The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

by John Gross (Editor)

Overview

In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide—this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth—a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199543410
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/14/2008
Series:	Oxford Books of Prose & Verse
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Gross is the editor of The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, The Oxford Book of Essays, After Shakespeare, and many other publications. He was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1974 to 1981, and is currently theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph.

Table of Contents

The subjects of the anecdotes include all the major British, American, and Commonwealth writers, starting with Chaucer, Sir Thomas More and Sir Walter Raleigh, then Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Johnson, Swift, Pope, Hume, Edmund Burke, Gibbon, Jefferson, the Romantics, Fenimore Cooper, Macaulay, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Twain, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Cather, Robert Frost, Carson McCuller, Salinger, Mailer, Larkin, Vonnegut, Burroughs, Bellow, Churchill, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Updike, Philip Roth, Wole Soyinka, Les Murray, Margaret Atwood, Stoppard, Coetzee, Chatwin, Bob Dylan, Rushdie, McEwan, Amis, Jeanette Winterson etcAuthors of the anecdotes are equally diverse, from the diarists John Aubrey, John Evelyn and James Boswell to fellow writers e.g. Wodehouse, Auden,Harriet Martineau, Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, Vanessa Bell; modern biographers such as Selina Hastings, journals and radio interviews.

Editorial Reviews

Gross (A Double Thread), former editor of the New York Times and Times Literary Supplement, has compiled more than 700 anecdotes about English-language writers, from Geoffrey Chaucer to J.K. Rowling. The brief, chronologically-arranged (by subject's birth date) entries offer a glimpse into the personalities and times of these authors. In some cases, italicized commentary explains context. The material is often humorous, e.g., Bertrand Russell's advice on how to "make" a girl; and perhaps surprising, e.g., Wilkie Collins's self-administered daily doses of laudanum. Because the entries are largely biographical, this collection is as much a contribution to social history as to literary criticism, though it would best be dipped into for the purposes of trivia-not reference or research. It builds on The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975) and The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (1981), with about a ten percent overlap of content. Gross makes no claim to have recherary figures-he further admits that many of the entries "have no direct bearing on authorship or literary life"-but literature lovers will find juicy tidbits and surprising revelations on every page. For public library collections.-Rebecca Bollen Manalac, Sydney, Australia Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"...good for endless hours of random reading. Open at any page, at any time. You will be rewarded in unexpected ways, by unexpected writers."—William Grimes, New York Times

"An agreeable and quite funny bookish companion."—Los Angeles Times

"Literature lovers will find juicy tidbits and surprising revelations on every page."—Library Journal

"Contains scores of delightful items.... All the anecdotes are set out in the elegant, unobtrusive manner that one is accustomed to from other of Mr. Gross's handsome anthologies for Oxford."—The Wall Street Journal

"I would argue that, after food, shelter, and sex, anecdotes are an absolute necessity to human life. After all, the only thing that makes most of our agonizing experiences endurable is the potential for turning them into amusing anecdotes.... full of such juicy tidbits, along with more serious or even poignant reflections."—Booklist

From the Publisher