Lewis Carroll

John Tenniel

Martin Gardner

Jeffrey Meyers

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

The Epistle of James Through New Eyes

Ancient Wisdom for Today's Dissidents

Gary Cooper

The highly influential author of novels The Razor's Edge, Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and the story "The Letter" (all of which have been made into films), William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote an impressive 78 books, sharing his ironic yet sympathetic view of human passion and agony with readers from the Victorian era's close to the world after WWII. His works influenced generations of subsequent writers, including D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, and V.S. Naipaul. The W. Somerset Maugham Reader presents the full range of Maugham's literary capabilities, from his early works of social realism, to his dramatic tales of love and revenge, to his pieces on travel to exotic lands. Included are stories and book excerpts for which Maugham is famous, as well as pieces which focus on his reoccurring themes: flight from sexual repression, the decay of Europeans transplanted to the tropics, and marriages turned unhappy or violent.

Novels, Stories, Travel Writing

The W. Somerset Maugham Reader

An instinctive and magnificent storyteller, Somerset Maugham was one of the most popular and successful writers of his time. He published seventy-eight books -- including the undisputed classics Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge -- which sold over 40 million copies in his lifetime. Born in Paris to sophisticated parents, Willie Maugham was orphaned at the age of ten and brought up in a small English coastal town by narrow-minded relatives. He was trained as a doctor, but never practiced medicine. His novel Ashenden, based on his own espionage for Britain in World War I, influenced writers from Eric Ambler to John le Carr?. After a failed affair with an actress, he married another man’s mistress, but reserved his greatest love for a man who shared his life for nearly thirty years. He traveled the world and spoke several languages. Despite a debilitating stutter, and an acerbic and formal manner, he entertained literary celebrities and royalty at his villa in the south of France. He made a fortune from his writing--the short story “Rain” alone earned him a million dollars–yet true critical recognition, and the esteem of his literary peers, eluded him. The life of Somerset Maugham, as told by acclaimed biographer Jeffrey Meyers, is an intriguing, glamorous, complex, and extraordinary account of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring writers. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A Life

Somerset Maugham

Major English novelist. Key themes: totalitarianism and English working classes. Writings include: "The Road to Wigan Pier, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty Four." Volume covers the period 1933-1969.

The Critical Heritage

George Orwell

New Essays

The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence

This remarkable volume collects, for the first time, essays representing more than four decades of scholarship by one of the world's leading authorities on George Orwell. In clear, energetic prose that exemplifies his indefatigable attention to Orwell's life work, Jeffrey Meyers analyzes the works and reception of one of the most widely read and admired twentieth-century authors. Orwell: Life and Art covers the novelist's painful childhood and presents accounts of his autobiographical writings from the beginning of his career through the Spanish Civil War. Meyers continues with analyses of Orwell's major works, including Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as his style, distinctive satiric humor, and approach to the art of writing. Meyers ends with a scrupulous examination of six biographies of Orwell, including his own, that embodies a consummate grasp and mastery of both the art of biography and Orwell's life and legacy. Writing with an authority born of decades of focused scholarship, visits to Orwell's homes and workplaces, and interviews with his survivors, Meyers sculpts a dynamic view of Orwell's enduring influence on literature, art, culture, and politics.

Life and Art

Orwell

A Biography

D.H. Lawrence

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 "secondary virtues": 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.

Letters of the Canadian Artist Alex Colville and Biographer Jeffrey Meyers

The Mystery of the Real

DH Lawrence and Tradition indicates how Lawrence interprets, revalues, absorbs, and transforms the work of Blake, Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, Hardy, Whitman, and Nietzche. Though the critics differ in their approaches to the question of Lawrence's relation to tradition and receptivity to influence, they all assume that his use of the style, forms, and ideas of his predecessors is positive. The contributers believe that Lawrence's fiction, poetry, and criticism derive their resonance, meaning, and value--and much of their inspiration--from his vital connection to significant authors of the nineteenth century. Since tradition can be construed as the cultural equivalence of the individual consciousness, this book explores the very roots of Lawrence's art. The essays examine how Lawrence fulfills the implications and completes, the potential of his Romantic and Victorian forebears and how, by rewriting the works of others, he makes them entirely his own. Though Lawrence transcends any single literary influence, part of his receptive genius is the ability to select and learn from the traditions of the past. He had the persistance, and courage to continue the struggle with the potent dead and, from his spiritual combat, to re-create a new are. Lawrence's exploration of earlier writers and his cultivation of underlying temperamental an stylistic affinities lead him to self-discovery. His debts to traditions enhance rather than diminish his originality and establish him more seriously as a writer of the first rank.

D.H. Lawrence and Tradition

Thirteen essays by the celebrated Hemingway biographer explore the relationship between the great writer's colorful life and his bold literary art.

Life Into Art

Hemingway

This set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Ernest Hemingway

El Héroe Americano

Bible-reading is more of an art than a science. The Bible is a story, not a lexicon of systematic theological definitions. With this in mind, The Through New Eyes Bible Commentary Series builds on the foundational Biblical-theology work of James B. Jordan and other like-minded scholars in bringing you a set of commentaries that will help you read, teach and preach through the Bible while picking up on the rich symphonic themes and the literary symbolism of the Scriptures. Because they are written for thoughtful Christians without being overly academic, these commentaries will serve as valuable resources for family worship, Sunday school or Bible studies.

A Table in the Mist

Ecclesiastes Through New Eyes

This masterly work offers an exciting recreation of the life and times of British novelist D.H. Lawrence.

Robert Lowell and His Circle

Manic Power

Drawing on the collected works of the visionary writer, as well as interviews with family and friends and unpublished materials in the Orwell Archive, the author paints a vivid portrait of the writer who penned, 1984 and other modern classics. Reprint.

Wintry Conscience of a Generation

This remarkable volume collects, for the first time, essays representing more than four decades of scholarship by one of the world's leading authorities on George Orwell. In clear, energetic prose that exemplifies his indefatigable attention to Orwell's life work, Jeffrey Meyers analyzes the works and reception of one of the most widely read and admired twentieth-century authors. Orwell: Life and Art covers the novelist's painful childhood and presents accounts of his autobiographical writings from the beginning of his career through the Spanish Civil War. Meyers continues with analyses of Orwell's major works, including Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as his style, distinctive satiric humour, and approach to the art of writing. Meyers ends with a scrupulous examination of six biographies of Orwell, including his own, that embodies a consummate grasp and mastery of both the art of biography and Orwell's life and legacy. Writing with an authority born of decades of focused scholarship, visits to Orwell's homes and workplaces, and interviews with his survivors, Meyers sculpts a dynamic view of Orwell's enduring influence on literature, art, culture, and politics. Jeffrey Meyers has written extensively on literature, film, and art. He is the author of forty-eight books, including The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe and biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Jeffrey Meyers

Books

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