San Antonio College Library

In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher, rejected by every major publisher--until an editor pulled Lord of the Flies off the rejection pile. He went on to become one of the most popular and influential British authors since World War II--disheveled and darkly humorous, sometimes more disturbing than he is palatable, and above all fascinating. Yet despite the fame and acclaim, the renowned author saw himself as a monster--a reclusive...

Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens's early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out. From his traumatized childhood to the suicide...

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring...

"E. M. Forster was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, author of such acclaimed and much-loved books as A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India. Yet in many ways his life has remained an enigma. Homosexual, deeply inhibited, a man who lived with his mother from the time he was born until her death when he was sixty-six, Forster nevertheless created a fictional world of abiding richness and fascination. It is this...

Discusses the life and work of the twentieth-century English author, Virginia Woolf.

"This new biography explores the forces that shaped the interior life of one of the most beloved novelists in the English language ... each chapter begins by evoking an object that conjures up a key moment or theme in Austen's life and work ... The woman who emerges is far tougher, more socially and politically aware, and altogether more modern that the conventional picture ... The book looks closely, too, at the biographical influences on her work,...

"In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel is a fierce, self-possessed child, schooling herself in "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay" and convinced that she will become a boy at age four. Catholic school comes as a rude distraction from her rich inner life. At home, where fathers and stepfathers come and go at strange, overlapping intervals, the keeping of secrets becomes a way of life. Her late teens bring her to law school in London and then...

A tale inspired by Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo" follows the story of Colombian-born José Altamirano, who reveals his integral role in the classic's writing and who pens his own version of events against a backdrop of a flourishing twentieth-century London and lawless Panama.

"Believe no one's representations about me, " George Eliot wrote a friend during the most painful scandal of her life; "for there is not a single person who is in a position to make a true representation." In a book that embodies a new approach to literary biography, Rosemarie Bodenheimer demonstrates how Eliot's letters and fiction together represent the real life of Mary Ann Evans, the complex and deeply appealing woman beneath the male pseudonym....