Synopses & Reviews
Part of James Atlas’s Icons series, a biography of one of the leading intellectuals in postwar America, and the author of the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt was an eminent philosopher, a distinguished professor, and a famous journalist. When she wrote about the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann she not only recorded history but changed it. Her major works, The Origin of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, belong among the classics of Western thought. When she died in 1975 at the age of 69, she was revered as one of the major intellectual figures of her day.
In Anne Heller’s skilled telling, she was also an outsized personality, fearless and indifferent to the opinions of others. As a student in Germany, she had a controversial affair with her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, a supporter of the Nazi party. Barred from teaching because she was Jewish, she fled to France and, later, to New York. She made her way in the world of émigré Jews with force; Eichmann in Jerusalem, first published in The New Yorker, invoked a phrase — “the banality of evil” — that would forever alter how we view the Holocaust. Heller, the biographer of Ayn Rand, is accustomed to dealing with strong women; her portrait of Arendt engages both her private life — the philosopher Karl Jaspers was one of her professors, Mary McCarthy was her closest friend — and her role as a public intellectual in postwar New York. One of her most important books was a collection of biographical essays called Men in Dark Times; Arendt, too, lived through dark times, but managed to bring light.
Synopsis
A biography of one of the leading intellectuals in postwar America, author of the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem, which introduced the concept of banality of evil, changing in a single phrase our view of humanity.
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A view into the tumultuous and creative life of Edgar Allan Poe.
Synopsis
Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some of the greatest works in the English language, from the chilling “The Tell-Tale Heart” to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—the first modern detective story—to the iconic poem “The Raven.”
Poes life was one of unremitting hardship. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died when he was three. Poe was thrown out of West Point, and married his beloved thirteen-year-old cousin, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. He was so poor that he burned furniture to stay warm. He was a scourge to other poets, but more so to himself.
In the hands of Paul Collins, one of our liveliest historians, this mysteriously conflicted figure emerges as a genius both driven and undone by his artistic ambitions. Collins illuminates Poes huge successes and greatest flop (a 143-page prose poem titled Eureka), and even tracks down what may be Poes first published fiction, long hidden under an enigmatic byline. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Edgar Allan Poe is a spellbinding story about the man once hailed as “the Shakespeare of America.”
Synopsis
Hannah Arendt, one of the most gifted and provocative voices of her era, was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that arose after the publication of her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of the kidnapped Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Arendt was a woman of many contradictions. She was brilliant, beautiful when young, and irresistible to gifted men, even in her chain-smoking, intellectually provocative middle age. She learned to write in English only at the age of thirty-six, and yet her first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations of Americans and Europeans viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous—and most divisive—work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, created fierce controversy that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the great romantic philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. In this fast-paced, comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s apparent contradictions and her greatest achievements to her sense of being what she called a “conscious pariah”—one of those few people in every time and place who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to gain the acceptance of others.
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A spirited, deeply personal inquiry into the near-mythic life and canonical work of J. D. Salinger by a writer known for his sensitivity to the Manhattan culture that was Salinger's great theme.
Synopsis
J.D. Salinger published his first story in
The New Yorker at age twenty-nine. Three years later came
The Catcher in The Rye, a novel that has sold more than sixty-five million copies and achieved mythic status since its publication in 1951. Subsequent books introduced a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, hyperarticulate Glass family, whose stage is the Upper East Side. Yet we still know little about Salingers personal life and less about his character.
This was by design. In 1953, determined to escape media attention, Salinger fled to New Hampshire, where he would live until his death in 2010. Even there, privacy proved elusive: a Time cover story; a memoir by Joyce Maynard (who dropped out of Yale as a freshman to move in with him); and a legal battle over an unauthorized biography, which darkened his last decades. Yet he continued to write, and is rumored to have left behind a mass of work that his estate intends to publish.
Thomas Beller, a novelist who grew up in Manhattan, is the ideal guide to Salingers world. He gives us a sense of life at The New Yorker (where he was once a staff writer) and a portrait of editor Gus Lobrano, whose relationship with Salinger has rarely been written about. He visits Salingers summer camp and the apartment buildings where the author lived. He reads the famous works with obsessive attention, finding in them an image of his own life experience. The result is a quest biography about learning to know yourself in order to know your subject. J.D. Salinger is the triumph of a rare literary form: biography as work of art.
About the Author
Thomas Beller is the author of Seduction Theory, a collection of stories; The Sleep-Over Artist, a novel; and How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, an essay collection. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorkers Culture Desk, has edited numerous anthologies including two drawn from his website, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and was a cofounder of the literary journal Open City.
Table of Contents
1. 1923: On Running Away 1
2. The Gift 3
3. Lost 11
4. 1930s: Ham and Cheese 14
5. The Myron Arms 18
6. Comanches 21
7. 1932: McBurney and Central Park 26
8. The Salinger Triptych 29
9. 1934-1936: Salinger the Sublime 33
10. The Perversities of Princeton 39
11. Samizdat Salinger 43
12. 1937: Vienna 47
13. “A Girl I Knew” 52
14. The Bacon King 55
15. The Eighth Grade Canon 57
16. The Muse of Manasquan 60
17. 1938: “The Young Man Went Back to College.” 63
18. The New Yorker 69
19. Roger Angell 76
20. The Professional 82
21. Room 505 86
22. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” 94
23. 1133 Park Avenue 97
24. 1941: “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All” 104
25. Women in Letters 110
26. The Fan 117
27. The Lady Upstairs 120
28. Joyce Maynard 126
29. 1945: The End of the War 131
30. 1945: The Nazi Bride 136
31. 1961: The Year of the Woodchuck 142
32. 1972: “Begin the Beguine” 154
33. The Miscalculation 157
34. Gustave Lobrano and William Shawn 160
35. 1960s-1980s: Letters to the Swami 172
36. The Catcher in the Rye: Rereading and Birthing 177
Acknowledgments 181