Friday, November 30, 2012

Five top literary subjects

The famed literary editor and author Robert Gottlieb's latest book is the new biography, Great Expectations: the Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens.

For The Daily Beast, Gottlieb named five great literary subjects, "those men and women who never cease to fascinate, whose lives we can follow again and again in various reiterations." One entry on the list:
Charles Dickens

Not only one of the world’s greatest and best-loved novelists, but the most famous Englishman of his time, he was a man of charm, magnetism, inner turbulence, and self-destructive contradictions. You can safely choose among the five major biographies of the last half-century or so—Edgar Johnson, Fred Kaplan, Peter Ackroyd, Michael Slater, and Claire Tomalin; each has its large virtues. Or you can go back to the basic book, written within three years of his death by his closest friend John Forster. “The inimitable” bursts through all of them.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue