Benjamin Taylor

"After John F. Kennedy's speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor's teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president's assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had...

"A brief and tender biography of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century and an elegant exploration of artistic endurance, as told by a life-long lover of Willa Cather's work"--

It is the story of the Mehmels, privileged and eccentric and headed into shipwreck, and of fourteen-year-old Felix, last of their line, who takes his rise from the family ruin. The place is Galveston Island. The season is summer. The year is 1907. Erotic as it is spiritual, homely as it is exalted, insistently comical as it is deeply sad, a book of life's inevitable opposites.

"Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became -- against all expectations...

"Saul Bellow wrote marvelously acute, unsparing, tender, ferocious, hilarious, and wise letters throughout his long life (1915-2005). Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages.This self-portrait shows the influences at work in the man and illuminates his enduring legacy: the novels and stories that earned him a Nobel Prize and the admiration of readers the world over."--[book cover]