Writers and Personality

In this concise but pointed volume of ruminations on writers, literary icon Louis Auchincloss considers the inextricable link between a writer's personality and the fiction he or she creates. The acclaimed novelist examines the works of two dozen writers from his canon of personal favorites, ranging from the seventeenth century's Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine to the twentieth century's E. M. Forster and Ernest Hemingway. Auchincloss suggests that great art flows from the expression of a writer's unique personality--and that, in keeping with this, the stifling of the personal self, as in the case of Anne Brontë, may forestall consummate artistic achievement.

Taking an expansive approach to the notion of personality, Auchincloss provides succint assessments of the lives, temperaments, obsessions, and interests of his subjects and explores how their personalities materialize in the fiction they produce. In lively prose, Auchincloss's observations offer an expanded appreciation of these vaunted writers and of the acuity that has earned the author his dedicated following.

The featured writers are Henry Adams, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Willa Cather, Pierre Corneille, Theodore Dreiser, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, E. M. Forster, Anatole France, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, John P. Marquand, George Meredith, Prosper Merimée, Marcel Proust, Jean Racine, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Edith Wharton.