Stephen Spender: A Life In Modernism

David Leeming

ISBN 10: 0805042490 / ISBN 13: 9780805042498

Published by Henry Holt and Co., 1999

About this Item

The first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary figures. Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic, journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friendend of the best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes, Brodsky, Ginsberg-a 'who's who' of contemporary literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining moments: the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise of America as a cultural and political force. As David Leeming's fascinating biography demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and flux of the century in which he lived: his sexual ambivalence, his famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars, the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on modernity itself.

Seller Inventory # 9780805042498

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Stephen Spender: A Life In Modernism
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805042490
• ISBN 13: 9780805042498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary figures.

Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic, journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friendend of the best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes, Brodsky, Ginsberg-a "who's who" of contemporary literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining moments: the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise of America as a cultural and political force. As David Leeming's fascinating biography demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and flux of the century in which he lived: his sexual ambivalence, his famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars, the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on modernity itself.

About the Author

David Leeming, a former professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, is the author of The World of Myth, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, and James Baldwin: A Biography (Owl Books, 0-8050-3835-3). He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.