Home Books Links Dean King ... Ordering Patrick O'Brian
A Life Revealed by Dean King Published by Henry Holt and Company
Read Chapter One "It is only in knowing the truth about O'Brian's life that we can fully grasp the magnitude and nature of his accomplishment.... His genius was largely that he had connected with his 'different self' to create from disappointing realityquite magicallyextraordinary fiction, fiction that, for so many of us, embodies the sheer joy of reading.
From the Introduction In 1991, when The New York Times Book Review proclaimed Patrick O'Brian the writer of "the greatest historical novels ever written," making him an overnight sensation in the United States, O'Brian was already in his mid-seventies and had already had two distinct and remarkable writing careers. In less than a decade, O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, ultimately twenty novels strong, became an unprecedented literary juggernaut, with legions of devoted fans around America and around the world. With O'Brian's death in January 2000, curiosity about the carefully guarded secrets of his life has peaked. Here, Dean King tells the story of a man, an artist and an intellectual, born Richard Patrick Russ, who first achieves literary recognition as an adolescent, when he publishes a series of popular adventure stories. After the Second World War, he emerges as Patrick O'Brian, a writer of dark, sometimes tortured short stories and highly literary novels. He enjoys success as a translator, even as a biographer. Slowly, the O'Brian persona, forged in his own imagination and refined by years of rumor and speculation, takes form, until his ultimate triumphant arrival as a masterful historical novelist and chronicler of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. | |
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