Anthony Powell: A Life

Duckworth Overlook, 2004. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 1st Edition (Duckworth Overlook - 2004) No marks noted in text. Binding is tight and square. Gently read. . . . . . . . . . From Dust Jacket Flap: In the first full-length biography of Anthony Powell, Michael Barber--publisher, journalist, and man-about-town--takes a close look at the man and the writer. He finds someone whose temperament was often at war with his upbringing. The son of an army officer, educated at Eton and Oxford, Powell chose as his closest friends people like Malcolm Muggeridge and the composer Constant Lambert, who were not out of the top drawer, or the one below it. Although happily married for more than sixty years to Lady Violet Pakenham, the daughter of an earl, he admitted that he had always been attracted by girls who looked as if they'd slept under a bush for a week. Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable process by which experience became art. Michael Barber focuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material. He pays particular attention to the entre-deux-guerres, that sharply divided cultural interlude when the artists and good-timers with whom Powell identified in the twenties were followed, in the thirties, by the politicians and the prigs. Family-owned bookshop in Steubenville, Ohio: BookMarx Bookstore. Books shipped within 24 hours.