Wilkie Collins A Brief Life

✍ Scribed by Ackroyd, Peter

• Book ID: 110502136
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 8 MB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780385537391

✦ Synopsis

A gripping short biography of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White , two early masterpieces of mystery and detection.

Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely near-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colorful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was nonetheless a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women--and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, "the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists," from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame and his lifelong friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone --often called the first true detective novel--and the sensational The Woman in White , he produced an intriguing array of...