This study demonstrates the complex interaction between Frost's life and work. Based not only on the poetry, but on letters, notebooks, recorded interviews and public appearances as well, it treats the most significant aspects of Frost's life and poetry.

In this collection of essays and reviews, William H. Pritchard focuses on the work of English and American writers, most of them from the twentieth century. At a time when English studies in the academy seems increasingly impelled by historical and political concerns, Pritchard's aim is to reinstate the aesthetic as the major motive for literary study. Indeed "study" may be the wrong word for it, as the poet Philip Larkin made forcefully evident when he once snapped at an interviewer, "Oh, for Christ's sake one doesn't study poets. You read them and think, that's marvelous, how is it done, could I do it?"

Pritchard is convinced that his job as a critic is to talk back to the imagination he has been engaged by. The four sections of this volume look at writers as diverse as the critic Samuel Johnson, the novelist Raymond Chandler, and the poet James Merrill, and at the abrasive epistolary behavior of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. Perhaps the book's most original section is its final one, in which Pritchard writes about music-about playing the piano, singing hymns, listening to jazz-and about the teaching life as it appears in literature and in his own classroom. He concludes with appreciative essays on two of his own fondly remembered teachers.

Shelf Life is mannerly and elegant, but venturesome, even bold in its explorations of the artistic performance-of that passionate preference Robert Frost found to be the root of all human expression.

This collection makes the case for literary criticism as an informed, aggressive, personal, and often humorous response to writers and writing. An unrepentant academic, William Pritchard nonetheless finds himself looking vainly , in much current professional study of literature, for what he sees as criticism 's central task. This involves in part, an attentiveness to the performing voice e of the novelist, poetry, or essayist under discussion. to bring out this quality, the critic must exploit, with invention and intrepidity, his or her own responsive voice--must "talk back" to the work of art.

The essays, all of them about English and American writers, are arranged chronologically, beginning with Shakespeare, an Edmund Burke, and proceeding through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to end with contemporaries like Kinglsey Amis, V. S. Naipaul, and Doris Lessing. Pritchard writes with equal authority about poetry and fiction; the collection also includes assessments of critics such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle, Ford Madox Ford and R. P. Blackmur.

By the age of twenty-eight, John Updike had already been published in the three major forms—novel, poem, and short story—he would continue to explore with steadily expanding skill and authority. For the next four decades his literary career would realize itself primarily in these three forms, but also in essays, reviews, and memoirs, and in resourceful commentary on his own work—the stuff of many interviews and prefaces. In this book, William H. Pritchard offers not a biography, but an insightful portrait of the writer and his work.