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In this splendid group portrait, David Laskin tells the stories of four friendships that helped to define the course of American literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Written with uncommon grace and insight, A Common Life is a fascinating narrative of the entanglements of art and life, and an illuminating study of the nature of friendship itself. In each of these pairings, the two writers met at a critical turning point in their lives and careers, and the friendship profoundly affected the course of both. The friendships came as great shafts of light, throwing open new possibilities and relieving the numbing isolation of American literary life. The "shock of recognition" that passed between Melville and Hawthorne when they met in the Berkshires in 1850 changed the course of Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Edith Wharton was nearly forty, rich, and unhappily married when she met the sixty-year-old Henry James in London in 1903. His thunderous advice to "Do New York!" steered her toward her first triumph with The House of Mirth. . Each friendship sprang from sha

Author

Laskin, David

Publisher

Simon & Schuster, Incorporated

Published

1994

Language

EN

ISBN

9780671724191

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Memoir, Biography

Updated

2026-03-24