The Essential Rebecca West: Revised Edition: Rebecca West: A Celebration - Softcover

West, Rebecca; Hynes, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140069445 ISBN 13: 9780140069440

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1987

Synopsis

Rebecca West produced a stream of profound, trenchant and witty work, ranging from fiction, biography and critism to reportage, history and travel. This book, compiled with her help, is a selection of her writings.

About this title

About the Author

Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of several major works of literary criticism, including The Auden Generation, Edwardian Occasions, and The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Hynes's wartime experiences as a Marine Corps pilot were the basis for his highly praised memoir, Flights of Passage. The Soldiers' Tale, his book about soldiers' narratives of the two world wars and Vietnam, won a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

From Publishers Weekly

Although hardly a household name today, leftist and feminist Rebecca West (1892–1983) was world-famous in her lifetime, writing prolifically in many genres, feted for her New Yorker coverage of the Nuremberg trials and for her 1941 Yugoslavia history, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. In the first of 22 uncollected essays and book reviews, West recalls a 1920s late-night boating expedition in Central Park accompanied by a silent, often sleeping foreigner who turns out to be Pirandello. In another piece, West describes the comedic antics of her cat Pounce, and, in a third, laments the space constraints imposed on book reviewers by newspapers. In her book reviews, West calls Dickens a nasty man; Solzhenitsyn a courageous and immensely gifted patriot; and Richard Nixon, she says, had a mind so unsophisticated and so narrowly educated that he has almost no mental context. Throughout, West is caustic and outspoken. But with a scanty introduction by Anne Bobby, who co-wrote and starred in a one-woman Off-Broadway show about West, and no background information about the pieces, these disjointed articles have the feel of leftovers that won't draw in new admirers. (May)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0140069445
• ISBN 13: 9780140069440
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 800