C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis's Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times. In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. The result is an extraordinary account of the ideas, affections and vexations that drove the group's most significant members. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years-and did so in dazzling style.

Presents a collection of unusual and entertaining facts and myths about writers, books, word origins, publishers, critics, grammar, and other aspects of the world of literature

This book charts the major events of Stoker's life, including friendships with many of the major figures of the age and as manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum, with his literary career. It offers critical evaluation of Dracula and of Stoker's lesser-known works, yielding much interest when reinserted into their original cultural contexts.

This is a study of the forces and influences that shaped Kipling's work, including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of empire and the deaths of two of his children, and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him.

Presents biographies by the acclaimed caricaturist Edward Sorel, who has long believed, that next to composers, writers are the craziest people in the world.

In addition to exploring the key characteristics of life writing, this book examines the relationship between the lives of authors and the influence of these lives both on their own writing and on the reception of their work by contemporary and later readers.

In a career that lasted little more than a decade, Kate Chopin became well known for stories set in the Creole and Acadian regions of Louisiana, but her masterwork, The Awakening (1899), told the daring story of a woman who defied social and sexual conventions, eliciting negative reviews that denied Chopin prominence until the middle of the 20th century. This study of her life and work sets Chopin in the context of 19th-century American women writers to show how standards of literary propriety affected the career of a major American writer.