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Summary
Summary
In the spirit of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets, acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland tours the history of fiction in English
No previous author has attempted a book such as this: a complete history of novels written in the English language, from the genre's seventeenth-century origins to the present day. In the spirit of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets, acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland selects 294 writers whose works illustrate the best of every kind of fiction--from gothic, penny dreadful, and pornography to fantasy, romance, and high literature. Each author was chosen, Professor Sutherland explains, because his or her books are well worth reading and are likely to remain so for at least another century. Sutherland presents these authors in chronological order, in each case deftly combining a lively and informative biographical sketch with an opinionated assessment of the writer's work. Taken together, these novelists provide both a history of the novel and a guide to its rich variety. Always entertaining, and sometimes shocking, Sutherland considers writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe, Henry James, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Archer, and Jacqueline Susann.
Written for all lovers of fiction, Lives of the Novelists succeeds both as introduction and re-introduction, as Sutherland presents favorite and familiar novelists in new ways and transforms the less favored and less familiar through his relentlessly fascinating readings.
Author Notes
John Sutherland was born on October 9, 1938. After graduating from the University of Leicester in 1964, he began his academic career as an assistant lecturer in Edinburgh. He specializes in Victorian fiction, 20th century literature, and the history of publishing. He is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College, London and is currently teaching at the California Institute of Technology. He writes for The Guardian and is a well-known literary reviewer.
He is the author of more than 20 books including Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide, The Boy Who Loved Books, Curiosities of Literature, 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, and Magic Moments: Life-Changing Encounters with Books, Film, Music. He is also the co-author, with Stephen Fender, of Love, Sex, Death and Words: Tales from a Year in Literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Presented as an idiosyncratic history of fiction in English, this covers novels from the seventeenth century to the present day. Sutherland, a well-known critic and professor of modern English literature at University College-London, has selected 294 authors representing a broad range of fiction genres and cheerfully declares that, in so doing, he has deliberately omitted many worthy writers in order to include often overlooked names that have had a lasting impact and who have frequently led lives as interesting as those of their characters. Writers as diverse as V. C. Andrews, Louis L'Amour, J. M. Barrie, and Stephen King appear along with more conventional selections, such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Mark Twain. Written in an engaging manner with clear language, entries range in length from one to five pages and are appended with the author's full name, a must-read text, and a go-to biographical reference for readers. Articles are arranged in chronological order by birth year, opening with John Bunyan (b. 1628), and concluding with Rana Dasgupta (b. 1971). Some authors are presented in groupings of two or three; the Bronte siblings are covered in one entry, while F. Scott Fitzgerald appears twice, with Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. A comprehensive index of persons named is included. Recommended for students and general audiences fiction fans will appreciate seeing this in the circulating stacks.--Szwarek, Magan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Back Stories Many novelists don't have to look far for inspiration, John Sutherland writes. LIVES OF THE NOVELISTS A History of Fiction in 294 Lives. By John Sutherland. 818 pp. Yale University Press. $39.95. IN his "Lives of the Poets," Samuel Johnson saw no necessary alignment between a writer's life and work. A finicky Cambridge don like Thomas Gray, who indulged in the "fantastic foppery" that he could write only "at certain times, or at happy moments," could sit down at a happy moment and compose his sad elegy on the plight of the rural poor, who lived and died "far from the madding crowd." Despite his dislike of Gray, Dr. Johnson wrote of the poem, "I rejoice to concur, with the common reader." John Sutherland, in his immensely long but fleet-footed "Lives of the Novelists," takes the opposite view. "What I've written has been sustained," he observes, "by the belief that literary life and work are inseparable and mutually illuminating." Sutherland neglects to explain why Johnson "would have scorned the worthwhileness of any such project for novelists." Was it because Johnson (whose lone novel, "The History of Rasselas" was written "in the evenings of one week") would have considered this upstart literary form unworthy of serious attention? He would not have been pleased, in any case, with Sutherland's curiosity about the "fetters and handcuffs" Johnson reportedly enjoyed, perhaps in the bedroom. "Keyholes onto the lives of novelists are, sometimes, irresistible," Sutherland confesses in his entry on Ian McEwan, "however one hates oneself for peeking through them." For Sutherland, what makes life and work "inseparable" for many novelists is early trauma that spurs the creative imagination. He appears to embrace Edmund Wilson's argument in "The Wound and the Bow" that "superior strength" is "inseparable from disability" and disaster of various kinds. Dickens (a prime example for Wilson as well) was farmed out at age 12 to work in a shoe-blacking factory, an experience he described as the "secret agony of my soul" and memorialized in the endangered children who populate his novels. Hawthorne may have perpetrated incest on a sister before spreading the theme in his fiction. Virginia Woolf may have suffered it from a half brother, allowing critics to read her work as a response to the "male-made mess" of the world. After doctors told him he had a brain tumor, Anthony Burgess hurriedly embarked on a sequence of "Damoclean" novels, including "A Clockwork Orange," only to find that the diagnosis was a false alarm. Accidents dictate much in Sutherland's lives. Lightning struck dead a boyhood acquaintance of Paul Auster's on a camping trip, giving him his master theme of "how fragile and fluky the world is." Humbert Humbert lost his mother to "picnic, lightning" ; Nabokov's own "idyllic" youth was shattered by the Russian Revolution. Poor Dick Francis was leading the field on Devon Loch for the queen mother in the Grand National when his horse collapsed a few yards short of the finish line. Divine intervention, to convert a first-class jockey into a first-class writer of thrillers set at the racetrack? Not at all. "The most likely explanation" seems to have been a case of gas that "was so explosive as to prostrate the unluckily flatulent beast." For Sutherland, an Englishman who lived and taught for many years in Southern California, America seems particularly rife in trauma, hence ripe for novels. Like many non-natives, he views this country as the land of Buffalo Bill (see the entry on Prentiss Ingraham) and Bonnie and Clyde (see Elmore Leonard). The appropriate vehicle for what he melodramatically calls "the ineradicable violence in the American soul," a notion borrowed from D. H. Lawrence that Sutherland applies to Michael Crichton, of all writers, is the thriller in its various incarnations. The "genre genius" Jim Thompson ("The Grifters") acquired his "grittily disillusioned view of life" as a bellhop in a Texas hotel during Prohibition and suffered, at age 18, "a complete nervous collapse, pulmonary tuberculosis and delirium tremens." Yet that master of violence Elmore Leonard, "the greatest American novelist never to be mentioned in the same breath as 'Nobel Prize,'" grew up in a "wholly uncriminal, mildly bookish" household. Sutherland's heroes are authors like these, who raised genre writing to the "levels of literary respectability." "Good trash," a phrase he borrows from the spy novelist Eric Ambler, is his highest praise. Sutherland does a shabbier job with Americans who did land the Nobel, allotting too much space to the protest when Toni Morrison's "Beloved" failed to win the National Book Award and giving sustained attention to "Soldiers' Pay" while ignoring the books that made Faulkner perhaps our greatest 20th-century novelist. Hemingway receives several mentions for a single story, "The Killers," which inspired a thousand other hardboiled thrillers. "Lives of the Novelists" is much too whimsically selective to serve as a reliable reference, although the attentive reader will no longer confuse Alistair Maclean ("The Guns of Navarone") with Alistair MacLeod ("No Great Mischief"). The book appears to be more a compendium of reviews, of writers "who have come my way over a long reading career," than a rigorously conceived assessment of the rise of the novel from Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" ("about a man that left his family, it didn't say why," in Huck Finn's summary) and Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" to its current shifting shapes at the hands of Salman Rushdie and Alice Sebold. The list of notable American novelists not accorded an entry in Sutherland's pages is long: Harriet Beecher Stowe (mentioned as a possible ancestor of Patricia Cornwell, who does get her own entry), Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and so on. Sutherland's book offers, as compensation, enthusiastic considerations of books the "common reader" might want to take a gamble on. If Charles Willeford's "Miami Blues" is "among the best things ever done" in crime fiction, it might be perfect for the beach. If P.D. James's "Original Sin" is really (in Ruth Rendell's judgment, endorsed by Sutherland) "the 'Middlemarch' of crime novels," it might be high time to read it. Then again, it might be high time to reread "Middlemarch." Like the masters of pulp memorialized in this bighearted book, Sutherland is something of a genre writer himself. He has a special fondness for Poe, the great inventor of fast-paced plots, who squeaks in on the basis of "one so-called novel" and who dashed off short stories, poems and reviews "like a writing Galling gun." In Sutherland's 294 sprints over the twin hurdles of life and work, he revels in the short take, the darting, sonnet-like in-andout, the lightning shifts and the abrupt and fitting close. His epitaph for Willeford could stand for many of the authors, famous and obscure, for whom he finds a place on the shelf: "A hell of a lot better writer than you might think." Keyholes, Sutherland admits, 'are, sometimes, irresistible, however one hates oneself for peeking through them.' Christopher Benfey, Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke, is the author, most recently, of a family memoir, "Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay."
Choice Review
That Sutherland (University College London, UK) has roots in 19th-century fiction is evident in this volume of biographical essays; approximately half the entries are Victorian era, with nearly the same for 20th-century novelists. The few remaining slots belong to 17th- and 18th-century novelists. Most of the authors are British or American, with a smattering from the Commonwealth and beyond. Inclusion is admittedly idiosyncratic, ranging from the obvious (Defoe, Austen, Trollope, Steinbeck, Coetzee) to the niche or unknown (Catherine Cookson, Vernor Vinge, Guillermo Cabrera Infante). Readers looking for comprehensive coverage will not find that; they may, however, discover unfamiliar writers to pursue. Entries are chronological by birth year, run two or three pages, and include references to standard biographical sources and Sutherland's choice of "must-read texts." The name-only index is useful for finding main entries and for mentions of other personalities. For example, Oscar Wilde is mentioned in 22 entries but does not have an entry himself. Celebrity sightings range from the historical (Charles Lindbergh, Timothy McVeigh, Monica Lewinski [sic]) to actors in screen versions of the novels (Errol Flynn, Renee Zellweger). Not a reference book in any traditional sense, this is a volume for perusal and enjoyable home reading. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. H. C. Williams University of Washington
Library Journal Review
Sutherland's title plays off of Samuel Johnson's The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations of Their Works (1779-81), thereby establishing Sutherland's presumptuousness at the outset. This should be titled Riffs on the Lives of Assorted Novelists. Sutherland (Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, University Coll. London) riffs on novelists from the usual canonical crowd but also includes lesser knowns and recent pop culture phenoms such as Patricia Cornwell and Stephen King. He proceeds chronologically by date of birth, from John Bunyan to Rana Dasgupta, seeming to choose at whim (e.g., he includes Marilyn French but not Erica Jong). With each piece, averaging three or four pages, he dives right in, no formula at the start by which he establishes basic facts, although notations at the end include reference to exactly one major work and one biographical study-on this score the book is particularly unhelpful to students. By his approach, when an essay avoids some facts, it's not clear whether Sutherland chose to exclude them or is ignorant. Some entries (e.g., Melville, Salinger) incorporate errors of detail. When writing on someone Sutherland evidently knows well, the results are wonderful, e.g. Daniel Defoe or Laurence Sterne (excluding the misplaced modifier: "Physically frail, the army was out of the question"). For some authors (e.g., Hawthorne or Arnold Bennett), his coverage has a perplexingly sexual focus. Verdict Most readers will venture here for particular novelists. If they're lucky enough to catch Sutherland at his authoritative best, that's great (but why no bibliography or endnotes?). If not, will they know to search elsewhere?-Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
