{"product_id":"9780826208743-1","title":"Six Literary Lives: The Shared Impiety of Adams, London, Sinclair, Williams, Dos Passos, and Tate","description":"\u003cp\u003eA brilliant tour de force, informative, unapologetically opinionated and a pleasure to read,\" exclaimed \u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/i\u003e about Reed Whittemore's recent book on biography, \u003ci\u003eWhole Lives\u003c\/i\u003e.  The \u003ci\u003eWashing Times\u003c\/i\u003e proclaimed that his earlier work \u003ci\u003ePure Lives\u003c\/i\u003e revealed biography as \"a troubled genre-but as this book testifies brilliantly, a fascinating one.\"  Whittemore continues to build upon his formidable reputation in the field of biography with \u003ci\u003eSix Literary Lives\u003c\/i\u003e, in which he deepens our understanding of six major twentieth-century writers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhittemore's subjects-Henry Adams, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Allen Tate-were writers of widely diverse talents and interests.  However, Wittemore says, they all shared a \"common climate of thought,\" a nineteenth-century view, now unfashionable, of literature's role in our culture.  Although each biography could stand alone, Whittemore focuses on the ideas-literary, scientific, cultural-that united these six literary lives and emphasizes the shared impiety.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book is an experiment in group biography with an ideological base.  Using as a foundation American culture before World War II, which Daniel Bell described as \"the end of ideology,\" Whittemore introduces these biographies with a discussion of the intellectual climate these writers shared.  There is also a supplementary essay on three naturalists-Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, and Gerard Manley Hopkins-who shared similarly impious mind-sets.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSix Literary Lives\u003c\/i\u003e reasserts values of character and art that have been belittled or attacked in the late twentieth century.  The six figures studied here were all aggressive individuals ill at ease with solidarity.  Their personal relations were slight, yet their common underlying stance in relation to their culture illuminates both that culture and, by comparison, our own.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Missouri Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47042151153904,"sku":"9780826208743","price":50.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780826208743_p0.jpg?v=1763748842","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780826208743-1","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}