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10 books match the query 'Authors' spouses'

cover of An Apprehension of Splendor: A Biography in Photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Family

An Apprehension of Splendor

A Biography in Photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Family

Shawn Sudia-Skehan; Foreword by Jackson R. Bryer; Introduction by Eleanor Lanahan

University of Alabama Press, 2025

A unique collection of Fitzgerald family photographs, many never before published, hand selected by a curator of the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum.

Enter the Jazz Age glamour of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their daughter, Scottie. An Apprehension of Splendor is a rich pictorial biography that illuminates the lives of this brilliant literary family in 344 rare photographs, 180 of which have never been published.

The Fitzgeralds are chiefly known from a small number of iconic, posed images, but the dashing couple and their daughter amassed hundreds of candid snapshots now housed in archives and university library collections throughout North America. These rare photos reveal the full, vivid lives behind the icons—a Buffalo boy cradling a velvety puppy, a jaunty southern gamine in the shade of a loblolly pine laughing at a secret, the stoic gloom of an enlistee in a scratchy woolen uniform, a plot taking shape in the mind of a fledgling writer with bed-tousled hair, an amorous young couple struggling to light a cigarette in the chiaroscuro of a Riviera beach, an unhappy baby tugged through the snow in a laundry basket lashed to a sled, and a myriad of other images that will rekindle fascination with the Fitzgeralds and their time.

With unparalleled access to the family’s personal papers and photographs, Shawn Sudia-Skehan, former director of acquisitions at the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, handpicked and annotated this collection of images that brings readers closer to the Fitzgeralds than any other work. Readers of Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, and many other works by F. Scott and Zelda will recognize some of the places and experiences that inspired their unforgettable fictions.

A captivating portrait of Jazz Age celebrity, young passion, and artistic ambition, An Apprehension of Splendor returns the perfume to the luminous flower of the Fitzgeralds.
 

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cover of Duchess of Palms: A Memoir

Duchess of Palms

A Memoir

By Nadine Eckhardt

University of Texas Press, 2009

A “fifties girl” tells the fascinating story of her marriages to novelist Billy Lee Brammer and Congressman Bob Eckhardt, and how these relationships propelled her into the multifaceted life she led on her own terms.

Child of the Great Depression, teenage "Duchess of Palms" beauty queen, wife of an acclaimed novelist and later of a brilliant U.S. congressman, and ultimately a successful single working woman and mother, Nadine Eckhardt has lived a fascinating life. In this unique, funny, and honest memoir, she recounts her journey from being a "fifties girl" who lived through the men in her life to becoming a woman in her own right, working toward her own goals.

Eckhardt's first marriage to writer Billy Lee Brammer gave her entrée to liberal political and literary circles in Austin and Washington, where she and Brammer both worked for Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. She describes the heady excitement of LBJ's world—a milieu that Brammer vividly captured in his novel The Gay Place. She next recalls her second marriage to Bob Eckhardt, whom she helped get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as her growing involvement with the counterculture of social protest, sexual revolution, and drug use. Eckhardt honestly recounts how the changing times changed her perception of herself, recalling that "I didn't know how to achieve for myself, only for others, and I felt ripped off and empty." This painful realization opened the door to a new life for Eckhardt. Her memoir concludes with a joyful description of her multifaceted later life as a restaurateur, assistant to Molly Ivins, writer, and center of a wide circle of friends.

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cover of Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson

Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson

Delores Bird Carpenter

Michigan State University Press, 2012

Ellen Tucker Emerson's biography of her mother, Lidian Jackson Emerson, provides important insights into the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife of 46 years. Delores Bird Carpenter has carefully edited this narrative to enhance continuity and to ensure completeness.
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cover of Living At The Edge: Biography Of D H Lawrence & Frieda Von Richthofen

Living At The Edge

Biography Of D H Lawrence & Frieda Von Richthofen

Michael Squires

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Dashingly told and meticulously researched, this double biography of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen is the first to draw fully on Frieda’s unpublished letters and on interviews with people who knew her well. It explores their collision with an industrial world they hated and chronicles the stormy relationship between husband and wife. The strong sexual vitality that inspired Lawrence’s art brought both joy and anguish to his marriage. Here, the Lawrences emerge as proud but not conceited in their unconventional lives, staunch in the face of fierce opposition from a conformist society.
    Living at the Edge follows the separate lives of Lawrence and Frieda up to their first meeting in 1912. Tracing their new life together, it depicts their grateful escape from the English Midlands; their discovery of exotic places where they made temporary homes—Italy, Cornwall, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico; Lawrence’s courageous battle against illness; and, after his death in 1930, Frieda’s success in recreating the simple life on ranches near Taos, New Mexico, where she died in 1956.
    At the center of their story is Lawrence’s literary career. Biographers Squires and Talbot see Lawrence’s major novels—The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover—as a fresh way to understand his turbulent and conflicted life. They reveal the extreme care with which he rewrote his personal experience to satisfy his deepest needs, and they introduce the many influential people who entered the Lawrences’ lives and work. The rich materials from Frieda’s letters reveal a different Lawrence—more difficult as a man but more interesting as an artist; they also reveal a different Frieda—more vibrant as a woman, more substantial as a companion. This superb biography gives both Lawrence and Frieda striking new dimensions.
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cover of Memoir of Italo Svevo

Memoir of Italo Svevo

Livia Veneziani Svevo

Northwestern University Press, 2001

Writer Italo Svevo had many things in common with other writers: a long struggle for recognition; a friendship with a noteworthy author (in Svevo's case, James Joyce); and a long list of neuroses. His choice of a wife, however, was anything but common. Livia Veneziani Svevo tirelessly worked on her husband's behalf after his tragic early death and also penned this remarkable portrait of a serious artist and a loving (if quirky) marriage. Memoir of Italo Svevo tells the story of how a successful middle-aged businessman, as obsessed with smoking as with his abandoned literary ambitions, somehow became one of the great authors of the twentieth century.
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cover of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne

A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871

Patricia Dunlavy Valenti

University of Missouri Press, 2015

As is often the case with spouses of celebrities, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was overshadowed by her husband. While Nathaniel Hawthorne is renowned for numerous publications, including The Scarlet Letter, that staple in high school English curricula, Sophia’s remarkable life and career did not receive the recognition they deserve. She was, however, a source for many of Nathaniel’s stories and responsible for much that he accomplished. Sophia was an artist, one of the first in America to earn income from her painting and decorative arts; she was also a writer and traveler to foreign countries at a time when women typically confined their activities to the home. Patricia Dunlavy Valenti began to tell this story in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1, 1809-1847 (2004). This biography concludes now in a second volume, which details the less examined and more surprising second half of Sophia’s life.
Valenti’s thorough research culminates in a compelling, revealing account of Sophia’s travels to Britain and Europe and her intense personal relationships outside her marriage with men and women, among them notable figures in American history and literature. As an impoverished widow, Sophia dealt resourcefully with the consequences of her husband’s financial carelessness; as a mother, her liberal practices resulted in unintended, sometimes unfortunate consequences. Throughout every vicissitude, her relentless optimism prevailed.
With the publication of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871, Sophia emerges forever from the shadow cast by her husband. Historians and general readers alike will be drawn to this riveting account of an interesting, important woman and what her life reveals about American history and culture at a moment of national conflict, emerging class divisions, and evolving gender roles.
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cover of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume I, 1809-1847

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne

A Life, Volume I, 1809-1847

Patricia Dunlavy Valenti

University of Missouri Press, 2004

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne is known almost exclusively in her role as the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who portrayed her as the fragile, ethereal, infirm “Dove.” That image, invented by Nathaniel to serve his needs and affirm his manhood, was passed on by his biographers, who accepted their subject’s perception without question. In fact, the real Sophia was very different from Nathaniel’s construction of her.
 
An independent, sensuous, daring woman, Sophia was an accomplished artist before her marriage to Nathaniel. Moreover, what she brought to their union inspired Nathaniel’s imagination beyond the limits of his previously confined existence. In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti situates the story of Sophia’s life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural background, as well as within the context of her marriage. Valenti begins with parallel biographies that present Sophia, and then Nathaniel, at comparable periods in their lives.

Sophia was born into an expansive, somewhat chaotic home in which women provided financial as well as emotional sustenance. She was a precocious, eager student whose rigorous education, in her mother’s and her sisters’ schools, began her association with the children of New England’s elite. Sophia aspired to become a professional, self-supporting painter, exhibiting her art and seeking criticism from established mentors. She relished an eighteen-month sojourn in Cuba. Nathaniel’s reclusive family, his reluctant early education, his anonymous pursuit of a career, and his relatively circumscribed life contrast markedly with the experience of the woman who became his wife and the mother of his children. Those differences resulted in a creative abrasion that ignited his fiction during the first years of their marriage.
 
Volume 1 of this biography concludes with Sophia’s negotiation of the Hawthornes’ departure from the Old Manse and the birth of their second child. This period also coincides with the conclusion of Nathaniel’s major phase of short story writing.
 
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne is an engrossing story of a nineteenth-century American life. It analyzes influences upon authorship and questions the boundaries of intellectual property in the domestic sphere. The book also offers fresh interpretations of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, examining it through the lens of Sophia’s vibrant personality and diverse interests. Students and scholars of American literature, literary theory, feminism, and cultural history will find much to enrich their understanding of this woman and this era.
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cover of The Picshuas of H. G. Wells: A Burlesque Diary

The Picshuas of H. G. Wells

A Burlesque Diary

Gene K. Rinkel and Margaret E. Rinkel

University of Illinois Press, 2000

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cover of Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage

Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage

Ruth A. Hawkins

University of Arkansas Press, 2012

It was the glittering intellectual world of 1920s Paris expatriates in which Pauline Pfeiffer, a writer for Vogue, met Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley among a circle of friends that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Dorothy Parker. Pauline grew close to Hadley but eventually forged a stronger bond with Hemingway himself; with her stylish looks and dedication to Hemingway's writing, Pauline became the source of "unbelievable happiness" for Hemingway and, by 1927, his second wife. Pauline was her husband's best editor and critic, and her wealthy family provided moral and financial support, including the conversion of an old barn to a dedicated writing studio at the family home in Piggott, Arkansas. The marriage lasted thirteen years, some of Hemingway's most productive, and the couple had two children. But the "unbelievable happiness" met with "final sorrow," as Hemingway wrote, and Pauline would be the second of Hemingway's four wives. Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow paints a full picture of Pauline and the role she played in Ernest Hemingway's becoming one of our greatest literary figures.
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cover of Zea Mexican Diary: 7 September 1926—7 September 1986

Zea Mexican Diary

7 September 1926—7 September 1986

Kamau Brathwaite

University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

In May of 1986 Edward Kamau Brathwaite learned that his wife, Doris, was dying of cancer and had only a short time to live.  Responding as a poet, he began “helplessly & spasmodically” to record her passage in a diary.  Zea Mexican is a collection of excerpts from this diary and other notes from this period of the Brathwaites’ lives, and few who read this book will fail to be caught up in the depth of Edward Brathwaite’s grief.
    Zea Mexican is a tribute to Doris Brathwaite and an exploration of the creative potency of love.  (The title comes from the name Brathwaite gave Doris, who was originally from Guyana of part Amerindian descent.)  Exposing the intimacy of his  marriage, this book is the closest Brathwaite has ever come to an autobiographical statement.  In examining his life with Doris he found the courage to reveal something of his own character.  But, more than an autobiography, Zea Mexican is an extraordinary work of literature, much of it written in the expressive “nation language” of Jamaica and the Caribbean.  Brathwaite filters his pain through his poetic gift, presenting it to the reader with all the poignancy poetry conveys.

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