FROM THE DUST JACKET: An enigma of 20th-century literature — a writer accorded great importance in his time, if less than in his own mind — is here explored by one of our most versatile men of letters ...

Joshua Slocum, born in Nova Scotia in 1844, ran off to sea to escape a cruel father at age 13. The boy signed on as a fishing schooner’s cook but was jettisoned to return home since he “couldn’t cook ...

What Geoffrey Wolff reveals is not only the hugely complicated man in full but also his rightful place in our contemporary attention — a portrait of the artist that illuminates both the process of ...

I grew up loving Joshua Slocum’s “Sailing Alone Around the World.” It was “Walden” without the training wheels. Whereas Thoreau made so much of his precious solitude in a shack only a couple of miles ...

Sign up for City Lights, our twice-weekly guide to arts and nightlife in the D.C. area. It lands in your inbox every Sunday and Thursday. In The Art of Burning ...

“I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston.” With these words, Capt.

is barely 200 pages, a surprisingly short take in an era of doorstop biographies. "I wanted it to be even shorter," Wolff said during a visit to Portland last week. "I'm tired of long, long ...

The title of this book by novelist, memoirist and biographer Geoffrey Wolff aptly presents the greatest challenge put to the author by his subject. John O'Hara, a Prohibition-era novelist and ...

The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara, by Geoffrey Wolff. Knopf. 400 pages. $30. John O’Hara was probably the 20th century’s most prolific serious, good, underappreciated-by-his-peers ...

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