Literary Lives - Hardcover

Sorel, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159691064X ISBN 13: 9781596910645

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2006

Synopsis

Award-winning caricaturist Edward Sorel uses his distinctive style to illustrate the strange and eccentric lives of ten iconic literary figures.

Literary Lives features the brief, unauthorized biographies of ten larger-than-life literary figures: Tolstoy, Sartre, Eliot, Proust, Yeats, Brecht, Jung, Rand, Mailer, and Hellman. Amusing and sometimes hard to believe (but always absolutely true), Sorel's vignettes depict, among other sparkling moments, Proust investing in a male brothel so he can peep at its clientele through a keyhole; Rand launching a torrid affair with a protégé half her age; Hellman pleading the Fifth in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; Yeats attending his first séance; Simone de Beauvoir supplying Sartre with her students for his pleasure; Jung cozying up with the Nazis; Norman Mailer's disastrous candidacy for Mayor of New York; and Tolstoy setting his peasants free (and they, in turn, refusing to be emancipated).

About this title

About the Author

Edward Sorel is an internationally known caricaturist and satirist, whose drawings have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. In 1998, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., exhibited their large collection of his caricatures. Sorel is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. Born in the Bronx, he now lives in Harlem with his wife, the writer Nancy Caldwell Sorel.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.If caricaturist Sorel's goal with this series of short, illustrated biographies is to deflate the bloated personas of Proust, Sartre, Tolstoy and seven other of prominent literary figures, he has surely succeeded. Sorel, whose work appears in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, among others, sweeps through the portraits by focusing most of his attention on embarrassing foibles. There's a great deal to laugh at in his satirical take on this sexually promiscuous group of bombastic literati, such as the indelible images of an aging Ayn Rand enveloping her young male protégé, W.B. Yeats proposing repeatedly to the same woman for 25 years, or Norman Mailer plunging an ice pick into his wife at the 1960 announcement of his New York mayoral candidacy. As if Sorel's squiggly caricatures of wide-eyed figures prone to frequent fits of rage and grandeur aren't enough to cut his subjects down to size, his short lines of text further puncture with wrath. ("Still in pursuit of true Christianity, Tolstoy decides to give away his wealth by making his novels free of copyright. His wife is less than supportive" and "Yeats edits 'The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.' It includes three poems by Ezra Pound, three by W.H. Auden, and seven by a 29-year-old actress named Margot Ruddock, his current mistress.") The scathing effect of this quick read is best described in an introduction from E.L. Doctorow: "never have authors of such magnitude been so casually eviscerated."
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 159691064X
• ISBN 13: 9781596910645
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112