Stephen Spender : A Life in Modernism

by Leeming, David

• ISBN13: 9780805042498
• ISBN10: 0805042490
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-10
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Summary

The first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary figures. Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic, journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friendend of the best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes, Brodsky, Ginsberg-a "who's who" of contemporary literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining moments: the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise of America as a cultural and political force. As David Leeming's fascinating biography demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and flux of the century in which he lived: his sexual ambivalence, his famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars, the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on modernity itself.

Author Biography

David Leeming is a former professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut in Storrs

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction	3	(4)
Childhood and Heritage	7	(18)
Oxford	25	(20)
Germany	45	(16)
The Man of Letters	61	(18)
Love and Ideology	79	(22)
The Crusader	101	(26)
War	127	(28)
New Worlds	155	(24)
Spender I and Spender II	179	(34)
The Generous Days	213	(28)
The Final Phase	241	(20)
Notes	261	(20)
Bibliography	281	(6)
Acknowledgments	287	(2)
Index	289