Books by Jeffrey Meyers

Jeffrey Meyers' Resurrections: Authors, Heroes-and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he writes in the preface, "e;The chapters in this book represent in miniature my career as a life-writer. My biographies have always been driven by fascination with the source of artistic creativity, with people who wrote or painted and with the worlds they inhabited."e; Ian Watt, who taught Meyers at Berkeley, struggled with the legacy of his ordeal as a Japanese prisoner of war, and with its depiction in the film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. The story of Paul Theroux's feud with Sir Vidia Naipaul is well known, but Meyers finds greater meaning in their quarrel through the lens of his own long friendship with Theroux. While James Salter, fighter pilot and brilliant stylist, epitomizes Meyers' heroic ideal, the fiction writer also responds with an epistolary friendship, punctuated by visits, and Meyers is delighted by Salter's great reputation late in life. Anthony Blunt, art historian and communist spy, fascinates the biographer for a darker reason: the depth of his capacity for intellectual and personal deceit. The feckless, lesser-known Hugh Gordon Porteus, told Meyers many revealing and amusing stories about his friends Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In the process of writing these profiles, Meyers discovers a common thread relating to himself: not only do these subjects provoke a kind of personal testing, they also represent his search for the ideal father in his vivid intellectual and imaginative inquiry.

Robert Lowell was known not only as a great poet but also as a writer whose devotion to his art came at a tremendous personal cost. In this work, his third on Robert Lowell, Jeffrey Meyers examines the poet's impassioned, fraught relationships with the key women in his life, including his mother, his three wives, nine of his many lovers, his close women friends, and his most talented students.

This examination of the life and work of writer Lawrence by prolific biographer Meyers looks at Lawrence's tempestuous marriage and the intersections between his fiction (Lady Chatterly's Lover, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers) and the life that inspired them.

Filled with provocative new assessments and new facts, this biography presents the contradictory, tormented life of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim , and one of the great figures of modern literature.

This comprehensive biography of prolific critic, essayist, historian and novelist Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) posits, quite successfully that the subject lived a life as romantic and chaotic as his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's.

Sampling works by the creator of Holmes and Watson, this collection features Doyle's detective stories, horror tales, journalism, historical stories, and the complete text of his science-fiction novel The Poison Belt.

A pre-eminent Orwell scholar's lifetime of work on the icon of modern literature

The Genius and the Goddess, based on Jeffrey Meyers' long friendship with Arthur Miller and extensive archival research from Washington to Los Angeles, is a portrait of a marriage.

"Distinguished by its precision, its graceful use of language, and its resonant depth, the innovative style of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) radically altered literary convent"

This biography of Edgar Allan Poe, a giant of American Literature who invented both the horror and detective genre, is a portrait of extremes: a disinherited heir, a brilliant bu underpaid author, a temerate man and uncontrollable addict.