UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

A Literary Life Reconsidered

Book Jacket: "Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance" by K. Benesch

William H. Pritchard
Second edition with a new preface

Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review

Although this book does not attempt to revive the image of Frost as a benign, white-haired sage, it does present him in a strikingly different light than did Lawrance Thompson's controversial three-volume biography. William H. Pritchard sees Frost whole, demonstrating the complex interaction between the poet's life and work.

Based not only on the poetry, but on letters, notebooks, recorded interviews, and public appearances as well, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered examines the most interesting and significant aspects of Frost's life and poetry and offers an attentive, sensitive portrait of an artist whose critical reputation continues to grow.

"This deft, concise, readable literary life moves between its two genres—biography and criticism—with confidence and poise....[It is] a compact, sympathetic account of Frost's life as a poet, one that puts the biographical emphasis where it belongs, on Frost's powerful and tenacious art."

New York Times Book Review

"Alert, skeptical, generous and shrewd—on the work and on the life."

Washington Post Book World

"Sensitive, well balanced and useful....Pritchard's study markedly contributes to our appreciation of the nuances of Frost's poetry."

Boston Globe

"Pritchard's short biography is valuable precisely because it suggests the complicated and ambiguous nature of the man—and, in the process, evokes the troubled and ambivalent nature of the poetry itself."

(London) Sunday Times

William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College, where he has taught for more than forty years. Among his many books are biographical critical studies of Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, and John Updike.

Literary Studies
312 pp., 17 illus.
LC 92-36872
$24.95s, ISBN 0-87023-838-8
1993

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