Richard Aldington 2
Novelist, Biographer and Exile 1930-1962
Format:Paperback
Publisher:James Clarke & Co Ltd
Published:25th Jul '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The story of Richard Aldington, outstanding Imagist poet and author of the bestselling war novel Death of a Hero (1929), takes place against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent and creative years of the twentieth century. Vivien Whelpton provides a remarkably detailed and sensitive portrayal of the writer from the age of thirty-eight to his death from a heart attack in 1962. The first volume, Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover, described Aldington's life as a stalwart of the pre-war London literary scene, his experience as an infantryman on the Western Front and his postwar personal and creative crises; this second volume seeks to balance the stories of Aldington's subsequent public and private lives through a careful reading of his novels, poems and letters with his circle of acquaintances. The ways in which Aldington's dysfunctional childhood and survivor's guilt continued to haunt him through the inter-war years and beyond are masterfully untangled by an author with gifted psychological insight into her subject. Volume Two covers Aldington's personal and public lives as he transformed himself from poet to novelist and from novelist to biographer and explores his debacles and triumphs, particularly in the wake of his hugely controversial attack on the reputation of T.E. Lawrence. This authoritative biography recounts the life of one of the most underrated writers of the last century.
"Vivien Whelpton's two-part biography of the writer Richard Aldington is a formidable achievement. This second volume illuminates the world of English letters from the Thirties to the Sixties while deftly charting the fluctuations of Aldington's career and personal life. Whelpton's scrupulous account of his latter years, and of how the controversy surrounding his book Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry brought his reputation and career to premature collapse, is a heartening demonstration of scholarly and fair-minded literary biography at its best." Adrian Barlow, The English Association "This meticulously researched book draws on extensive archival material to present a nuanced, thorough, and highly readable account of Richard Aldington's life in the years after the publication of Death of a Hero. Whelpton unfailingly guides her reader through the maze of difficult personal and literary relationships that were so characteristic of Aldington and, as she did in the first volume of this two-part biography, makes a compelling argument for his continued importance to literary history." Professor Elizabeth Vandiver, Whitman College Whelpton has lain the details of his life before us with a careful scrupulousness. -Anne Williamson Henry Williamson Society Vivien Whelpton's achievement is very considerable in bringing to life a writer who for a long time has been represented more by his name than his work. -Meg Crane, Tunbridge Wells, Kent Vivien Whelpton, despite her obvious admiration for her subjct's work, both poetry and prose, does not shrink from describing his many faults as fully as she does his virtues. The amount of research that went into this comprehensive biography is both staggering and highly commendable. Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship Journal, July 2019 The picture created by Vivien Whelpton of these increasingly frail figures, still paying the price, and reaping the rewards, of their youth is strangely moving, and offers - at the last - the sympathetic, redeeming image of Aldington which she has been so keen to provide. Times Literary Supplement, Anna Girling, March 20 2020
ISBN: 9780718894771
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 647g
415 pages