Blackwing by Stephen Drake
From the award-winning author of The Age of Wonder and Falling Upwards, here is a luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author's own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime's obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe, and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Sta l, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Z lide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary bard William Blake. The diversity of Holmes's material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spirit--and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insider's account of a biographer at work: traveling, teaching, researching, fantasizing, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.
Stephen Drake, a retired computer programmer of 20+ years, is an American fantasy/sci-fi author. He is an avid Harley-Davidson Motorcycle enthusiast, and versed in many survival skills such as martial arts and bow hunting. He draws on his experiences to create gripping and believable stories.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781034157731 |
| ISBN 10 | 1034157736 |
| Title | Blackwing |
| Author | Stephen Drake |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Blurb |
| Year published | 2021-12-21 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |