T.H.White by Sylvia Townsend Warner

T.H.White by Sylvia Townsend Warner

During a lecture given in the last year of his life, T.H. White explained how, throughout his life, he had armed himself against disaster by exploring new fields of knowledge. Sylvia Townsend Warner has written a biography which reveals White's humour and vivid imagination, and also his passionate enthusiasm - the manner in which he would see a skill, pursue it with passionate curiosity and having mastered it, move on to something else, whether this was falconry or flying, painting or ploughing a field. The book traces White's brilliant career at Cambridge and his employment as a teacher at Stowe until a publishing contract allowed him to devote himself entirely to his novels. It explains how the journal he kept of his ill-fated attempts to train a falcon provided the basis for his book "The Goshawk", and how his continuing preoccupation with the Arthurian legends led eventually to the four books of "The Once and Future King". The biography also describes his periodic dependence on alcohol, brought on by bouts of recurrent melancholy.

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893-1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from New York Review Books), appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book of- the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune's Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warner's biographer Claire Harman, it was almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda to Mr. Fortune's Maggot. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote. Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T. H. White. NYRB also publishes Summer Will Show, Warner's novel of the French Revolution of 1848.

ADAM MARS-JONES was born in London, where he lives and works. His fiction includes Monopolies of Love (1992) and The Waters of Thirst (1993). He writes about films and books for London newspapers.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192821010
ISBN 10	0192821016
Title	T.H.White
Author	Sylvia Townsend Warner
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1989-12-01
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable