Atlantic Brief Lives: A Biographical Companion to the Arts

Atlantic Brief Lives is a one-volume biographical companion to the literature and arts of the West. It is the most originally conceived book of reference in many years, containing as it does both brief factual biographies for bookshelf reference and longer interpretative essays for bedside reading. Edited over the course of six years by noted author, critic, and bibliophile Louis Kronenberger, assisted by Emily Morrison Beck, editor of the 14th Edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations the book contains 211 essays written at the highest level of critical appreciation by some of the most eminent authors and scholars of our time. Among these contributors are Jacques Barzun, Leon Edel, Paul Horgan, Justin Kaplan, Stanley Kunitz, Harry Levin, Lewis Mumford, Howard Nemerov, Conor Cruise O'Brien, V. S. Pritchett, I. A. Richards, Mark Schorer, Harold Shapero, Francis Steegmuller, Wallace Stegner, Diana and Lionel Trilling, John Updike, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and many others.