Stephen Spender : The Authorized Biography - Hardcover

Sutherland, J. A.

3.79

19 ratings by Goodreads

9780670883035: Stephen Spender : The Authorized Biography

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670883034 ISBN 13: 9780670883035

Publisher: Viking, 2004

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Seven years after Stephen Spender's death, John Sutherland offers the authorised life of this brilliant, but famously enigmatic, man. Sutherland's account ranges from the depiction of Spender's cosmopolitan family (and the dominant influence of his archetypal Victorian father) via Oxford, to the breakaway years in 1930s Weimar Germany, where his comrades in liberated exile were W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. We follow him through the war as Britain's most famous fireman, to the postwar years of international celebrity - a celebrity which provoked some animosity; Spender?s reputation is among the most unfairly contested of its time but of all the great writers of the 1930s he lived longest and lived most fully. Stephen Spender was, and still is, a controversial figure. One thing is, however, irrefutable. Anyone who was anyone, in literary or cultural terms, crossed his path: the pageant of his friends, acquaintances (and, sometimes, antagonists) includes Isaiah Berlin, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly.. As well as being a colleague of Spender?s during the 1970s, John Sutherland has had unhindered access to archive material and living witnesses to Spender's career. Stephen Spender is a biography of a remarkable writer - a hero of the 1930s - and a panoramic portrait of the troubled century which he inhabited: as poet, cultural ambassador and man of letters.

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About the Author:

John Sutherland was until recently the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of many works of literary criticism, biography, and publishing history and is one of Britain's best known literary reviewers with a regular column in the Guardian.

Review:

"John Sutherland has written a superlative biography. He has combined tact with a straightforwardness like Spender's own. His study also challenges the misconceptions that have surrounded Spender since the 1960s. Sutherland emphasizes that he was not like the other poets of his time with whom he is so often grouped. Spender is--and I think will remain--very much his own man and his own poet."--John Bayley, New Statesman"Masterly.... Vibrant, humane, anecdote-packed."--John Carey, Sunday Times (London)"His lucid and affectionate biography reminds us of the astonishing range of Spender's literary and extra-literary achievements. And it traces the Spenderian manner--the holy foolishness, relentless networking, stubborn liberalism, and saintly forbearance--back to its roots."--Blake Morrison, Guardian"It is a model of its kind: thoughtful, knowledgeable, and thoroughly engaged, both with Spender and the landscapes through which he moved." --D. J. Taylor, The Independent

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