Defoe on Sheppard and Wild
Author(s): Daniel Defoe, edited by Richard Holmes
Part of a radical new series -- edited by Richard Holmes -- that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive. In this pioneering series, Richard Holmes, the world's leading Romantic biographer, sets out to recover the great forgotten tradition of English biographical writing. 'I have had no time for dusty tomes,' writes Holmes, 'I have looked for brevity, intelligence and style. Above all, I have sought out great biographical writers: Biographers with passion, biographers who have found a way to the heart and soul of a memorable subject. 'Jack Sheppard was an eighteenth-century Houdini -- a handsome young escape artist who broke out of his cell on Newgate's grim Death Row three times. Jonathan Wild was the infamous Thief-Taker General who helped to recapture him and many other criminals, only to be tried and executed himself for racketeering, among scenes of mayhem at Tyburn. Daniel Defoe, the master of adventure fiction, was fascinated by 'True Confessions' and the workings of the criminal personality (including its daring, its stoicism and its humour). He was the first to re-tell
Product Information
Richard Holmes is our greatest living biographer. His biography of Shelley won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Footsteps (1985) revolutionized the way biography was thought about and written. The first part of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. His portrait of the friendship between Dr Johnson and Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. The concluding volume of his Coleridge biography won the Duff Cooper Prize and the William Heinemann award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy, and lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.
General Fields
- :
- : HarperCollins Publishers
- : HarperPerennial
- : 0.118
- : 29 May 2003
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : 122
- : 364.1092
- : Paperback
- : Daniel Defoe, edited by Richard Holmes