my letters to him. He sent me photographs and slides of his work and, in his eighties, discussed the progress and meaning of the paintings he completed during the last decade of his life. His handwritten letters, precisely explaining his thoughts and feelings, provide a rare and enlightening opportunity to compare my insights and interpretations with his own intentions and ideas. He also discussed his family, health, sexuality, politics, reading, travels, literary interests, our mutual friend Iris Murdoch, response to my writing, his work, exhibitions, sales of his pictures and of course the meaning of his art. His letters reveal the challenges he faced during aging and illness, and his determination to keep painting as health difficulties mounted. He stopped writing to me when he became seriously ill two years before his death. In this context the late paintings, presented in colour in this book, take on a new poignancy.

This examination of the life and work of writer Lawrence by prolific biographer Meyers looks at Lawrence's tempestuous marriage and the intersections between his fiction (Lady Chatterly's Lover, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers) and the life that inspired them.

Filled with provocative new assessments and new facts, this biography presents the contradictory, tormented life of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim , and one of the great figures of modern literature.

This comprehensive biography of prolific critic, essayist, historian and novelist Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) posits, quite successfully that the subject lived a life as romantic and chaotic as his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's.

Meyers emphasizes Fitzgerald's alcoholism, Zelda's illnesses and her doctors, Fitzgerald's love affairs both before and after her breakdown, and his wide-ranging friendships, from the polo star Tommy Hitchcock to the Hollywood executive Irving Thalberg.

Sampling works by the creator of Holmes and Watson, this collection features Doyle's detective stories, horror tales, journalism, historical stories, and the complete text of his science-fiction novel The Poison Belt.

A pre-eminent Orwell scholar's lifetime of work on the icon of modern literature

The Genius and the Goddess, based on Jeffrey Meyers' long friendship with Arthur Miller and extensive archival research from Washington to Los Angeles, is a portrait of a marriage.

"Distinguished by its precision, its graceful use of language, and its resonant depth, the innovative style of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) radically altered literary convent"

This biography of Edgar Allan Poe, a giant of American Literature who invented both the horror and detective genre, is a portrait of extremes: a disinherited heir, a brilliant bu underpaid author, a temerate man and uncontrollable addict.