Mary V. Dearborn

A detailed new biography of the legendary art collector and culture maven offers insight into the childhood, self-education in the ways of art and artists, and sexual appetites of Peggy Guggenheim, in a portrait of a woman who transformed the art world of the twentieth century.

The Life of Peggy Guggenheim

Mistress of Modernism

Louise Bryant

Six Red Months in Russia

A full biography of Ernest Hemingway draws on a wide range of previously untapped material and offers particular insight into the private demons that both inspired and tormented him.

A Biography

Ernest Hemingway

"As the biographer of both Henry Miller (one of Mailer's heroes) and the radical journalist Louise Bryant, Dearborn is uniquely sensitive to Mailer's best and worst sides."--BOOK JACKET.

Mailer

Henry Miller was perhaps the most notorious and controversial writer of this century. His novels had been acclaimed for bringing a new, liberating frankness to writing about sexuality, and condemned as misogynistic pornography. Born in New York in 1891, to a rigidly conventional German-American family, Henry left America for Paris in 1930. It was there that he wrote Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn anmd Black Spring. This book tells his story.

Biography of Henry Miller

Happiest Man Alive

The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals V. S. Pritchett called her “a genius.” Gore Vidal described her as a “beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . .” And Tennessee Williams said, “The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson.” She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she’d been “born a man.” At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer (“He was the best-looking man I had ever seen”). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. While McCullers’s literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured—the heart and longing of the outcast.

A Life

Carson McCullers

Flamboyant, idealistic, and beautiful, Loiuse Bryant was an essential presence on the 20th-century stage. Her life with journalist John Reed took her from Greenwich Village to Provincetown to an affair with Eugene O'Neill, and on to exclusive interviews with Lenin and Trotsky at the Russian front. Dearborn passionately chronicles Bryant's stormy life, as she struggled to live by her convictions. Photos.

The Life of Louise Bryant

Queen of Bohemia

The life story of the bohemian socialite who rebelled against her famous family and became a renowned art collector. Peggy Guggenheim was the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Her visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking “happening” at the center of its time. In Mistress of Modernism, Mary V. Dearborn draws upon her unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers to craft a “thorough biography . . . [that] will appeal to art lovers interested in more than the paint” (Publishers Weekly). “With drive and clarity, Dearborn charts Guggenheim’s peripatetic life,” offering rich insight into Peggy’s traumatic childhood in German-Jewish “Our Crowd” New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites (her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name just a few) (Booklist). Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy’s last years as l’ultima dogaressa—the last (female) doge—in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of Peggy Guggenheim, whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy Dearborn brings compellingly to life.

Drawing on previously unpublished materials plus interviews with Miller's friends and associates, Dearborn provides the definitive biography of this important literary figure who came into the limelight in 1934, when his Tropic of Cancer was widely banned for its sexual passages. Miller became a symbol for the sexual revolution when the novel was finally published in the U.S. in 1961. 16-page photo insert.

A Biography of Henry Miller

The Happiest Man Alive

A comprehensive, objective biography of Henry Miller draws on his vast correspondence as well as interviews with his associates to paint a fresh portrait of this important writer

Henry Miller

In 1930 Henry Miller moved from New York to Paris, leaving behind — at least temporarily — his tempestuous marriage to June Smith and a novel that had sprung from his anguish over her love affair with a mysterious woman named Jean Kronski. Begun in 1927, Crazy Cock is the story of Tony Bring, a struggling writer whose bourgeois inclinations collide with the disordered bohemianism of his much-beloved wife, Hildred, particularly when her lover, Vanya, comes to live with them in their already cramped Greenwich Village apartment. In a world swirling with violence, sex, and passion, the three struggle with their desires, inching ever nearer to insanity, each unable to break away from this dangerous and consuming love triangle.

Mary V. Dearborn

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