From the back cover:
T.S. Eliot's wife often went to his lectures wearing a sign that said "I am the wife he abandoned." One night at a Hollywood party, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald collected all the women's purses--and boiled them. Emily dickinson hid from her father in the basement to avoid going to church. Henry James preserved all his life a jacket he had worn as a boy while meeting Thackeray, because the reat author had praised the buttons. These stories, taken from memoirs, biographies, letters, and table-talk, form an irreverent and revealing history of American literature.
T.S. Eliot's wife often went to his lectures wearing a sign that said "I am the wife he abandoned." One night at a Hollywood party, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald collected all the women's purses--and boiled them. Emily dickinson hid from her father in the basement to avoid going to church. Henry James preserved all his life a jacket he had worn as a boy while meeting Thackeray, because the reat author had praised the buttons. These stories, taken from memoirs, biographies, letters, and table-talk, form an irreverent and revealing history of American literature.
