Lewis Carroll - by Morton N Cohen (Paperback)

About the Book

Under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson became a legend for his children's books, which broke the constraints of Victorian moralism. Thirty years in the writing and drawn from a voluminous fund of letters and diaries, this exemplary biography conveys both the imaginative fancy and human complexity of the creator of Alice in Wonderland. Photos.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Abraham Cohen (1887-1957) was the editor of the Soncino Books of the Bible and participated in the Soncino translation of the Talmud and Midrash. Cohen is the author of Everyman's Talmud The Major Teachings of the Rabbinic Sages, The Parting of the Ways: Judaism and the Rise of Christianity, and The Psalms.