From Publishers Weekly
Appointed MacLeish's biographer by the MacLeish estate, Donaldson ( John Cheever ) in collaboration with Winnick ( Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 - 1982 ) has produced a sympathetic and fully realized treatment of the writer's life and work. MacLeish (1892-1982) was born into wealth but rejected a law career for poetry, supporting his family by working as a journalist for Fortune magazine. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice for his poems (1932, 1953) and once for his play J.B. (1959). Donaldson details his subject's friendships with Hemingway, Dean Acheson and Dos Passos, acknowledging MacLeish's literary achievements and his outstanding stint as FDR's Librarian of Congress. The book credits him with acting against fascism and McCarthyism but also reveals his snobbishness, extra-marital affairs and failures as a father. Readable and well-researched, this is a solid scholarly biography of a major literary figure. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Library Journal
This exhaustive, sympathetic biography helps explain why MacLeish, one of the best-known and respected American poets in the 1930s to the 1950s, is all but forgotten today. Raised to value a life of selfless public service, he early subordinated a pursuit of private poetry to a career in the law, then at the fledgling Fortune magazine. In the Depression, at the request of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he revered, he became Librarian of Congress and, in the 1950s, Boylston Professor of English at Harvard--all the while carped at by critics both Left and Right, who accused him of "selling out." This fine book should help resurrect MacLeish, not as a poet (liberal samplings of his work suggest he remains too public and hortatory for our tastes), but as a principled and courageous American public servant. For an interview with Donaldson, see Behind The Book, p. 92.--Ed.
- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
