The first critical
biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary
figures.
Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major
cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic,
journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friend of the
best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist
periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes,
Brodsky, Ginsberg-a "who's who" of contemporary
literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the
emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining moments:
the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism;
World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam
protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise
of America as a cultural and political force.
As David Leeming's fascinating biography
demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and
flux of the century in which he lived: his sexual ambivalence, his
famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars,
the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this
comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on
modernity itself.
Stephen
Spender : A Life in Modernism 
