Dickens by Fred Kaplan
Brilliantly written and thoroughly researched, Dickens provides an absorbing and perceptive account of its subject as a singularly complex man and a consummate artist, offering readers new insights into Dickens's-and literature's-greatest works, works such as Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist.
Dickens by Fred Kaplan may do for our greatest writer after Shakespeare what Ellman did for Oscar Wilde.. A brilliantly readable work and one essential for all of us who care about the man who, for all his faults, remained 'The Inimitable' and 'The Sparkler' to the end. -- John Mortimer Spectator Fred Kaplan's Dickens ... would be valuable if only because it takes into account the reams of research that have been published in the intervening years; but it is also well proportioned, persuasive in its judgments and consistently, grippingly readable. -- John Gross New York Times Kaplan has spent ten years preparing and writing this book; his achievement is as rare, as wonderful, as the Dickens he brings to life. We are all the beneficiaries of this exceptional biography. -- A. D. Hutter Los Angeles Times A winning mix of insight, narrative skill and shrewd judgement. Kaplan shows how powerfully both as a man and artist Dickens was shaped by the experience of his youth: on the one hand the humiliations showered on him by his penurious and feckless parents, on the other his mental escape into the bright world of the 18th-century novel which gave him his models for good and bad character. Publishers Weekly Kaplan is particularly good... on the shape and perspective of Dickens's career, his relation with his younger siblings, all of whom he outlived, and with his own children and their developing private lives. To be fully understood as a writer he needs to be put in this sort of family frame. -- John Bayley New York Review of Books Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Mr. Kaplan's biography is its picture of Dickens's professional life and friendships: one senses anew the extraordinary competitive vigor of the Victorian imperial personality. Mr. Kaplan's objective presentation of the facts about the colossus of the age gives us a far better sense of its shape and scale than any facile charm might conjure up. His clarity is the highest form of respect and affection for his astonishing subject. -- Richard Locke Wall Street Journal
Fred Kaplan is the author of Miracles of Rare Devices, Dickens and Mesmerism, Thomas Carlyle, A Biography (nominated for the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Sacred Tears, and Henry James: A Biography, and is the editor of Charles Dickens' Book of Memoranda. A past recipient of Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, he has also served as editor of the Dickens Studies Annual.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780801860188 |
| ISBN 10 | 0801860180 |
| Title | Dickens |
| Author | Fred Kaplan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Year published | 1999-01-04 |
| Number of pages | 640 |
| Prizes | Winner of Notable Book of the Year 1998 (United States) |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |