Jeffrey Meyers | |
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Born | New York City, New York, U.S. | April 1, 1939
Alma mater | University of Michigan |
Occupation(s) | Biographer; critic: modern literature, art, film |
Known for | Lives of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell |
Spouse | Valerie Meyers |
Children | Rachel |
Jeffrey Meyers (born April 1, 1939 in New York City) is an American biographer, literary, art and film critic. He currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Jeffrey Meyers was born in New York City in 1939 and grew up in New York. He was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at UCLA (1963–65), for the Far East Division of the University of Maryland in Japan (1965–66), and Tufts University (1967–71), and then spent time writing in London and Málaga, Spain (1971–75) before teaching at the University of Colorado from 1975 to 1992. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Kent and Massachusetts, Jemison Professor at the University of Alabama and Visiting Scholar at Berkeley. He has won three Colorado Research Awards (two in 1976, one in 1988) and two Faculty Fellowships (1986 and 1991) as well as Huntington Library (1971), Fulbright (1978–79), ACLS (1983–84) and Guggenheim grants (1978–79). Since 1992 he's been a professional writer in Berkeley, California. In 1983 Meyers became one of 12 Americans who are Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2005 received an Award in Literature "to honor exceptional achievement" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As of 2018, Meyers has published 54 books and 980 articles on art, film, and modern American, English, and European literature. His wide range of interests include bibliography, editing, literary criticism, and biography. He is a specialist in archival research and published the FBI file on Ernest Hemingway, [1] love letters by Hemingway, [2] and literary manuscripts by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Roy Campbell. Meyers has had 33 works translated into 14 languages and is sometimes referenced as a "serial biographer" [3] due to his prolific biographic output.
His manuscripts are in the University of Tulsa, University of Texas at Austin, Huntington Library in Los Angeles, Harvard University, University of Virginia, and John F. Kennedy libraries. He has lectured at 70 universities. He has been interviewed many times and has appeared in documentary films about Edgar Allan Poe, [4] Gary Cooper, [5] and Errol Flynn, [6] and BBC-TV programs on Hemingway [7] and D. H. Lawrence. [8] He has spoken on television about his literary discoveries on CBS Morning News [9] and about Orwell on C-Span's Booknotes . [10] In 2012 he gave the Seymour Lectures in Biography at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.
Jeffrey Meyers married Valerie Froggatt in 1965. Their daughter Rachel was born in 1972 and has given them two grandchildren. Besides writing, Meyers' interests include collecting books, tennis, seeking silence, and avoiding boredom. He currently resides in Berkeley, California.
Anthony Powell [38] and Anthony Burgess praised Meyers' Hemingway: A Biography. [39] Tom Stoppard chose it as the "Best Book of the Year" in 1986. [40] In America, the poet James Dickey noted: "Meyers has given us an extremely valuable deepening of what is quite likely to prove Hemingway's greatest work, his life." [41] The National Book Award winner J. F. Powers said: "This is simply the best book there is on Hemingway, thorough, perceptive, no holds barred, highly entertaining, so good and right on the famous writer and also on the famous performer who acted from the All-American hope that what goes up may not come down, but did, in this case, tragically." [42] George Painter, the distinguished biographer of Marcel Proust, wrote: "I believe that Professor Meyers' Hemingway is one of the great biographies of our half-century, a masterwork in which true scholarship and creative art are so united as to become indistinguishable, and worthy to belong with Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, [Leslie] Marchand's Byron or Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey. Ellmann's passing has been universally mourned; but one can at least feel that the world now has a new major biographer." [43]
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.
"A Descent into the Maelström" is an 1841 short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. In the tale, a man recounts how he survived a shipwreck and a whirlpool. It has been grouped with Poe's tales of ratiocination and also labeled an early form of science fiction.
Victor Burgin is a British artist and writer. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting "the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud". His work is influenced by a variety of theorists and philosophers, most especially thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.
The Dhammapada is a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures. The original version of the Dhammapada is in the Khuddaka Nikaya, a division of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.
Eric Honeywood Partridge was a New Zealand–British lexicographer of the English language, particularly of its slang. His writing career was interrupted only by his service in the Army Education Corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II.
The Dangerous Summer is a nonfiction book by Ernest Hemingway published posthumously in 1985 and written in 1959 and 1960. The book describes the rivalry between bullfighters Luis Miguel Dominguín and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordóñez, during the "dangerous summer" of 1959. It has been cited as Hemingway's last book.
Death in the Afternoon is a non-fiction book written by Ernest Hemingway about the ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting, published in 1932. The book provides a look at the history and the Spanish traditions of bullfighting. It also contains a deeper contemplation on the nature of fear and courage. While essentially a guide book, there are three main sections: Hemingway's work, pictures, and a glossary of terms.
The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist Ambrose Bierce, consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce's witty definitions were imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version as The Devil's Dictionary in 1911.
To Have and Have Not is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1937 by Charles Scribner's Sons. The book follows Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain out of Key West, Florida. To Have and Have Not was Hemingway's second novel set in the United States, after The Torrents of Spring.
Men Without Women (1927) is the second collection of short stories written by American author Ernest Hemingway. The volume consists of 14 stories, 10 of which had been previously published in magazines. It was published in October 1927, with a first print-run of approximately 7600 copies at $2.
Mary Welsh Hemingway was an American journalist and author who was the fourth wife and widow of Ernest Hemingway.
The Conchologist's First Book is an illustrated textbook on conchology issued in 1839, 1840, and 1845. The book was originally printed under Edgar Allan Poe's name. The text was based on Manual of Conchology by Thomas Wyatt, an English author and lecturer.
A yellow-back or yellowback is a cheap novel which was published in Britain in the second half of the 19th century. They were occasionally called "mustard-plaster" novels.
Patrick Miller Hemingway is an American wildlife manager and writer who is novelist Ernest Hemingway's second son, and the first born to Hemingway's second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. During his childhood he travelled frequently with his parents, and then attended Harvard University, graduated in 1950, and shortly thereafter moved to East Africa where he lived for 25 years. In Tanzania, Patrick was a professional big-game hunter and for over a decade he owned a safari business. In the 1960s he was appointed by the United Nations to the Wildlife Management College in Tanzania as a teacher of conservation and wildlife. In the 1970s he moved to Montana where he managed the intellectual property of his father's estate. He edited his father's unpublished novel about a 1950s safari to Africa and published it with the title True at First Light (1999).
Daniel P. Biebuyck was a Belgian scholar of Central African art.
Christopher Hitchens was a prolific English-American author, political journalist and literary critic. His books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. Recognized as a public intellectual, he was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. Hitchens was a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets.
Critical Essays (1946) is a collection of wartime pieces by George Orwell. It covers a variety of topics in English literature, and also includes some pioneering studies of popular culture. It was acclaimed by critics, and Orwell himself thought it one of his most important books.
Shakespeare and Company was an influential English-language bookstore in Paris founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919; Beach published James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses at the bookstore. The store closed in 1941.
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