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Olaf Stapledon : Speaking for the Future by Robert Crossley (1994, Hardcover)
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherSyracuse University Press
ISBN-100815602812
ISBN-139780815602811
eBay Product ID (ePID)1029589
Product Key Features
Book TitleOlaf Stapledon : Speaking for the Future
Number of Pages494 Pages
LanguageEnglish
TopicScience Fiction & Fantasy, Literary
Publication Year1994
IllustratorYes
GenreLiterary Criticism, Biography & Autobiography
AuthorRobert Crossley
Book SeriesUtopianism and Communitarianism Ser.
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.3 in
Item Weight29 Oz
Item Length9.2 in
Item Width6.2 in
Additional Product Features
LCCN93-038221
ReviewsThough more than sixty years have passed, I can still visualize the very shelf in the Minehead Public Library where I discovered Olaf Stapldon's Last and First Men . No other book had a greater influence on my life.
Dewey Edition20
Dewey Decimal823/.912 B
SynopsisWilliam Olaf Stapledon is best remembered for the extraordinary works of speculative fiction he published between 1930 and 1950. As a novelist, he was known as the spokesman for the Age of Einstein and has influenced writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. Clarke, and Doris Lessing. This biography is the first to draw on a vast body of unpublished and private documents--interviews, correspondence, archival material, and papers in private hands--to reveal fully the internal struggles that shaped Stapledon's life and reclaim for public attention a distinctive voice of the modern era. Late in his life in an unpublished "letter to the future" Stapledon unwittingly provided the rationale for his biography: "It is just possible that my very obscurity may fit me to speak more faithfully for my period than any of its great unique personalities. A pacifist in World War I, an advocate of European unity and world government, one of the first teachers in the Workers' Educational Association, and an early protestor against apartheid, Stapledon turned utopian beliefs into practical politics. With roots in the shipping worlds of Devon, Liverpool, and the Suez Canal, he was transformed from a self-described provincial on the margins of English literary and political life into a visionary idealist who attracted the attention of scientists, journalists, and novelists, and, given his left-wing political affiliations, even the F.B.I. Stapledon's novels-- Last and First Men, Star Maker, Odd John, and Sirius --have gathered a passionate following, and they have seldom been out of print in the last twenty-five years. But the personal experiences and political commitments that shaped this creative work have, until now, barely been known. Robert Crossley's work reveals how, in public and in private, in his social activism as in his fiction, Olaf Stapledon embodied many of the modern era's anxieties and hopes that allow his works to continue to speak to and for the future.
LC Classification NumberPR6037.T18Z6 1994
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