A major new biography on an increasingly important American literary icon. Having spoken with people close to Bukowski, and with a full examination of Bukowski's extensive writings, Barry Miles has written the definitive story of the man dubbed the 'laureate of American low-life'.

Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, 'The Talented Mr Ripley' and 'Strangers on a Train', Patricia Highsmith is lauded as one of the great modern writers. The triangular relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality - by parts self-destructive and malicious - and her fiction has been largely avoided by other biographers. She was openly lesbian and would, in modern times, be venerated as a radical...

The world of Raymond Chandler is shrouded in secrets and half-truths as deep and deceptive as anything in his magisterial novels. This biography demonstrates Chandler's restless private life, exploring his depressive and obsessive attitude toward his craft, his infidelity, alcoholism and suicidal tendencies.

Since his death in 1969, the legend of Jack Kerouac, 'King of the Beats', has continued to grow. Clark's biography reveals the essential Kerouac, often through his own words and writings.

Norman Mailer was one of the most famous writers of his generation. People who had never read a word that he wrote knew who he was because of his fame as a novelist or journalist, or his notoriety because of his womanising, his rivalries with other writers, his appearances on television, his political outspokenness and his prominence as a leading intellectual of his era. A provocative chronicler of the second half of the 20th century, both as a journalist...

Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people, this is a global cultural event: the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the 20th century. For more than 50 years, the ever elusive author of 'The Catcher in the Rye' has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet Salinger has remained, astonishingly,...

As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means. Ranging from the personal - her portrait of the three men she called her fathers; unexpectedly falling into a life-changing friendship with Tom Hanks; how to answer when someone asks why you don't have children...

With poetic sensibility, tireless research, and dazzling writing, Hendrickson focuses on the period from 1934 to 1961, from the pinnacle of Hemingway's fame to his suicide. He shows the close connection between Hemingway's life and the words that would wind up on the pages of his books.

'In the first decade of the twentiety century, it was not a good time to be born black, or woman, in America'. So begins this stunning portrait of Vivian Baxter Johnson: the first black woman officer in the Merchant Marines, purveyor of a gambling business and rooming house, and mother to one of our most cherished literary treasures.

'A Widow's Story' illuminates one woman's struggle to understand a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of 'death duties,' and the solace of friendship.