World Within World : The Autobiography of Stephen Spender

SPENDER, World Within World. London, Faber and Faber, 1977. Originally published in 1951. Softcover, 349 pp. Nonfiction / Biography & Autobiographies / Memoirs – Stephen Spender (1909 – 1995). Very Good Minus. One corner lightly bumped (lower right hand corner of front cover). Creasing along the book-spine with light edge-wear adjacent to it. Pages clean and unmarked; a near first-rate copy. “Virtually from its first appearance in 1951 this book became one of the most celebrated literary autobiographies of its time...an illuminating commentary on the relationship between literature and politics in England during the thirties. There are vivid portraits of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and others.” 0571102123

"In this book I am mainly concerned with a few themes: love; poetry; politics; the life of literature....I believe obstinately that, if I am able to write with truth about what has happened to me, this can help others....In this belief I have risked being indiscreet, and I have written occasionally of experiences which seem strange to me myself, and which I have not seen discussed else-where." So begins Stephen Spender's autobiography, widely acclaimed as the twentieth century's greatest memoir.

Spender was one of his generation's most celebrated poets, a writer living at the intersection of literature and politics in Europe between the two world wars. His portraits of his friends?Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden,
W. B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood?render a romantic world of literary genius. Spender uses a poet's language to create an honest and tender exploration of amity and the many possibilities of love. First published in 1951, World Within World simultaneously shocked and bedazzled the literary establishment for its frank discussion of Eros in the modern world.

Out of print for several years, this Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the critic John Bayley and an Afterword Spender wrote in 1994 describing his reaction to the charges that David Leavitt plagiarized this autobiography in a novel.