Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spite of his first principle, Auden would probably have grudgingly liked this book. Biographer Charles Osborne, who knew the poet in his last years, glides easily over the surface of Auden's life. He slows down only for amusing anecdotes, witty remarks (chiefly Auden's) and occasional but discreet lists of who was sleeping with whom. A few of the subject's stomach spots are here, to be sure, but Osborne makes most of them look like beauty marks...
This sunny approach is largely justified by the facts. "I've had an exceptionally lucky life," Auden said some four years before his death in 1973, and indeed it seemed to be. He enjoyed those rarest experiences in English literature, a happy childhood and a pleasant public school education. At Oxford in the '20s he made some impressive lifelong friends and acolytes: Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis. A Cambridge graduate named Christopher Isherwood also joined what became known as the Auden Gang. The publication of Poems (1930) made Auden famous...
MARQUAND: AN AMERICAN LIFE by Millicent Bell...
...came from a family of decayed gentry whose life centered on a summer home in Newburyport, Mass. His father was a charming scapegrace, only occasionally employed. When Marquand entered Harvard in 1911, it was on a scholarship, although he was an indifferent scholar. He was a public high school boy, ignored by the "St. Grottlesex" preppies...
...British rock, came together to create a new culture. As if by spontaneous combustion, that culture quickly spread beyond England's meaner streets and pubs to the entire world; eventually it defined a generation. To be in the country where the excitement began was to see life in fast motion...