Lewis Carroll: A Biography

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A.A. Knopf, 1995 - Biography & Autobiography - 577 pages
Who was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the pioneer photographer, Oxford don, and mathematician who, writing as Lewis Carroll, gave the world the Jabberwock, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red Queen, the Hatter, the March Hare, and an unforgettable tea party? In this elegant, affectionate biography, Morton N. Cohen brings his singular expertise - gained from some thirty years' scholarship on Carroll as well as from special access to the Dodgson family documents - to the riddle of the quiet, stammering man who liberated children's books from the moralists and whose imagination brought forth some of the funniest nonsense, wildest characters, and most extraordinary cultural icons of modern times. What emerges is both an extraordinary work of scholarship and a portrait that is filled with admiration for Carroll's accomplishment, delight in his playfulness and charm, and sympathy for the self-reproach and emotional turbulence that underlay his apparently placid existence. A major literary biography.

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Contents

Beginnings
3
Cap and Gown
29
The Don the Dean and His Daughter
57
Copyright

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About the author (1995)

Morton Norton Cohen was born on a farm in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on February 27, 1921. He graduated from what is now Tufts University before receiving a doctorate in English at Columbia University. He taught at West Virginia University, Syracuse University, Rutgers University, City College of New York, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was a scholar of Victorian literature who spent much of his career editing the letters and writing the definitive biography of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson as known as Lewis Carroll. His books included Rider Haggard: His Life and Works, The Search for Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll: A Biography, and Lewis Carroll and Alice, 1832-1982. He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in England in 1996. He died on June 12, 2017 at the age of 96.

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