Word: yourcenar
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Dates: during 1954-1954
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HADRIAN'S MEMOIRS, by Marguerite Yourcenar, was a cool, cleanly written novel in the form of a letter from Roman Emperor Hadrian to his adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. It made most of the year's best-selling historicals seem like blowsy farces...
HADRIAN'S MEMOIRS (313 pp.]-Marguerite Yourcenar-Farrar, Straus & Young...
This book has about as much in common with the run of historical novels as a Roman bust with Marilyn Monroe's. The novel deals with the turbulent second century, but French Author Yourcenar shuns sex and sadism, keeps the defenseless slave maidens in the background and the Saturnalia under control. She allows the sick and aging Emperor Hadrian, ruler of the Western world, to tell his own story in a letter to his 17-year-old adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian enjoys a good orgy from time to time as much as the next Roman, and he practices...
...Author Yourcenar's portrait is chiseled in stone. An expertly researched novel, it has won two literary prizes in France. What it lacks in pace, it makes up in stateliness and thoughtful writing about the man who first called Rome eternal and did his share to make...