Jonathan Swift
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
His Life and His World
Leo Damrosch
“Superb. . . . Damrosch’s outstanding book has raised Swift’s provocative genius to life.”—Jeffrey Collins, Wall Street Journal
Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?
In this deeply researched biography, Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift’s life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swift’s parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift’s public version of his life—the one accepted until recently—was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets.
Assembling suggestive clues, Damrosch re-narrates the events of Swift’s life while making vivid the sights, sounds, and smells of his English and Irish surroundings.Through his own words and those of a wide circle of friends, a complex Swift emerges: a restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters.
“[Damrosch] writes elegantly, has exactly the right mix of empathy and detachment, and is admirably open-minded in his approach to complex evidence – some of it the product of very new scholarship. . . this will be the definitive life of Swift for years to come.”—Jonathan Bate, New Statesman
"Immensely enjoyable and fast-paced."—Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club
This “lively new biography” by “the immensely talented biographer Leo Damrosch” is “piercingly intelligent . . . [and] will surely be the definitive one-volume Swift biography of our time.”—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
“We live in an age when we sorely need a Swift; instead we have Jon Stewart. Modest recompense is to be found in Leo Damrosch’s new life of Swift.”—Lucas Wittmann, The Daily Beast
“Leo Damrosch's. . . wonderful and absorbing biography of Swift . . [is] by far the most balanced, nuanced and persuasive biography of Swift so far. Damrosch is a fine scholar who knows Swift’s works and his age very well indeed. . .It should remind the reader what a wonderful writer Swift is and send us enthusiastically back to the texts – something few biographies ever succeed in doing.”—Andrew Carpenter, Irish Times
'Leo Damrosch has written a conscientious and worthy book, full of meat and handsomely illustrated.'—Paul Johnson, Literary Review
“Damrosch invites other scholars into the pages of his book….and he also animates his readers by enlisting them in the discussion.”—Frances Ferguson, Studies in English Literature
A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
Publication Date: August 5, 2014
94 b/w illus.