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Illustrating America

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1985

Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture 
by Paul Cummings, Jorn Merkert and Claire Stoullig.
Norton, 308 pp., £35, August 1984, 0 393 01840 7
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Abstract Expressionist Painting in America 
by William Seitz.
Harvard, 490 pp., £59.95, February 1984, 0 674 00215 6
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About Rothko 
by Dore Ashton.
Oxford, 225 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 19 503348 5
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The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York 
by Peter Conrad.
Oxford, 329 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 19 503408 2
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... York’. Whitman’s desire to embody the city is set against the closed world of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Conrad shows O’Henry and Stephen Crane plucking characters from the crowd; Jacob Riis using photography to document the inhumanities of slum tenements, Stieglitz using it to make skyscrapers monumental; Oldenburg embracing the city by making ...

A.E. Housman and Biography

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 22 November 1979

A.E. Housman 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Routledge, 304 pp., £9.75
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... to Grant Richards. Housman read Proust and James; he enjoyed Colette; he much admired the work of Edith Wharton. Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he did of Galsworthy’s. The only Lawrence he is ...

Dr Love or Dr God?

Luc Sante: ‘The Man in the Red Coat’, 5 March 2020

The Man in the Red Coat 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 280 pp., £20, November 2019, 978 1 78733 216 4
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... of furniture, all of it having been seized by creditors. ‘As in the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton,’ Barnes writes, ‘there was an evident and familiar solution: find an American heiress.’ Montesquiou came to the rescue, fixing Polignac up with Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune (‘It’s the union of the lyre and ...

The Long Con

Jackson Lears: Techno-Austerity, 16 July 2015

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organised Wealth and Power 
by Steve Fraser.
Little, Brown, 466 pp., £21.99, February 2015, 978 0 316 18543 1
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... to explain the gap between resistance to organised capital in the first Gilded Age – the age of Edith Wharton and J.P. Morgan – and acceptance of it in the second. Fraser provides a powerful historical explanation for the waning of American dissent. He discusses the mid-century incorporation of the labour movement but also dissects more recent ...

In a Boat of His Own Making

James Camp: Jack London, 25 September 2014

Jack London: An American Life 
by Earle Labor.
Farrar, Straus, 439 pp., £21.99, November 2013, 978 0 374 17848 2
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The Sea-Wolf 
by Jack London.
Hesperus, 287 pp., £9.99, August 2013, 978 1 78094 200 1
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... alive: he was briefly the most highly paid writer in America, valued by magazine editors alongside Edith Wharton. He’s now remembered for a handful of short stories and his ‘dog books’. As early as 1942, Kazin was writing that London seemed to be ‘slipping away even as a boy’s hero’. By 1953, he was the punchline of one of Nabokov’s ...

Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode: Reviewing T.S. Eliot, 4 November 2004

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews 
by Jewel Spears Brooker.
Cambridge, 644 pp., £80, May 2004, 0 521 38277 7
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... editor is American, and she is contributing to a series which gives the same treatment to Emerson, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Faulkner, Melville and so on. Eliot’s presence on this list amounts to a claim that Eliot is an American author, a decision qualified by a willingness to be fair to the disappointed British: ‘since Eliot’s work was ...

Don’t Ask Henry

Alan Hollinghurst: Sissiness, 9 October 2008

Belchamber 
by Howard Sturgis.
NYRB, 345 pp., £8.99, May 2008, 978 1 59017 266 7
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... tinkling, private, giggling, impression. As if I had gone in to a men’s urinal.’ Edith Wharton, a frequent guest at Qu’Acre, wouldn’t have liked that either. To the translator Gerard Hopkins, who stayed at Qu’Acre as a young man, the most striking thing was the provision of books in the lavatories. In a preface to Belchamber ...

Portrait of a Failure

Daniel Aaron, 25 January 1990

Henry Adams 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 504 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 9780674387355
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The Letters of Henry Adams: Vols I-VI 
edited by J.C Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee and Viola Hopkins-Winner.
Harvard, 2016 pp., £100.75, July 1990, 0 674 52685 6
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... of a prejudice shared in varying degrees by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as an ...

‘I thirst for his blood’

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Henry James, 25 November 1999

Henry James: A Life in Letters 
edited by Philip Horne.
Penguin, 668 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 7139 9126 7
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A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Chatto, 500 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6166 3
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... the mother, is ‘small-minded’ and ‘boring’; Alice, ‘seething with correct repression’; Edith Wharton, a ‘voyeur’. (Alice is treated more sympathetically once she is dying, perhaps because she then appears to feel more sympathetic to Woolson.) That Gordon is also willing to trash the men in James’s life – according to one of the ...

I whine for her like a babe

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: The Other Alice James, 25 June 2009

Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James 
by Susan Gunter.
Nebraska, 422 pp., £38, March 2009, 978 0 8032 1569 6
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... took up her role as the family’s angel of death. Other managing women were swiftly sent packing: Edith Wharton, most notably, but also Henry’s loyal secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, whose decision to pass on a message from Wharton led to her virtual banishment from the flat. (Alice had long resented ...

A Moustache Too Far

Danny Karlin: Melville goes under, 8 May 2003

Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. II: 1851-91 
by Hershel Parker.
Johns Hopkins, 997 pp., £31, May 2002, 0 8018 6892 0
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... being inherited by a Van Rensselaer grandson, Walter Berry, remembered now as the consort of Edith Wharton. Some of the papers and books, taken to Paris, passed into the possession of a great-grandson of Augusta’s patron Stephen Van Renssalaer, mad Cousin Harry Crosby, the subject of Geoffrey Wolff’s Black Sun.) Why is Parker telling us all ...

A Shark Swims through It

Lidija Haas: A Talent for Nonchalance, 8 March 2018

A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays and Poetry 
edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley.
Farrar, Straus, 371 pp., $27, October 2017, 978 0 374 16582 6
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... striking in her shortest stories: ‘Wants’, in which a woman at long last returns two Edith Wharton books to the library and pays her $32 fine, evokes a full span of debts and disappointments, hopes and habits, and the unaccountable passage of the years in not much more than two pages. It begins: ‘I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was ...

He had it all

Alex Harvey: Fitzgerald’s Decade, 5 July 2018

Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald 
by David S. Brown.
Harvard, 424 pp., £21.95, May 2017, 978 0 674 50482 0
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‘I’d Die for You’ and Other Lost Stories 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Scribner, 384 pp., £9.99, April 2018, 978 1 4711 6473 6
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... fights with bouncers and cabbies, drunken self-pity and bouts of remorse. Take his courtship of Edith Wharton, one of his literary heroes. At their first meeting, in 1920, he prostrated himself, kneeling ‘at her feet in a showy adulation’. Invited to lunch at Wharton’s French château, he ‘fortified his ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... in the entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured a newspaper rack displaying a thick crop of the issue of the LRB in which Jonathan Meades claims it’s ...

800 Napkins, 47 Finger Bowls

Zachary Leader, 16 March 2000

Morgan: American Financier 
by Jean Strouse.
Harvill, 816 pp., £25, June 1999, 9781860463556
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... strength of the biography is its interweaving of private and public lives; here the milieu of Edith Wharton and Henry James is rendered whole, no longer shorn of its economic base – the working world of Newland Archer or Caspar Goodwood. The public life is described clearly and persuasively, even for a reader largely ignorant of stocks and ...

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