Word: morgans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Morgan's volume forms a monument to Maugham--its size testifies to the complexity of the subject and the exceptionally active life he led. Yet Morgan does not attempt to deify the writer, revealing not the successful, exciting, respected literary profile Maugham wished to project, but the often caustic, seldom genuinely charming man, obsessed with his literary shortcomings--he considered himself a failure for not winning a Nobel Prize--and haunted by his own homosexuality and his fear of public exposure. Born during the reign of Queen Victoria, he clung to Edwardian values of keeping up appearances; he had many...
...dissection of the characters' worst sides--their own. The Grand Old Man is W. Somerset Maugham, the British playwright, novelist and essayist, and the Riviera mansion, as well as the drama, is his. Maugham in his lifetime presented his friends and acquaintances with many such little surprises. Today Ted Morgan turns the spotlight back, dazzlingly, into Maugham's eyes. Morgan, in his meticulous biography, sketches the writer as a man who exploited his friends and their lives for material, but rarely dared to offer up his own psyche to such public scrutiny...
FICTION: Freddy's Book, John Gardner Kennedy for the Defense, George V. Higgins ∙Life Before Man, Margaret Atwood ∙Morgan's Passing, Anne Tyler ∙Neighbors, Thomas Berger The Beginning Place, Ursula K. Le Guin ∙The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
NONFICTION: And No Birds Sang, Farley Mowat ∙Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske Maugham, Ted Morgan ∙Misia, Arthur Gold & Robert Fizdale ∙Show People, Kenneth Tynan ∙The Last Nomad, Wilfred Thesiger ∙The Return of Eva Perón, V.S. Naipaul
...characters of Morgan's Passing, for all their failings, are not playing tragedy. The novel ends happily for nearly all the main characters. To Tyler things often work out well for us despite our fundamental inability to escape irrationality. Clearly, an unpredictable bizarre world full of Morgans is better than a cold, rational world with no Morgans...