KEEPERS OF THE FLAME - Hardcover

Hamilton, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0712659706 ISBN 13: 9780712659703

Publisher: Random House UK, 1993

Synopsis

Literary biography is an endlessly fascinating form, not least because of the fierce controversies that attend the question of how much of a writer's real life ought to be related to readers. Ian Hamilton, a first-rate biographer who encountering his share of adversity in writing the life of J.D. Salinger, is the perfect chronicler of such controversies in this brilliant study, first published in 1992, which charts the course of literary biography from Donne and Shakespeare to Plath and Larkin.

'Such a compelling read.' Antonia Fraser, Times

'Lively and informative, powerfully and humorously written.' Anthony Burgess, Observer

'Surely the funniest book ever written on the doom-laden issue of posthumous literary fame.' Jonathan Keates, Independent

About this title

About the Author:

Ian Hamilton was born in 1938, in King's Lynn, Norfolk, and educated at Darlington Grammar School and Keble College, Oxford. In 1962, he founded the influential poetry magazine, the Review, and he was later editor of the New Review. He also wrote biographies and journalism, mainly about literature and football. He died in 2001.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A surprisingly original study of the literary estates of many famed writers, and a look at the tangled relationship between estate management and biography. Hamilton wrote the strong Robert Lowell (1982) and the admirable In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988). Estates that Hamilton looks into include those of John Donne the Younger, Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Boswell, Robert Burns, Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Hardy, Kipling, Joyce, Eliot, and Sylvia Plath. John Donne made no mention of his poems in his will and, thinking them a young man's ``evaporations'' and ``vanities,'' would have preferred that these sins be destroyed. Following his death, Shakespeare's plays were edited by two fellow actors and ``set forth according to their first originals,'' as these friends put it, saving eighteen of Shakespeare's plays from oblivion (including King Lear, The Tempest, and Macbeth) and several others, according to Hamilton, from being handed down in ``irretrievably corrupt'' texts. While poets' posthumous papers gave rise to biography, Dr. Johnson wrote his hasty Lives of the Poets to consolidate publishers' copyrights on various posthumous materials. Meanwhile, Boswell took down Johnson's table talk for his monumental Life of Johnson (Macauley later damned Boswell as a drunkard, pipsqueak, and lickspittle), then left a hoard of journals and Boswelliana that engendered the great Boswell papers saga. Hamilton follows the styles of biography as one mode rises over the body of earlier modes: the Victorian biography, for instance, reflects the newly emerging Romantic concept of the artist. Dickens writes long letters to his future ``beeograffer,'' John Forster. Joyce appoints his benefactress Harriet Shaw Weaver as his literary executor; she also inherits his mad daughter. Eliot directed that there should be ``no biographies,'' and his estate will not go public until 2015. Ted Hughes' trial-by-gravestone bequeathed him by Sylvia Plath is quite moving. As a commentary on literary mortality, and on biography and trumpery, this is book is a treasure. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0712659706
• ISBN 13: 9780712659703
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352