Il labirinto

Libri dimenticati:Il bambino che guardava le donne

Il protagonista di questo libro di Pansa è un bambino,Giuseppe,testimone del difficile ed improbabile amore fra un ebreo ex partigiano e Carmen,ex ausiliaria delle RSI.
E' tutto da leggere!

Frase del giorno

Per un momento le bugie diventano verità

Scrittori dimenticati:Robert Southey

Robert Southey was expelled from Westminster School for criticising the practice of flogging in the school magazine. This incident helped to fire his youthful revolutionary ideals, which found expression a few years later in his first long poem Joan of Arc (1796). He went to Balliol College, Oxford, but failed to gain a degree; his attention was taken up by a new friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his ideas about 'pantisocracy', a scheme to set up a utopian community in America. Southey and Coleridge married two sisters, Edith and Sara Fricker. Though there was some ill-feeling over the abandonment of pantisocracy, the two men remained friends.

By this time Southey had resolved to make his living as a writer. In 1797 he was already printing the second edition of his Poems, and a trip to the Continent resulted in the publication of Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal. In this year he also began to receive an annual sum of £160 from his friend Charles Wynn; this was replaced in 1807 by a government pension for the same amount.

Southey and his family moved into Greta Hall, Keswick, in 1803, where he lived for the rest of his life. They shared the house with the Coleridges, and Southey also got to know William and Dorothy Wordsworth, who lived nearby. When Coleridge went to Malta in 1804 Southey worked extremely hard to provide for both families.

As he grew older, Southey seemed increasingly a part of the Establishment he had sought to rebel against in his pantisocratic days. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, he became disillusioned by the progress of the French Revolution, and he was criticised as a political turncoat by the younger generation of Romantic writers, notably in Byron's Don Juan. He became Poet Laureate in 1813, a responsibility he later came to dislike.

Though he has been subject to some neglect since his death, Southey was an influential writer in his own day, and even his enemies, like Byron and Hazlitt, professed admiration for his prose style. His later years were clouded by his wife's madness and death in 1837, and his own deteriorating mental and physical health.

Scritotri dimenticati:Hans Hellmut Kirst

Scrittore tedesco (Osterode, Prussia Orientale, 1914 - Brema 1989), autore di una serie di romanzi di facile accessibilità, attenti alle tensioni del mondo attuale ma non privi di una luce di ottimismo. Da ricordare: Aufruhr in einer kleinen Stadt (1949); Sagten Sie Gerechtigkeit, Captain? (1952); Trilogie 08/15 (il suo maggior successo, 1954-55, cui è seguito 08/15 heute, 1963); Fabrik der Offiziere (1960); Die Nacht der Generale (1962); Kein Vaterland. Roman aus unseren tagen (1968); Der Nachkriegssieger (1979); Der unheimliche Mann Gottes (1987).

Scrittrici dimenticate:Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in the village of South Berwick, Maine, on Sept. 3, 1849. Because she suffered from arthritis and could not attend school regularly, her formal education at Berwick Academy was intermittent. Her father, a distinguished obstetrician, encouraged her to read widely in his library, and she accompanied him on his visits to patients in the countryside. She read the major English and European writers and also important American authors, such as Emerson, Lowell, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Talks with her father about the country, the seacoast and his patients' lives and characters, and talks with the patients in their homes saturated the budding author with firsthand information. Her adoration of her father was so strong, apparently, it prevented her from ever falling in love.

Jewett's first story was published in 1868, when she was 19, and the next year another story initiated her long association with the Atlantic Monthly and other prestigious magazines. William Dean Howells, an editor of the Atlantic, encouraged her to collect several sketches and connect them with a fictional framework. These became the novel Deephaven (1877). Outstanding collections of stories and sketches followed: Old Friends and New (1879), Country By-ways (1881), A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), and A Native of Winby and Other Tales (1893). At intervals Jewett wrote successful books for children, including Play Days (1878), The Story of the Normans (1887), and Betty Leicester (1890). Her novels included A Country Doctor (1884), A Marsh Island (1885), and the book generally considered to be her masterpiece, The Country of Pointed Firs (1896).

Jewett's best fiction portrayed the area surrounding and including the town of her birth and childhood, a home to which she always returned after her wide-ranging travels and where she died on June 24, 1909. "My local attachments," she wrote, "are stronger than any cat's that ever mewed." In the state of Maine the end of the importance of clipper ships had led to the abandonment of shipyards and wharves. Villages much like South Berwick were almost deserted by the men and by the young of both sexes, leaving as inhabitants mostly older women. Jewett wrote about this dying world and the isolated or the elderly who find deep meanings in local customs and private experiences. She wrote realistically but gently, creating what many critics regard as the best fictional narratives to come out of New England during a period when regional writing flourished there.