PUBLISHED TO COINCIDE WITH THE BECENTENARY OF HORACE WALPOLE S DEATH Horace Walpole was letter writer so energetic and fertile that his collected correspondence occupies forty volumes. Yet his energy and fertility were matched by such perceptiveness and wit, and his thoughts are expressed in such a delightful style, that the results are always entertaining, often brilliant and invariably gripping. As the prime minister s son and an habitue of the highest social and political circles, Walpole was well-placed to gather all the gossip of his day, great or small, and to form opinions on the great. As a celebrated novelist, amateur architect and man of taste, he also had an unrivalled eye for the customs and changing fashions of the time. His letter provide one of the most vivid pictures we have of the late eighteenth-century Britain. This collection contains 434 letters, arranged under sixteen headings for ease of reference: Boyhood and th Grand Tour; Politics; The Court: The Man about Town; Virtuoso and Antiquarian; Strawberry Hill his Literary Works; his Literary Criticism; his Family; Friends and Correspondents; Later Years; His Character; Current Historical Events; France and the French Revolution; Social Hisory.
About the Author
Herman Melville was born on 1st August 1819. He went on his first sea voyage in 1839 as cabin boy on the St Lawrence bound for Liverpool. He later became a teacher before taking to the seas again on the Achushnet. On this voyage he abandoned ship and lived among the natives of the Marquesas Islands for some time. This sojourn inspired his books Typee and Omoo which were published to great success. He became close friends with the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick and his later works and poetry were not particularly successful in his lifetime. Moby-Dick did not sell out its first print run of 3,000 copies. It was not until the 1920s that his work was properly appreciated. Moby-Dick is now considered one of the most important American novels of all time. Melville died on 28th September 1891.
John Updike was born in 1932, in hillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
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