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A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendships and Influence
David Laskin shares the stories of four friendships that have defined the course of American Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, and Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
An illuminating study of the nature of friendship itself, A Common Life is a fascinating narrative of the entanglements of art and life.
In each of the friendships that Laskin portrays, he demonstrates how the two writers met at a critical turning point in their lives and careers and how they profoundly affected the course of both.
“A delightful, unusual and often illuminating study of a kind of influences wrought on eight famous American writers by their intimate friendships with each other.” — Louis Auchincloss
An illuminating study of the nature of friendship itself, A Common Life is a fascinating narrative of the entanglements of art and life.
In each of the friendships that Laskin portrays, he demonstrates how the two writers met at a critical turning point in their lives and careers and how they profoundly affected the course of both.
“A delightful, unusual and often illuminating study of a kind of influences wrought on eight famous American writers by their intimate friendships with each other.” — Louis Auchincloss
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
56 people want to read
About the author
David Laskin
25 books110 followersBorn in Brooklyn and raised in Great Neck, New York, I grew up hearing stories that my immigrant Jewish grandparents told about the “old country” (Russia) that they left at the turn of the last century. When I was a teenager, my mother’s parents began making yearly trips to visit our relatives in Israel, and stories about the Israeli family sifted down to me as well. What I never heard growing up was that a third branch of the family had remained behind in the old country – and that all of them perished in the Holocaust. These are three branches whose intertwined stories I tell in THE FAMILY: THREE JOURNEYS INTO THE HEART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
An avid reader for as long as I remember, I graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a degree in history and literature and went on to New College, Oxford, where I received an MA in English in 1977. After a brief stint in book publishing, I launched my career as a freelance writer. In recent years, I have been writing suspense-driven narrative non-fiction about the lives of people caught up in events beyond their control, be it catastrophic weather, war, or genocide. My 2004 book The Children’s Blizzard, a national bestseller, won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award. The Long Way Home (2010) also won the Washington State Book Award.
I write frequently for the New York Times Travel Section, and I have also published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times and Seattle Metropolitan.
When I’m not writing or traveling for research, I am usually outdoors trying to tame our large unruly garden north of Seattle, romping with our unruly Labrador retriever pup Patrick, skiing in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, or hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. My wife, Kate O’Neill, and I have raised three wonderful daughters – all grown now and embarked on fascinating lives of their own.
An avid reader for as long as I remember, I graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a degree in history and literature and went on to New College, Oxford, where I received an MA in English in 1977. After a brief stint in book publishing, I launched my career as a freelance writer. In recent years, I have been writing suspense-driven narrative non-fiction about the lives of people caught up in events beyond their control, be it catastrophic weather, war, or genocide. My 2004 book The Children’s Blizzard, a national bestseller, won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award. The Long Way Home (2010) also won the Washington State Book Award.
I write frequently for the New York Times Travel Section, and I have also published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times and Seattle Metropolitan.
When I’m not writing or traveling for research, I am usually outdoors trying to tame our large unruly garden north of Seattle, romping with our unruly Labrador retriever pup Patrick, skiing in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, or hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. My wife, Kate O’Neill, and I have raised three wonderful daughters – all grown now and embarked on fascinating lives of their own.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 17, 2012
Laskin has written a book of criticism and biography centered around 4 important friendships: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton and Henry James, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. That these friendships have influence upon the individuals of each pair there's no doubt. Perhaps this is most famously demonstrated in Melville's changing the elemental character of Ahab after he met the brooding, introspective Hawthorne, turning Moby-Dick on a more philosophical spit and therefore heavily influencing all of literature. Laskin tries to show how these relationships following upon each other influenced those later. In this he's less successful and sometimes unclear, espccially in the cases of Wharton-James and Welty-Porter. I even failed to see what Wharton and James had in common other than their writing and the friendship itself. Porter's primary influence on Welty seemed to be her promoting Welty's first book of stories, unless you consider how Porter's slack work ethic affected her friend when they were visiting. The author has trouble linking the 4 relationships in a common thread.
What he doesn't have trouble with is the critical appraisal of the works of these eight people within the framework of their individual attachments. He's generous and insightful with his criticism. However, other than the influence of Hawthorne's writing on Melville's, the work of the other 3 pairings, to me, show how divergent their work was.
The longer you read in the book, the closer you come to the present, the more insight Laskin is able to apply to his subjects. He's best on the bond between 2 of the finest poets of the 20th century, Lowell and Bishop. He makes clear that Lowell's relationship with her was responsible for the impulse to his great poetry. I don't recall Laskin using the word muse, but it hangs in the air as you read. Other than the suspected homoerotic feelings of Melville for Hawthorne, the Bishop-Lowell friendship was the only one with romantic overtones. Laskin leavens their story with the idea that they were romantically and sexually attracted to each other but were aware of the difficulties their individual flaws--her alcoholism, his madness--would bring to such a relationship. Instead Lowell found stability with Elizabeth Hardwick, Bishop a measure of sobriety and love with Lota de Macedo Soares in Brazil.
Theirs is the longest account and the most detailed. It's probably the best-known, too, but Laskin does a good job of simmering the brew down to its most essential flavors, allowing us to see what the long friendship contributed to their craft and to their own personal lives. Of the 3 20th century friendships, I feel theirs was the most important.
What he doesn't have trouble with is the critical appraisal of the works of these eight people within the framework of their individual attachments. He's generous and insightful with his criticism. However, other than the influence of Hawthorne's writing on Melville's, the work of the other 3 pairings, to me, show how divergent their work was.
The longer you read in the book, the closer you come to the present, the more insight Laskin is able to apply to his subjects. He's best on the bond between 2 of the finest poets of the 20th century, Lowell and Bishop. He makes clear that Lowell's relationship with her was responsible for the impulse to his great poetry. I don't recall Laskin using the word muse, but it hangs in the air as you read. Other than the suspected homoerotic feelings of Melville for Hawthorne, the Bishop-Lowell friendship was the only one with romantic overtones. Laskin leavens their story with the idea that they were romantically and sexually attracted to each other but were aware of the difficulties their individual flaws--her alcoholism, his madness--would bring to such a relationship. Instead Lowell found stability with Elizabeth Hardwick, Bishop a measure of sobriety and love with Lota de Macedo Soares in Brazil.
Theirs is the longest account and the most detailed. It's probably the best-known, too, but Laskin does a good job of simmering the brew down to its most essential flavors, allowing us to see what the long friendship contributed to their craft and to their own personal lives. Of the 3 20th century friendships, I feel theirs was the most important.
August 13, 2022
I love this book. Bios are great, writers' bios are greater and this one is one of the greatest! I started to read it while at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, NS and couldn't finish it before I left. I got an interlibrary loan so I could read the rest of it at home. Highly recommend it to one who likes literary bios.
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