After completing his biography of Rebecca West in 1995, Carl Rollyson felt bereft. As his wife said, "Rebecca was such good company." He had already embarked on another biography, but Rebecca kept beckoning him. He felt there was more to say about her politics-a misunderstood part of her repertoire as reporter and novelist. And had he done justice to her enormous sense of fun and humor? He regretted excising the portrait of her he wanted to put at the beginning of his biography. His editor kept cutting away at what he called Rollyson's doorstop of a book. And then after years of waiting, Rollyson received her FBI file. He kept running into Rebecca, so to speak, when he was working on his biographies of Martha Gellhorn and Jill Craigie. Interviews in London often turned up people who had known West as well. Thus piece by piece, Rollyson accumulated what is now another book about Rebecca West. This new collection tells the story of how his biography got written, of what it means to think like a biographer, and why West's vision remains relevant. She is one of the great personalities and writers of the modern age, and one that we are just beginning to comprehend.

Rebecca West was a leading figure in the twentieth century literary scene. A passionate suffragist, socialist, fiercely intelligent, Rebecca West began her career as a writer with articles in The Freewoman and The Clarion. Her first book, a biography of Henry James, was published when she was only twenty–four, and her first novel followed just two years later. She had a notorious affair with H.G. Wells, and their illegitimate son, Anthony, was born at the beginning of the First World War. The author of several novels, she is perhaps best remembered for her classic account of pre–war Yugoslavia, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (published by Macmillan in 1941 and as relevant today as it was sixty years ago) and for her coverage of the Nuremberg Trials. When she died in 1983 at the age of 90, William Shawn, then editor–in–chief of the New Yorker, said: "Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature. No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently." Formidably talented, West was a towering figure in the British literary landscape. Lorna Gibb's vivid and insightful biography affords a dazzling insight into her life and work.

Almost the entire corpus of West's fiction receives attention in this volume (with the exception of The Thinking Reed, which is in itself a telling fact)."--Jacket.

The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary seventy-one year writing career. The general introductory studies of West are outdated and do not take into account her posthumous publications, or her large literary archive of unpublished letters and manuscripts. Previous scholarly books have chopped West up into categories and genres instead of following the evolution of her career.

Rebecca West's never-before-published Survivors in Mexico brings to readers a daring and provocative work by a major twentieth-century author. An exhilarating exploration of Mexican history, religion, art, and culture, it explores the inner lives of figures ranging from Cortés and Montezuma to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky. "Witty and entertaining, substantive and reflective, insightful and well documented, in splendid and uncommon prose, Rebecca West's travelogue . . . is a model of British sophistication and knack for seeing the other."--Jorge G. Castañeda, New York Times Book Review "An enthrallingly readable book . . . full of sharp impressions and stimulating insights."--Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Luscious reading. . . . The book succeeds beautifully as a travelogue thanks to West's intellect and experience, with Mexico serving as the vehicle for it all."--Sam Quinones, Washington Post Book World

This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile