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Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships
Richard Lingeman
#UA4752
Hardcover, 255 pages; 2006
$15.90
Were famous writers who were contemporaries friends or competitors? After all, writing seems to be inherently a solitary and self-absorbed occupation. Richard Lingeman has dug up the details of the relationships between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; Mark Twain and William Dean Howells; Henry James and Edith Wharton; Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett; Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway; and Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. The result is a richly varied and highly entertaining response. Friends, yes, and competitors, yes—but it's all so much more complicated than that. Not only are these relationships themselves intriguing, but the comparison between them provides dramatic contrast. And I for one am glad to get the straight story on the much-misquoted exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway about the difference between "the rich" and "you and me."
(EE)
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