HAWTHORNE

作者: Brenda Wineapple 著

出版社: Random House US

出版时间: 2004-06

版次: 1

ISBN: 9780812972917

定价: 173.00

装帧: 平装

开本: 16开

纸张: 胶版纸

页数: 509页

分类: 外文古旧书>英文书>历史

　　Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he wasapproached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was asmercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” HermanMelville said.

  Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of thosesupremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts,delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public.Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “Healways puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law MaryMann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, wasextraordinary, a play of light and shadow.

  In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more thana decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flannerand Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings himbrilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in anattempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated thecommunity (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; theconfidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the UnitedStates and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreauand Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who,also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifyingwith them–he was the first major American writer to create eroticfemale characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue tohaunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes,humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that whichenthralls.

  Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an oldpre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of westernMaine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Hereare his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of thePeabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including withMargaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer andintellectual.

  Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as agenius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by theBoston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held politicalloyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents ofhis time.

  Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrentsof Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, andinsight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travelnotes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in thisbiography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable corethat is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of hisgeneration for an authentically American voice bears disquietingfruit. 　　Brenda Wineapple is author of the award-winning Hawthorne:A Life; Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, andSister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. She is alsothe editor of the Selected Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier in theAmerican Poets Series (Library of America.) Her essays, articlesand reviews have appeared in many publications, among them TheAmerican Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus,Poetry, and The Nation. A Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, and twice of the NationalEndowment, she teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia Universityand The New School and lives in New York City.
内容简介:
　　Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he wasapproached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was asmercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” HermanMelville said.

  Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of thosesupremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts,delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public.Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “Healways puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law MaryMann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, wasextraordinary, a play of light and shadow.

  In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more thana decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flannerand Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings himbrilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in anattempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated thecommunity (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; theconfidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the UnitedStates and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreauand Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who,also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifyingwith them–he was the first major American writer to create eroticfemale characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue tohaunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes,humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that whichenthralls.

  Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an oldpre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of westernMaine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Hereare his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of thePeabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including withMargaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer andintellectual.

  Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as agenius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by theBoston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held politicalloyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents ofhis time.

  Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrentsof Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, andinsight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travelnotes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in thisbiography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable corethat is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of hisgeneration for an authentically American voice bears disquietingfruit.
作者简介:
　　Brenda Wineapple is author of the award-winning Hawthorne:A Life; Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, andSister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. She is alsothe editor of the Selected Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier in theAmerican Poets Series (Library of America.) Her essays, articlesand reviews have appeared in many publications, among them TheAmerican Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus,Poetry, and The Nation. A Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, and twice of the NationalEndowment, she teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia Universityand The New School and lives in New York City.

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HAWTHORNE

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