Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse: 1939-1948

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Faber & Faber, 1996 - 580 Seiten
This is the fourth volume in a complete edition of Auden's works, following Plays, Libretti and Prose Volume I - 1926-1938. The collection of 580 pages includes the essays, reviews and other writings that Auden published or prepared for delivery from the time he arrived in America in January 1939 until the end of 1948. In the following year he wrote his first book of criticism The Enchafed Flood, and adopted a new set of themes in his essays and reviews. Auden addresses himself to every conceivable subject - literature ancient and modern, art, politics, education, philosophy, religion, music, especially opera, and the theatre. The book is an exhilarating experience to read, and as an intellectual feat, and many of the pieces are reprinted here for the first time for half a century. The texts throughout have been, wherever possible, newly edited from Auden's manuscripts, and the notes report variant readings from the published versions.

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Autoren-Profil (1996)

W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and brought up in Birmingham. He went to Christ Church College, Oxford, where Stephen Spender privately printed a booklet of his poems. After university he lived for a time in Berlin, before returning to England to teach. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. Other volumes of poems and plays followed during the 1930s. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America, where Auden spent the next fifteen years lecturing, reviewing, writing poetry and opera librettos, and editing anthologies. He became an American citizen in 1946, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and a year later went to live in Kirchstetten in Austria, after spending several summers on Ischia. He died in Vienna in 1973.

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