Bøger af Penelope Niven

Thornton Wilder: A Life, the first biography of the playwright and novelist since 1983, is based on unprecedented research: thousands of pages of letters, journals, manuscripts, and other documentary evidence of Wilder's life, work, and times. Biographer Penelope Niven mined Wilder's personal archives for more than a decade, and has produced a book that illuminates his professional life anew and reveals an enigmatic, intensely private man who wandered the world, writing, he said, for and about everybody. Even today, he has a global audience. His novels, including The Bridge of San Luis Rey, remain in print all over the world. His plays, especially the iconic Our Town and the revolutionary Skin of Our Teeth, are touchstones of modern theater.Richly detailed, Thornton Wilder: A Life brings one of our country's most beloved playwrights to center stage and unseals his hidden inner self, apparent only here and there in his art and in his papers.

Not since 1929 has there been a biography of Edward Steichen, photographer, painter, and a pivotal yet enigmatic figure in twentieth-century art and culture on two continents. Steichen, who died just short of his ninety-fourth birthday, was fifty and internationally famous when Steichen the Photographer was written by his brother-in-law, the poet and biographer Carl Sandburg. Now Penelope Niven, whose highly acclaimed biography of Sandburg appeared in 1991, has written the first comprehensive biography of Steichen. Here, she illuminates the full story of Steichen's avant-garde life in Paris and New York and his roles in introducing modern art to the American audience, in shaping aerial reconnaissance photography in World War I and navy photography in World War II, in revolutionizing American fashion and portrait photography through his years as chief of photography at Vanity Fair and Vogue, and in creating the unprecedented photographic exhibition The Family of Man, which has touched a global audience of millions since it opened in 1955.

At age forty-four, Penelope Niven was at a turning point in her life. In need of a change for both body and spirit, she decided to learn how to swim. While discovering the restorative effect of the water, she also began to notice that the lessons she was learning in the pool drew remarkable parallels with the lessons of life. The way in which you first get into the water, for example, is similar to trying anything new-you can jump in feet first, or dive in headfirst, but first you have to have some idea of what you're actually getting into. From floating to treading water, forward strokes to the backstroke, Swimming Lessons combines the familiar lessons of swimming with personal anecdotes and apt observations to stirring effect. Sensible, touching, and personal, this appealing book will be invaluable to any reader facing a life change or simply looking for a little bit of inspiration. A Harvest Original