ellauri008.html on line 815: However, according to other biographers such as Frederick Karl, Jessie provided what Conrad needed, namely a "straightforward, devoted, quite competent" companion. Similarly, Jones remarks that, despite whatever difficulties the marriage endured, "there can be no doubt that the relationship sustained Conrad's career as a writer", which might have been much less successful without her.
ellauri071.html on line 101: He did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, but it was discussed candidly after his death by biographers including Graham Payn, his long-time partner, and in Coward's diaries and letters, published posthumously.
ellauri072.html on line 168: Frost boarded a steamship from New York to Norfolk, and walked into the Great Dismal Swamp where, Hart maintained, he planned to commit suicide in the woods by a canal. Some biographers have scoffed at the idea that Frost wanted to “throw… [his] life away” in the swamp.
ellauri072.html on line 176: Hart doesn’t understand why other biographers seem averse to broaching the subject. He points to the fact that Frost’s son, Carol, committed suicide, that depression and schizophrenia ran through the family, and that some of Frost’s poems express a death-wish.
ellauri072.html on line 178: “A lot of biographers didn’t want to go into that subject,” Hart said, shrugging. “Maybe they thought they would turn away readers.”
ellauri100.html on line 49: The two lived as roommates for a time in the South of France. An article in Harvard Magazine states that van Gogh's medical biographers agree that his adulthood included periods of hypersexuality, hyposexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality, and that "his stormy homosexual affair with the painter Paul Gauguin included endless, often argumentative discussions."
ellauri106.html on line 46: Philip Roth has not had much luck with biographers. Late in his life, furiously aggrieved after the failure of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the publication of Bloom’s incendiary memoir of their years together, he asked a close friend, Ross Miller, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, to take on the task. Roth sent Miller lists of family members and friends he wanted to be interviewed, along with the questions that he felt should be asked. (“Would you have expected him to achieve success on the scale he has?”) It didn’t work out, for various reasons. Roth had wanted Miller to refute a familiar charge, “this whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit!” that he felt flattened his long erotic history into one false accusation. But Miller came to his own conclusion. “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip,” he told a cousin of Roth’s. (Sandy was Roth’s older brother.) “They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”
ellauri109.html on line 517: When Updike, in the eighties, felt the sour breath of potential biographers on his neck, he tried to preëmpt his pursuers by writing a series of autobiographical essays about such topics as the Pennsylvania town where he grew up, his stutter, and his skin condition. The resulting collection, “Self-Consciousness,” is a dazzlingly intimate book, but his imagination and industry did more to draw biographical attention than to repel it. In the weeks before his death, of lung cancer, in early 2009, he continued to write, including an admiring review of Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever. And five years later there it was: “Updike,” a biography by Adam Begley.
ellauri146.html on line 676: Poe’s first great champion and biographer was the Englishman Ingram. So strong was Poe’s affinity with the life of Europe that legend has carried him there in spite of reality, and it is with some ineffectuality that his biographers explain that he at no time visited Ireland, Greece, France or Russia.
ellauri185.html on line 857: Bellow’s bad temper in the late ’60s was by no means directed exclusively at would-be biographers, radical students and aggrieved wives. Bellow had so many targets to attack, whether insulting them face to face or in blistering letters or put-downs circulated through intermediaries. One of his favorite one-liners ran: “Let’s you and him fight.” The most salient recipients of Bellow’s bad temper in this biography were his three sons, each from a different mother — the oldest 21 when this volume starts, the youngest just 1 year old and about to be abandoned after yet another divorce.
ellauri185.html on line 865: As previous biographers have discovered, it’s difficult to write an endearing biography of Bellow. “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Bellow inquired on his deathbed. The answer should be obvious.
ellauri198.html on line 755: Ei vaan Browning imuskelee kolleegansa Shellyn schollya, Harold täsmentää. The consensus among critics has long been that in his youth Browning had a great enthusiasm for Shelley, an enthusiasm clearly apparent in Pauline and Paracelsus, but abruptly extinguished in Sordello. Generally speaking, it would seem that Browning's ardent enthusiasm for Shelley the poet ends with Sordello in 1840, just as his respect for Shelley the man ends in 1856, with the discovery that he had abandoned his first wife. Any evidence for a lapse of his disaffection in later life seems effectively countered by Browning's own testimony in a letter written in 1885 to F. J. Furnivall, refusing the presidency of the newly formed Shelley Society: “For myself, I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the man and Shelley, well, even the poet, with what they were sixty years ago, when I only had his works, for a certainty, and took his character on trust.” With these highlights of the relationship, most Browning critics and biographers terminate the discussion.
ellauri210.html on line 1279: According to the trivia section here at IMDB, "George Bernard Shaw adamantly opposed any notion that Higgins and Eliza had fallen in love and would marry at the end of the play, as he felt it would betray the character of Eliza who, as in the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, would "come to life" and emancipate herself from the male domination of Higgins and her father. He even went so far as to include a lengthy essay to be published with copies of the script explaining precisely why Higgins and Eliza would never marry, and what "actually happened" after the curtain fell: Eliza married Freddy and opened a flower shop with funds from Colonel Pickering. Moreover, as Shaw biographers have noted, Higgins is meant to be an analogue of the playwright himself, thus suggesting Higgins was actually a homosexual." Eliza, where are my slippers?
ellauri222.html on line 70: Bellow’s bad temper in the late ’60s was by no means directed exclusively at would-be biographers, radical students and aggrieved wives. Bellow had so many targets to attack, whether insulting them face to face or in blistering letters or put-downs circulated through intermediaries. One of his favorite one-liners ran: “Let’s you and him fight.” The most salient recipients of Bellow’s bad temper in this biography were his three sons, each from a different mother — the oldest 21 when this volume starts, the youngest just 1 year old and about to be abandoned after yet another divorce.
ellauri222.html on line 78: As previous biographers have discovered, it’s difficult to write an endearing biography of Bellow. “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Bellow inquired on his deathbed. The answer should be obvious.
ellauri256.html on line 357: “Some call her the second Beatrice, a wise inspirer, Mayakovsky's kindred spirit. Others, a mercenary witch, a vampire, who attached herself to the troubled genius, to his fame and money, and who drove him to suicide,” present-day biographers write about her. Actually she was a little of both.
xxx/ellauri176.html on line 57: Havelock argues that the story of Phryne swimming naked in the sea is probably a sensationalized fabrication. Because Plutarch saw the statues in Thespiae and Delphi himself. Cavallini does not doubt their existence. She does think that the love between Praxiteles and Phryne was an invention of later biographers. Thebes was restored in 315 or 316 BC, but it is doubtful if Phryne ever proposed to rebuild its walls. Diodorus Siculus writes that the Athenians rebuilt the greater part of the wall and that Cassander provided more aid later. He makes no mention of Phryne's alleged offer.
xxx/ellauri176.html on line 69: Furthermore, Pseudo-Cooper continues that the evidence suggests that Idomeneus invented the more salacious version of the story, possibly in his desire to parody and ridicule the courtroom displays of Athenian demagogues. Considering his preference for attributing sexual excess to these demagogues, the provocative act of disrobing Phryne fits the character Hypereides had acquired in Idomeneus' work. As is not uncommon in the biographical tradition, later biographers failed to notice that earlier biographers did not give an accurate representation of events. The later biographer Hermippus incorporated the account of Idomeneus in his own biography. An extract from Hermippus' biography is preserved in the work of Athenaeus and Pseudo-Plutarch.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 793: In general, biographers describe Defense as "ironic": it was not so much a defense of women as a critique of the relationship between the sexes. Topics covered by the book included "Woman's Equipment," "Compulsory Marriage," "The Emancipated Housewife," and "Women as Martyrs." Women were gaining rights, according to Mencken—the ability to partake in adultery without lasting public disgrace, the ability to divorce men, and even some escape from the notion of virginity as sacred, which remained as "one of the hollow conventions of Christianity." Women nonetheless remained restrained by social conventions in many capacities.
xxx/ellauri187.html on line 103: Rilke's diaries and letters, lively with tales of self-dislike and depression, seem to out-Kafka Kafka himself. Still, biographers should beware of making too much of these highly polished introspections. Rilke conceived of writing as a form of prayer, as Kafka did, and he made astringent self-examination a ritualistic prelude to work. Both writers magnified their inadequacies, sometimes to the point of a vaunting self-regard; it was an efficient way to wrest from their doubts a diligent beauty of creation.
xxx/ellauri320.html on line 169: Some years after my visit to Camfield Place, Cartland told one of her biographers that the Duke of Sutherland 'used to come into my bedroom and lie on the bed and kiss me - but I wouldn't let him get into my sacrosanctum.'.
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