"The Lost Weekend" swept the 1945 Academy Awards, with nominations for Best Film Editing, Score, and Black and White Cinematography, and Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay. It also received numerous awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes. Based on the novel by[...]

Scott Fitzgerald, a romantic and tragic figure who embodied the decades between the two world wars, was a writer who took his material almost entirely from his life. Despite his early success with The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald battled against failure and disappointment. This book, by the acclaimed bi[...]

This remarkable volume collects, for the first time, essays representing more than four decades of scholarship by one of the world's leading authorities on George Orwell. In clear, energetic prose that exemplifies his indefatigable attention to Orwell's life work, Jeffrey Meyers analyzes the works a[...]

On every level - writing, direction, acting - "Double Indemnity" (1944) is a triumph and stands as one of the greatest achievements in Billy Wilder's career. Adapted from the James M. Cain novel by director Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler, it tells the story of an insurance salesman, played by [...]

This biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), a giant of American literature who invented both the horror and detective genres, is a portrait of extremes: a disinherited heir, a brilliant but exploited author and editor, a man who veered radically from temperance to rampant debauchery, and an agnos[...]

Jeffrey Meyers, the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Hemingway and George Orwell, offers this masterly work on British novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Meyers' fresh insights into Lawrence's life illuminate Lawrence's working-class childhood, his tempestuous marriage, and his death in F[...]

Leon Edel has recently noted that "there exists, I am sorry to say, no criticism of biography worthy of the name. Reviewers and critics have learned how to judge plays, poems, novels-but they reveal their helplessness in the face of a biography." The Biographer's Art, by concentrating on the aesthet[...]