Full name: Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Author: Leo Damrosch Year: 2013 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Award winners, Biographies, Non Fiction, History Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780300164992 0300164998

Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver's Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions? In this deeply researched biography, Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift's life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swift's parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift's public version of his life--the one accepted until recently--was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets. Assembling suggestive clues, Damrosch re-narrates the events of Swift's life while making vivid the sights, sounds, and smells of his English and Irish surroundings.Through his own words and those of a wide circle of friends, a complex Swift emerges: a restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters. Similar books: Mad World by Paula Byrne Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee Some Sort of Epic Grandeur by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli Uncle Mame by Eric Myers Invisible Writer by Greg Johnson Mary Renault by David Sweetman Flannery by Brad Gooch May Sarton by Margot Peters Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster In Search of J.D. Salinger by Ian Hamilton Paul Newman by Shawn Levy Louisa May Alcott by Martha Saxton Sidetracks by Richard Holmes Alice James by Jean Strouse Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee Zeitoun by Dave Eggers There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz Rise to Greatness by David Von Drehle With Malice Toward None by Stephen B. Oates One Shot at Forever by Chris Ballard