A revelatory exploration of Longfellow’s life and art and how he became a “dominant force in American Letters.”
A welcome new biography of the iconic 19th-century poet.
For many Americans, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is fondly associated with “Paul Revere’s Ride,” the “most memorized poem in American history.” In this comprehensive, affectionate, and astute biography, the first in many years, Basbanes provides a valuable reassessment of the once-beloved poet who fell from grace in the literary establishment just years after his death. For Basbanes, Longfellow was “discreet, loyal, and principled to a fault.” Drawing on previously unexplored primary source material, he focuses as much on the private man—especially the influential roles Longfellow’s two beloved wives, Mary and Fanny, had on his work—as he does on the public one. Their horrific deaths affected him greatly. One of eight children, young Henry was a “model of probity and purpose,” publishing his first poem at 13. Success at Bowdoin College—where lifelong friend Nathaniel Hawthorne was a fellow classmate—earned him a European fellowship to study foreign languages. The trip, Basbanes writes, was “fundamental” to everything he would become. Longfellow taught at Bowdoin but grew restless, yearning for the literary life. A position at Harvard included more language study abroad; ultimately, he was able to read 15 languages. By the age of 30, Longfellow had published numerous poems, essays, and translations. His first major work, Hyperion, received a favorable response but was trashed in print by Edgar Allan Poe. During the Civil War, Longfellow’s poem “The Building of the Ship,” writes Basbanes, “brought tears to the eyes of Abraham Lincoln.” The Song of Hiawatha sold 4,000 copies upon publication, 50,000 in the first two years in America. He was also popular in Britain, “outselling Robert Browning and Tennyson on their own turf.” His translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy “alone is a singular achievement, and his sonnets compare with the best in English.”
A revelatory exploration of Longfellow’s life and art and how he became a “dominant force in American Letters.” (76 photos)Pub Date: June 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-101-87514-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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