The World as I Found It - Hardcover

Bruce Duffy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436138166 ISBN 13: 9780436138164

Publisher: Secker & Warburg (London), 1988

Synopsis

THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT centers around Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most powerfully magnetic philosophers of our time--brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark on all around him.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Duffy is the author of the autobiographical novel Last Comes the Egg (1997), and—to appear June 2011—Disaster Was My God, a novel based on the life and work of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. An only child raised in a Catholic middle-class family in suburban Maryland, Duffy sees the 1962 death of his mother—essentially by medical malpractice— as what pushed him to be a writer. Duffy graduated from the University of Maryland in 1973, and has hitchhiked twice across the United States, worked construction, washed dishes, hopped freight trains with hoboes, and reported stories that have taken him to Haiti, Bosnia, and Taliban Afghanistan. Today he lives just outside Washington, D.C., works as a speechwriter, is married to a psychotherapist, and has two grown daughters and a stepson. Writing in Salon, Joyce Carol Oates named The World As I Found It as one of “five great nonfiction novels,” calling it “one of the most ambitious first novels ever published.” A former Guggenheim
fellow, Duffy has won the Whiting Writers’ Award and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award.
David Leavitt ’s books include The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer and the novel The Indian Clerk, a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the IMPAC /Dublin Literary Award. He co-directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida.Bruce Duffy was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Irish American parents. His novels include The World as I Found It and Last Comes the Egg. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. He lives in Maryland.

From Publishers Weekly

Improbable as it may seem, this long, sometimes complex first novel featuring the influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his colleagues/friends/rivals, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, is abundant with life and almost unflaggingly interesting. Deviating only when it must from the record, the lightly fictionalized work progresses chronologically through the convolutions of Wittgenstein's career: his early life in Austria; his arrival in Cambridge; his experiences in the first World War; his unhappy memories of his brilliantly gifted older brothers, both homosexual, both suicides; his relations with a rich, powerful, autocratic father; and his succession of young male friends. All the while Russell is reeling from Lady Ottoline Morrell (of Bloomsbury fame) to a series of wives and other wandering women and the good Moore, already far from young, is marrying happily. The enigmatic Wittgenstein could imagine the unimaginable, but never would he have imagined it possible that he would one day appear as the protagonist of a noveland a delightful one, at that.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Secker & Warburg (London)
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0436138166
• ISBN 13: 9780436138164
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 558