White Edmund Penguin Lives Series (1 results)

Soft cover. Condition: USED_VERYGOOD. paperback, unread but showing signs of shelf life, wraps slightly curving outwards, top slightly dusty, 165pp. Proust. The most revered novelist of the 20th century, the writer with the most enduring influence, the only author to have a uniformly international reputation. Such superlatives are not given lightly. Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett are among the many writers who have publicly admired Proust. In the first book of Weidenfeld & Nicholson's Lives series, Edmund White gives us not only the life of Proust, but a masterly explanation of why he, among so many others, admires the perfection of Proust's writing. White also shows a rare understanding of the strange, reclusive personality of this charismatic genius, who would lie in bed in his cork-lined room, obsessively rewriting his one massive work all night long. We also see the yearning, lonely boy; the brilliant wit and socialite; the ambitious grasper after honors; and the miserably closeted homosexual, an aspect of his life which this book explores openly. ISBN: 0965088023.