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Although he wrote extensively for adults, E.B. White is known by millions of young readers as the creator of three children's classics--Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. Here's a chance for young readers to meet the man behind the classics. Photos. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Ditzy Title Says It All
E.B. White, Beverly Gherman; Atheneum (1992)

The actual title, in its entirety, is "E.B. White, Some Writer!"

E.B. White owned a shotgun, I believe, when he resided in Maine in the latter half of his life.

And, not withstanding his diplomatic demeanor & eloquent voice dedicated to the cause of world peace, he would have wholeheartedly & without remorse fired a warning salvo over the head of whomever was responsible for that preposterous add-on.

The obituary of former teacher & state representative June Bugg, from Gadsden, Alabama, is taped onto the front overleaf page.
... Read more

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Publisher: New York : Platt ... Read more

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Like millions of other readers and moviegoers, as a youngster the late Robert W. Fenton loved swinging through the jungle with Tarzan. As an adult his interest was revived when he bought Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs' original office-estate in Tarzana, California, and began writing a biography of Burroughs. Originally titled The Big Swingers, it was the first full-scale, commercially published account of Burroughs' life and work. Here is Fenton's 1967 biography, back in print, as a wonderful source for a new generation of readers. Burroughs' early years were far from promising--he was dropped from school, undistinguished as a cavalryman at Fort Grant, lost out in gold mining, and had little success as a salesman. He knew nothing about writing, but decided to try it anyway--and created Tarzan, one of the most famous characters of all time. He also wrote 25 sequels and 40 other novels. This book includes letters, documents, synopses, lists of characters, and plots and themes Burroughs used in his work, and also reveals his interest in and ready observations on such issues as women's suffrage, prohibition, morality in Hollywood, and the Scopes trial in Tennessee. Some new photographs are included, along with a new foreword by Burroughs scholar George T. McWhorter. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

THE WORLD OF E.R.B.
For any fan of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Venus series, Pellucidar, even Westerns, and many more, this biography of the creator of all of the above, is a must have and a must read!!!I discovered Tarzan and John Carter in the 60s when paperback editions were readily available.Add to that replays of old movies on TV (Tarzan - Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, and the rest) and the creation of a fan was in the making.This reprint of the 1967 (The Big Swingers) makes this enthralling look at the life and times of Edgar Rice Burroughs available for the first time in too many years.Now, old and "new" fans alike can marvel at the fullness of this work.I can't praise it enough for allowing this "older" fan to relive the memories of cinema, television, and books that enchanted me as a youngster.For fans and followers, young and old, this book is an absolute essential for your library. ... Read more

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This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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The seventh volume of Biography Today: Author Series presents 10 all-new, in-depth biographical profiles of authors of interest to readers ages 9 and above. The following authors and illustrators are covered in Volume 7: William Armstrong, Patricia Reilly Giff, Langston Hughes, Stan Lee, Julius Lester, Robert Pinsky, Todd Strasser, Jacqueline Woodson, Patricia C. Wrede, and Jane Yolen. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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The eighth volume of Biography Today: Author Series presents nine all-new, in-depth biographical profiles of authors of interest to readers ages 9 and above. The following authors and illustrators are covered in Volume 8: Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Barbara Cooney, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Ursula K. LeGuin, Farley Mowat, Naomi Shahoub Nye, Daniel Pinkwater, Beatrix Potter, and Ann Rinaldi. ... Read more

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This is a comprehensive biography on Jean Toomer who was known as the Herald of the Harlem Renaissance. The author delves into the esoteric nature of many of Toomer's life experiences. ... Read more

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The long-awaited third edition of a classicThe new Third Edition of this renowned reference work illuminates African American contributions to the genre of books for children and young adults with the biographies of 121 new 247 authors and artists. The book presents a rich source of biographical data on each individual, covering birthplace, education, their approach to art or literature, career development, awards and honors received, families, and current place of residence. Over 120 photographs of the subjects bring the biographies to life, and 46 covers of important children's books are reproduced in black and white. The new edition includes 121 new biographies.
These special features make it easy to find a wealth of informationThe entries cite publication dates of the subject's books, and many of the narratives are preceded by a personal statement which can serve as an inspirational source to the reader. An extensive title index lists over 1,250 books by black authors and illustrators, and the book features a handy list of publishers, bookstores, and distributors arranged by state, making it easy for readers to locate books of interest. A listing of annual awards presented to African American authors and illustrators by the Caldecott, Newbery, and Boston Globe-Horn Book award committees and a complete, up-to-date listing of the Coretta Scott King award and honor recognitions enhance the usefulness of this book for parents, librarians, educators, and young readers. ... Read more

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Marcel Reich-Ranicki is remarkable for both his unlikely life story and his brilliant career as the "pope of German letters." His sublimely written autobiography is at once a fascinating adventure tale, an unusual account of German-Jewish relations, a personal rumination on who's who in German culture, and a love letter to literature.

Reich-Ranicki's life took him from middle-class childhood to wartime misery to the heights of intellectual celebrity. Born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1920, he moved to Berlin as a boy. There he discovered his passion for literature and began a complex affair with German culture. In 1938, his family was deported back to Poland, where German occupation forced him into the Warsaw Ghetto. As a member of the Jewish resistance, a translator for the Jewish Council, and a man who personally experienced the ghetto's inhumane conditions, Reich-Ranicki gained both a bird's-eye and ground-level view of Nazi barbarism. Written with subtlety and intelligence, his account of this episode is among the most compelling and dramatic ever recorded.

He escaped with his wife and spent two years hiding in the cellar of Polish peasants--an incident later immortalized by Günter Grass. After liberation, he joined and then fell out with the Communist Party and was temporarily imprisoned. He began writing and soon became Poland's foremost critical commentator on German literature.

When Reich-Ranicki returned to Germany in 1958, his rise was meteoric. In short order, he claimed national celebrity and notoriety as the head of the literary section of the leading newspaper and host of his own television program. He frequently flabbergasted viewers with his bold pronouncements and flexed his power to make or break a writer's career. His list of friends and enemies rapidly expanded to include every influential player on the German literary scene, including Grass and Heinrich Böll. This, together with his keen critical instincts, makes his memoir an indispensable guide to contemporary German culture as well as an absorbing eyewitness history of some of the twentieth century's most important events. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

fascinating
Marcel Reich-Ranicki is like the Roger Ebert of German literature.He is also a Jew who barely managed to survive the Warsaw ghetto.An interesting combination, which makes for a fascinating autobiography.

I think that the first half of the book is the strongest.It describes how he went to school in Germany in the 1930's under deteriorating conditions, followed by deportation to the Warsaw ghetto.The book's depiction of life in the Warsaw ghetto is amazing, and the story of his escape and survival is like a thriller.

The second half of the book describes how he rose to become a leading German literary critic, and paints portraits of various eccentric literary personalities that he interacted with.This part of the book might be less exciting to those who do not have a particular interest in German literature, but the crazy characters are amusing regardless of whether one knows anything about their works.

Discover the book--it's worth it!
It is interesting how often we see a person through his profession and work.You see an older man on television discussing books, you know that he is a literary critic writing reviews and books.Sure, they say that he is the one, that he is 'the Pope' of German letters, but if you are not interested in literature why would you care about a bookish man.What could be interesting about his life?If you are that person, reconsider.True, parts of the book are about literature and won't appeal to some (though try not to skip them either), but there is so much more.If not for the fact that author's early life happened in so tragic years of Nazi Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust, one could call the book a thriller, an adventure of an extraordinary height.The tragedy of these years makes the story real and sobering, but exciting nevertheless.Born in Poland of Polish Jewish parents, moved to Germany, deported by the Nazis back to Poland, survived Warsaw Ghetto and the war, served as Polish diplomat in England, wrote for Polish papers, returned to West Germany, became the leading literary critic in Germany.Read, read, and read one more time.

Warsaw ghetto
The most moving part of this book is its description of life in the Warsaw ghetto -- of how the Jews created a symphony orchestra and the Nazis' response to it, of the way that the Nazis chose which Jews were to be "resettled" and which would temporarily be allowed to live, and of Reich-Ranicki's and his wife's means of survival.I wish that Reich-Ranicki had been more introspective in the book, but one can't have everything -- it's a great book nonetheless.

The Author of Me-Me-Me, I-I-I
The concept of this work is both unique and intriguing while the execution was boring and trite.I'm certain that persons more familiar with German literature and authors will take great offense at my brief analysis but I learned more about everyone else in Germany than I did about Marcel Reich-Raniki.The first half of the book did keep me interested but always wanting for more, more about him & his wife and a lot less about Max Frisch et al.I was also put-off by his constant references to himself and how important he was.He was lucky to survive the holocost, lucky to have such a position in Germany after the war, but should have left the writing to those whom he reviewed.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Selfmade Man Extraordinaire
Considering how little is translated and published here in the U.S. from the German, it is heartening that Marcel Reich-Ranicki's autobiography is among the chosen. It is a moving testimony of a life dislocated and reconstructed several times over, of a youth in Berlin, survival in the Warsaw Ghetto,life in post-War Poland, and a return to West Germany, where he rose to be the the most esteemed and, I suppose, also feared literary critic. His portrayal of theGerman literary scene from the sixties through the nineties by means of vignettes of its chief representatives is poignant and revealing. His assessment including that of his own role within it is likely to have provoked controversy.

Throughout the book emerges the self-portrait of a courageous,persevering, and also pained and sensitive man, who as a much-published author, radio and television personality seems to have been simultaneously at the center and at the margins of German cultural life for four decades.

I happened to be in the midst of reading the German version of the book when the events of September 11 threw our world out of kilter.Day after day I went back to Reich-Ranicki's "Mein Leben" with bated breath to escape from the present, not into an idyllic past, but to gain perspective on human suffering from a wise old man who describes his own lifelong anguish without sentimentality or moralizing. There may be other takes on his life story, but no one can deny his undying passion for the literature of the German language and his pursuit of it against all odds. To have an English translation to share with my friends is indeed something to write home about.

It is ironic, to say the least, that Reich-Ranicki, who was born in Poland, raised in Berlin, deported to Poland because of being a Jew, should be called "the Pope of German Letters." But then was he, whom the popes represent on Earth, not also a Jew? (with apologies to G.E.Lessing). ... Read more

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In 1894, German society was introduced to The Love Council, a scandalous new play by the playwright Oskar Panizza. The carnivalesque satire, dealing with the first recorded outbreak of syphilis in 1495, portrays the scourge as divine punishment for the rampant sexual excesses in the Vatican court of the Pope of the time, the notorious Rodrigo Borgia. Panizza was imprisoned for one year on 93 counts of blasphemy, the harshest sentence ever given to an artist in the Second Empire. This book contains a detailed history of the play on stage and the court proceedings that led to Panizza's imprisonment. A new English translation of the play is included, as well as a biography of its avant-garde, modernist author. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Amazing book about an outrageous satire
This is an amazing book and an absolute must for anyone interested in modern drama! Brown's new translation of this outrageous satire gets as close to the original German text as the English language allows. It's THE definitive edition of The Love Council that also includes an insightful biography of this German author, who in many ways was a century ahead of his time. This is the only book on Panizza to include all the press reviews and court documents from Panizza's 1895 trial in Munich. I was equally fascinated by the wealth of other biographical materials he included, e.g., the documents from the court proceedings a century later in Austria and at the European Court of Human Rights dealing with Werner Schroeter's 1982 film version, Liebeskonzil. Brown's final chapter on the more than one hundred productions of the play around the world includes dozens of eye-popping stage shots by some world-class photographers. He has been studying Panizza for decades, and this carefully researched, very readable and beautifully illustrated volume once again confirms Brown's reputation as one of the world's leading authorities on this seminal author. ... Read more

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Some of the greatest writers in the history of the art-Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jerzy Kosinski, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf - all chose to silence themselves by suicide, leaving their families and friends with heartbreak and the world of literature with gaping holes. Their reasons for killing themselves, when known, were varied and, quite often, unreasonable. Some were plagued by depression or self-doubt, and others by frustration and helplessness in a world they could neither change nor tolerate. Profoundly moving and morbidly attractive, "Final Drafts" is a necessary historical record, biographical treatment, and psychological examination of the authors who left this 'cruel world' by their own hands, either instantly or over long periods of relentless self-destructive behaviour. It is also a devoted examination of references to suicide in literature, both by those who took their own lives and those who decided to live.Mark Seinfelt has selected many well-known (mostly fiction) writers, from those whose work dates to over a century ago - when the medical community was ill-equipped to deal with substance abuse and depression - to more recent writers such as Kosinski, Michael Dorris, and Eugene Izzi, who have left a puzzled literary community with a sad legacy.Seinfelt reveals that many authors contemplated ending their lives in their work; were obsessed with destroying themselves; were unable-in the case of the Holocaust-to live with the fact that their contemporaries had been killed; believed death to be a freedom from the horrors that forced them to create; and, sometimes, were simply unable to withstand rejection or criticism of their work.Other noted authors discussed in this volume include John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, Harry Crosby, John Davidson, William Inge, Randall Jarrell, Arthur Koestler, T.E. Lawrence, Primo Levi, Jack London, Jay Anthony Lukas, Tom McHale, Yukio Mishima, Henry de Montherlant, Seth Morgan, George Sterling, Sara Teasdale, Ernst Toller, John Kennedy Toole, Sergey Yesenin, and many others. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

With literary variety and a lot of psychology.
A lot of this book is thoroughly literary, with psychological insights.Irony is not listed in the index, but addictions, alcoholism, depression, drugs, manic depression (bipolar syndrome), mental illness, overdose, paranoia, schizophrenia, Vietnam War, World War I, and World War II are listed as some of the mechanisms which were either meaningful to certain writers or a means of explaining their behavior.Readers may pick other topics as their favorite parts of this book, with a few preferring the musical highlights relating to Adolph Hitler, Richard Wagner, and someone whose family was full of the suicidal tendencies of people who have problems adjusting to the world as it is.The ultimate irony, for me, would be if this book demonstrates something about the fatal nature of truth, if each of the subjects can be shown to have known something that the rest of us have not figured out yet.

Those of us who are still alive have little reason to worry that our own mechanisms for clinging to life will be vividly portrayed in a book of this nature, but some people have official positions which call on them to interact with famous people in a way which this book cannot ignore.In the case of William H. Webster, director of the F.B.I. in 1979, his contribution to this book was a public statement concerning a rumor printed on May 19, 1970, "Papa's said to be a rather prominent Black Panther," (p. 335) about Jean Seberg, wife of Romain Gary, "but that the story had been broken independently by Haber shortly after the bureau had given the go-ahead to its Los Angeles division to disseminate the rumor."(p. 336).Webster's statement, "The days when the FBI used derogatory information to combat advocates of unpopular causes have long since passed.We are out of that business forever."(p. 336).Recent news that Webster has been appointed to head an accounting oversight board, after leading an auditing committee at U.S. Technologies which fired an auditor who wanted to dwell on derogatory information, leaves us up in the air on who is capable of coming up with more derogatory information, and what people who have it are supposed to do with it.Manic traits associated with such a situation include, "In conversation, she is a perpetual monologist, and ignores or disregards the interpolations of those about her.If someone continues to interrupt or contradict her, she may fly into a fit of virulent rage.Often she suffers from a persecution complex or else feels that she is surrounded by incompetents."(p. 435).Medicine might be more appropriate than death in most cases, but it shouldn't be surprising that one of the chapters of this book is about John Kennedy Toole, author of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES.

Eating Cardboard
This book is a collection of tidbits of knowledge that anyone could have put together by simply reading each author's biography. The author's dry, pedantic style is as exciting as eating cardboard, rendering what could have been an interesting book into a simple reference work. This book is simply a reference and a third-hand reference at best, good for writing undergraduate and high school term papers, as little if none of the information seems to come from a primary source. There are no fresh insights, nothing much new here, just the same things one would find in any reference book, and only here they are condensed into a single source. Written like a reference book, the author could have produced the same thing, by cutting and pasting from an encyclopedia

His chapter on Mishma, perhaps the most spectacular suicide of all the writers, is made as dry and boring as reading instructions on how to assemble a child's toy. The author's style is best suited for such or an academic dissertation, something one has to read rather that what someone would read for pleasure or information.

Unique, fascinating, informative reading.
Some of the greatest writers in the world chose an untimelydeath by suicide, and this charts their lives and psychologicalconditions. It's hard to easily categorize this treatise, which considers both their literary lives and their psychology; but any studying such writers from Anne Sexton and Ernest Hemingway to the more modern Michael Dorris, will find Final Draft an important survey covering more than a century of literary figures.

Not as depressing as I thought
When I first picked up the book, Final Drafts, I thought it would be a series of depressing tales of writers who led desperate lives, ending them because of hopelessness, drug addition or failure.

Although many fit thiscriteria, Seinfelt managed to bring out a epathy towards these writers. Healso managed to convey the fact that their lives were not wasted or thrownaway, but even though wracked by pain, guilt or other strong emotion, manycreated works of art that endure today. I also got the sense that withouttheir art, these individuals would not have lived as long as theydid.

However, this does not pertain to all writers in the book. I feltpeople like Hitler (even treated unkindly by Seinfelt) and others did notbelong in the same book as writers such as Mishima.The largest flaw inthe book is that writers like Hitler should have been removed and the bookshortened to include mostly writers driven to suicide by mental illness,failure or other cause beyond their control. With some good editing andremoving about 150 pages, I would given this book 5 stars. ... Read more