Books by Edward Mendelson
Later Auden
Examines W.H. Auden's poetry from 1939 to 1973, from his move to the United States to his death, in relation to the events in his personal life
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Later Auden
The definitive study of Auden's poems from 1939 to 1973.
"For a poet like myself, an autobiography is redundant," W. H. Auden wrote to a friend, "since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem." This book is the history of Auden's poems, and of the events that went into them, from the time he moved to the United States until his death, completing the story begun in Edward Mendelson's acclaimed Early Auden.
Later Auden links the changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional, religious, and erotic life with his shifting public roles--as representative of political causes, as researcher working with the U.S. Army in postwar Germany, as public moralist, as lecturer and teacher, and above all as poet. Mendelson deftly reveals how Auden converted the success and later wreckage of his relationship with Chester Kallman into the seemingly impersonal meditations of some of his long poems, and explores the ways his later poetry celebrates the human body and represents it in verse. Throughout, he reveals the depth of Auden's struggles with himself and with the temptations of his growing fame, showing how these struggles gave shape to his imperishable art.
This inner biography of a great poet and thinker has unusual breadth and intensity. An absorbing narrative of a varied, productive life, it will interest everyone who cares about literature.
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Poetry for Young People: Edward Lear
by Edward Lear, Edward Mendelson
Utterly delightful to read aloud, and for parent and child to share, Edward Lear's humorous verses shine with irrepressible joy and rhythm. Filled with exuberantly nonsensical made-up words (like "Scroobius Pip" and "pobble"!) that tickle the funny bone, his work gives free rein to youthful imaginations. What better to foster a love of poetry than the immediately appealing The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, with its effortless rhymes, songlike beat, and charming animal characters? Or The Quangle Wangle's Hat, which tells the tale of a creature who warmly welcomes everyone--and so makes everyone cheerful. In Dingle Bank, even some young and mischievous boys punished by their schoolmaster make the best of their situation and succeed in having a good time. Bright and fanciful paintings--all as wildly energetic and unrestrained as the language itself--add to the enjoyment. 20 examples of Lear's finest poems will entice children over and over again--and, as always, this acclaimed series features fascinating biographical information, introductions to each verse, and full annotations that define difficult vocabulary.
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The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life
She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered . . .
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
An illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts—portray the essential experiences of life.
Edward Mendelson—a professor of English at Columbia University—illustrates how each novel is a living portrait of the human condition while expressing its author’s complex individuality and intentions and emerging from the author’s life and times. He explores Frankenstein as a searing representation of child neglect and abandonment and Mrs. Dalloway as a portrait of an ideal but almost impossible adult love, and leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understanding of each of the seven novels, reminding us—in the most captivating way—why they matter.
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Poetry for Young People: Edward Lear (Volume 12)
Utterly delightful to read aloud, and for parent and child to share, Edward Lear's humorous verses shine with irrepressible joy and rhythm. Filled with exuberantly nonsensical made-up words (like "Scroobius Pip" and "pobble"!) that tickle the funny bone, his work gives free rein to youthful imaginations. What better way to foster a love of poetry than the immediately appealing The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, with its effortless rhymes, song-like beat, and charming animal characters? Or The Quangle Wangle's Hat, which tells the tale of a creature who warmly welcomes everyone--and so makes everyone cheerful. This handsome volume of Edward Lear poems is now available in paperback – at a great price and with a bold new cover design – to bring the love of classic poetry to a broad new audience.
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Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll (Volume 11)
With fantastic characters and enchanting language, Lewis Carroll created magical wonderlands children have always loved to visit. These 26 selections from his classic works have never lost their fascination. Open the covers of this beautifully illustrated collection and take a magical journey through selections from his classic works, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Snark, and Sylvie and Bruno. Humorous paintings by Eric Copeland gloriously depict both the beloved and fantastic characters—from the fearsome Jabberwock to the wacky Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
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Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers
A deeply considered and provocative new look at major American writers—including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and W.H. Auden—Edward Mendelson’s Moral Agents is also a work of critical biography in the great tradition of Plutarch, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. Any important writer, in Mendelson’s view, writes in response to an idea of the good life that is inseparable from the life the writer lives.
Fusing biography and criticism and based on extensive new research, Moral Agents presents challenging new portraits of eight writers—novelists, critics, and poets—who transformed American literature in the turbulent twentieth century. Eight sharply distinctive individuals—inspired, troubled, hugely ambitious—who reimagined what it means to be a writer.
There’s Saul Bellow, a novelist determined to rule as a patriarch, who, having been neglected by his father, in turn neglected his son in favor of young writers who presented themselves as his literary heirs. Norman Mailer’s extraordinary ambition, suppressed insecurity, and renegade metaphysics muddled the novels through which he hoped to change the world, yet these same qualities endowed him with an uncanny sensitivity and deep sympathy to the pathologies of American life that make him an unequaled political reporter. William Maxwell wrote sad tales of small-town life and surrounded himself with a coterie of worshipful admirers. As a powerful editor at The New Yorker, he exercised an enormous and constraining influence on American fiction that is still felt today.
Preeminent among the critics is Lionel Trilling, whose Liberal Imagination made him a celebrity sage of the anxiously tranquilized 1950s, even as his calculated image of Olympian reserve masked a deeply conflicted life and contributed to his ultimately despairing worldview. Dwight Macdonald, by contrast, was a haute-WASP anarchist and aesthete driven by an exuberant moral commitment, in a time of cautious mediocrity, to doing the right thing. Alfred Kazin, from a poor Jewish émigré background, remained an outsider at the center of literary New York, driven both to escape from and do justice to the deepest meanings of his Jewish heritage.
Perhaps most intriguing are the two poets, W.H. Auden and Frank O’Hara. Early in his career, Auden was tempted to don the mantle of the poet as prophet, but after his move from England to America he lived and wrote in a spirit of modesty and charity born out of a deeply idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity. O’Hara, tireless partygoer and pioneering curator at MoMA, wrote much of his poetry for private occasions. Its lasting power has proven to be something different from its avant-garde reputation: personal warmth, individuality, rootedness in ancient traditions, and openness to the world.
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Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography
Presented in one volume for the very first time, and updated with new archival discoveries, Early Auden, Later Auden reintroduces Edward Mendelson's acclaimed, two-part biography of W. H. Auden (1907–73), one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. This book offers a detailed history and interpretation of Auden’s oeuvre, spanning the duration of his career from juvenilia to his final works in poetry as well as theatre, film, radio, opera, essays, and lectures.
Early Auden, Later Auden follows the evolution of the poet’s thought, offering a comparison of Auden’s views at various junctures over a lifetime. With penetrating insight, Mendelson examines Auden’s early ideas, methods, and personal transitions as reflected in poems, manuscripts, and private papers. The book then links changes in Auden’s intellectual, emotional, and religious experience with his shifting public role―showing the depth of his personal struggles with self and with fame, and the means by which these internal conflicts were reflected in his art in later years.
Featuring a new preface by the author, Early Auden, Later Auden is an engaging and timeless work that demonstrates Auden’s remarkable range and complexity, paying homage to his enduring legacy.
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The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway
"Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Edward Mendelson concedes that any book of criticism can only address more than a few fractions of the novel, but in focusing his reading on the themes of medicine, empire, and love, he provides insight to a variety of the themes and ideas that shape Mrs. Dalloway. Mendelson frames the novel as one in which characters, particularly Clarissa Dalloway, struggle to move toward personal freedom by triumphing over the fear of being oneself and creating an intimacy with others amid personal and social barriers. Mrs. Dalloway is, among many other things, an extended protest against all authorities who say "must" and confine the individual. These authorities include a medical establishment personified by Sir William Bradshaw's uncaring and soul-crushing treatment of Septimus Smith. In the section on "Empire," Mendelson examines how power impresses upon the lives in characters in ways that are at once subtle and totalizing. In the final chapter, Mendelson argues that Virginia Woolf had no answer to the question of love or "the difficult business of intimacy," but in Mrs. Dalloway she shows how different kinds of loves affect and, in some cases, liberate the characters' fates"-- Provided by publisher.
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