Books by Peter Bien

Peter Bien focuses on Kazantzakis' obsession with the demotic, the language "e;on the lips of the people,"e; showing how it governed his writing, his ambition, and his involvement in Greek politics and educational reform. Kazantzakis' obsession worked against him in his Odyssey and found its natural vehicle only in his translation of Homer's Iliad and his novels, Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Greek Passion.Originally published in 1972.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Integrated sequel to DEMOTIC GREEK I for second-year students uses scenarios and readings based on authentic Greek texts drawn from folktales, ballads, and writers such as Herodotus, Kazantzakis, Koraes, Myrivilis, and Seferis.

A new approach for teaching Modern Greek, using songs, poems, cartoons, and contemporary dialogues

Putting Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis's vast output into the context of his lifelong spiritual quest and the turbulent politics of twentieth-century Greece, Peter Bien argues that Kazantzakis was a deeply flawed genius--not always artistically successful, but a remarkable figure by any standard. This is the second and final volume of Bien's definitive and monumental biography of Kazantzakis (1883-1957). It covers his life after 1938, the period in which he wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, the novels that brought him his greatest fame. A demonically productive novelist, poet, playwright, travel writer, autobiographer, and translator, Kazantzakis was one of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century and the only one to achieve international recognition as a novelist. But Kazantzakis's writings were just one aspect of an obsessive struggle with religious, political, and intellectual problems. In the 1940s and 1950s, a period that included the Greek civil war and its aftermath, Kazantzakis continued this engagement with undiminished energy, despite every obstacle, producing in his final years novels that have become world classics.

A new approach for teaching Modern Greek, using songs, poems, cartoons, and contemporary dialogues