We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,553,828.57 | Books Available: 798,864 | Members Online: 204

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Dickens : A Biography

Dickens A Biography
Author: Fred Kaplan

Named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and one of best biographies of 1988 by Publishers Weekly"Anyone who has not read a life of Dickens is going to prefer Fred Kaplan's long, solid, and illuminating biography, furnished with new facts and theories, to any previous one they might encounter. The novelist who emerg... more »es from his study -- dynamic, mercurial, self-deluding, with a big heart for the masses and a small one for his ego, makes fascinating reading." -- Louis Auchincloss, Newsday" 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 TimesFrom a bitter childhood mired in poverty and hard work to a career as the most acclaimed and best-loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as tumultuous as any he created in his teeming novels of life in Victorian England. And no one has captured the rich texture of this life as colorfully and persuasively as Fred Kaplan in this acclaimed biography. Drawing on unpublished and long-forgotten sources, Kaplan presents a full-scale portrait of Dickens and his world. From the autobiographical basis of his novels and his extraordinary circle of friends to the course of his unhappy marriage and complicated family relations, Kaplan reveals the restless compulsions, private passions, and professional concerns that drove Dickens to unprecedented literary success. Kaplan details Dickens's often stormy dealings with his publishers and his carefully cultivated relationship with readers, heightened through amateur theatricals and numerous public readings in Britain and North America. 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."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

ISBN-13: 9780801860188
ISBN-10: 0801860180
Publication Date: 9/11/1998
Pages: 654
Rating:

Currently 4.5/5 Stars.

4.5 stars, based on 2 ratings

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Biographies & Memoirs >> Arts & Literature >> Authors
Biographies & Memoirs >> General
Biographies & Memoirs >> Historical >> Europe >> Great Britain >> General

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Dickens : A Biography

Loading...