(His seventh book. It is the story of a love affair betwee...)
His seventh book. It is the story of a love affair between a middle-aged woman and Maija von Einzeedle, married, with two grown sons and the vigorous yet reclusive Anthony Hope-Harding, who has been sleeping with Maija's sister.
(This is a fascinating story of the Beaux-Arts Trio - Bern...)
This is a fascinating story of the Beaux-Arts Trio - Bernard Greenhouse, Isidore Cohen, & Menahem Pressler. Appendices include a discussion of the group's interpretative strategies on a specific piece of music - Beethoven's Opus 70, no. 1 In addition to the text, there are several pages of black & white photographs.
(The author describes his experiences traveling with his f...)
The author describes his experiences traveling with his family in the south of France and discusses the qualities of the region that have attracted writers and artists.
(These stories from the acclaimed author present episodes ...)
These stories from the acclaimed author present episodes from the lives of nine characters who represent diverse facets of the work and world of the writer.
(After assisting his cancer-stricken wife to commit suicid...)
After assisting his cancer-stricken wife to commit suicide, Dr. Peter Julius takes charge of a hospice, where several unexplained deaths inspire fearful questions about the doctor's motives.
(Twenty-five years ago, Paul Ballard was a young college p...)
Twenty-five years ago, Paul Ballard was a young college professor, and Elizabeth Sieverdsen was his adoring student. Now, he is a retired and reclusive man, and she is a recently divorced and conflicted woman. Their unexpected love affair ended in tragedy, but they are about to meet again for the first time, exposing old wounds and stirring new desires.
(Told in the alternating voices of a family who moves from...)
Told in the alternating voices of a family who moves from London to New York at the end of the Second World War, Nicholas Delbanco's memoiristic novel is a moving story about how a family of immigrants comes to terms with life in America. How does a German Jewish family from London blend a past filled with ancestral homes in Germany, relatives fleeing the Nazi regime, and an intellectual life in London with the strange shores of America where they emigrate in order to take advantage of the land of opportunity? How can one balance the romanticism of native land with a desire to fit into the new? How can one realize what is lost, and what is gained in the journey from England to America?
(Nicolas Delbanco explores the stories and techniques of t...)
Nicolas Delbanco explores the stories and techniques of twelve stylists, from Ernest Hemingway to Jamaica Kincaid, and encourages students to imitate the craft of these master storytellers as they hone their own fiction writing skills.
(It doesn't matter, really, if what we inherit is money or...)
It doesn't matter, really, if what we inherit is money or debt, a set of cats or cutlery or a portrait of grandfather Aaron. What matters is the way we deal with what's been left behind.
(Nicholas Delbanco - who, John Updike says, "wrestles with...)
Nicholas Delbanco - who, John Updike says, "wrestles with the abundance of his gifts as a novelist the way other men wrestle with their deficiencies" - ventures forth to discover and illuminate various writers and places. In this follow-up to his acclaimed The Lost Suitcase, Delbanco weaves varied reflections to reveal a singular understanding of the relationships among literature, the past, and the world around us.
Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson - the narrator of this novel and the Count’s fictional, last-surviving relative - is “haunted” by one of history’s most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.
(Nick Delbanco and Alan Cheuse have proven in their own te...)
Nick Delbanco and Alan Cheuse have proven in their own teaching that when you improve students’ ability and interest in reading, you will help them improve their writing. Literature: Craft and Voice is an innovative Introductory Literature program designed to engage students in the reading of Literature, all with a view to developing their reading, analytical, and written skills. Accompanied by, and integrated with, video interviews of dozens of living authors who are featured in the text, conducted by authors Nick Delbanco and Alan Cheuse specifically for use with their textbook, the book provides a living voice for the literature on the page and creates a link between the student and the authors of great works of literature.
(One of the country's leading literary scholars explores t...)
One of the country's leading literary scholars explores the fascinating question of why some people's creative talents flourish with age while others fade. America grows older yet stays focused on its young. Whatever hill we try to climb, we're "over" it by fifty and should that hill involve entertainment or athletics we're finished long before. And if younger is better, it doesn't appear that the youngest is best: we want our teachers, doctors, generals, and presidents to have reached a certain age.
(The Art of Youth is a moving inquiry into the nature of a...)
The Art of Youth is a moving inquiry into the nature of artistic prodigies who did their major work at an early age. Renowned novelist Nicholas Delbanco gives us a triptych of indelible portraits: the American writer Stephen Crane (immortalized by The Red Badge of Courage); British artist Dora Carrington (called “the most neglected serious painter of her time”); and the legendary composer George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess).
Dear Wizard: The Letters of Nicholas Delbanco and Jon Manchip White
(Dear Wizard is a carefully selected, highly crafted gathe...)
Dear Wizard is a carefully selected, highly crafted gathering of letters from over three decades of correspondence between authors Nicholas Delbanco and Jon Manchip White. This correspondence, in part a contest to outdo one another with exotic and outlandish letterhead, ranges in tone from carefree to grave and covers topics as diverse as the art and practice of writing, the state of the writer’s profession, and age, illness, love, and loss.
(The Years is about the passage of time: from youth to mid...)
The Years is about the passage of time: from youth to middle age to the winter of life. Forty years after their intense but doomed college romance, Lawrence and Hermia meet again on a Mediterranean cruise. They fall in love even more deeply, but being in their sixties, with plenty of baggage, they wonder if marriage is the right move. When Lawrence visits Hermia’s home on Cape Cod, she has one request: “Please stay.”
(A miscellany of sorts, preeminent author and critic Nicho...)
A miscellany of sorts, preeminent author and critic Nicholas Delbanco’s Curiouser and Curiouser attests to a lifelong interest in music and the visual arts as well as both “mere” and “sheer” literature.
Nicholas Delbanco is an American writer and language educator. He has published thirty books of fiction and non-fiction.
Background
Ethnicity:
Delbanco was born to German Jewish and Italian parents.
Nicholas Delbanco was born to Barbara (née Bernstein) and Kurt Delbanco on August 27, 1942, in London, England, the United Kingdom, at the height of the German Blitz, and his family did not depart for America until he was six, and he was not naturalized as an American citizen until he was eleven. It is not surprising that, though later he would anchor himself firmly in New England and particularly in Vermont, and more recently in Michigan.
Education
At Harward, Delbanco's Bachelor of Arts thesis was devoted to a joint study of Rilke and Heredia, two noteworthy wanderers, and the subject of his master's thesis at Columbia was a tragic outcast, Malcolm Lowry.
Delbanco taught at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1966-1984, and at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1984-1985. He was a visiting professor at such institutions also as Trinity College, Williams College, Columbia University and the University of Iowa. He was the director of the Master of Fine Arts Program, and the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, until his retirement in 2015.
He has published thirty books of fiction and non-fiction. In 1966, with the encouragement of professors Theodore Morrison and Updike, Delbanco published The Martlet’s Tale, a novel set in Greece and based on the Prodigal Son fable. His next books, Grasse 3/23/66 and Consider Sappho Burning, are experimental works that employ a very poetic kind of fiction.
The author’s next three novels after Consider Sappho Burning - News, In the Middle Distance, and Fathering - have an important public and political dimension which makes Delbanco very much a writer of his time. News is probably the most fully realized and yet most neglected political novel in recent decades. The book concerns the efforts of several men to improve society and how three of them are destroyed in the process. In the Middle Distance and Fathering also touch on political issues, though the former is primarily an active autobiography.
A former Vermont resident, Delbanco is best known for the novels Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness, which together comprise his trilogy concerning a New England family. The novels tell of the declining years of an elite Vermont family, the Sherbrookes, and depicts the underside of family life.
After completion of the Sherbrooke trilogy, Delbanco’s concentration began to move away from the novel and toward the publication of nonfiction works and short stories, including Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and H. G. Wells; The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait; and About My Table, and Other Stories. The latter, which contains nine stories linked by a common theme and a New England setting, has received the approval of many critics. The tales are all related in that they tell about men suffering a crisis as they make the transition from youth to middle age. The tone of these stories towards present-day life is similar to that of the Sherbrooke novels.
Delbanco’s 1995 novel In the Name of Mercy is a work less characteristic of the novelist. Euthanasia, assisted suicide, managed health care, and cost-conscious doctoring figure prominently in this tale of unexplained deaths in a hospice. Treading the line between medical thriller and novel of ideas, In the Name of Mercy uses the late-twentieth-century ethical dilemmas over health care for the terminally ill as a backdrop to a murder mystery.
Delbanco’s next novel, Old Scores, begins on the campus of a small college in Vermont, where a professor and student fall in love and begin an affair that impacts the rest of their lives.
The Lost Suitcase, published in 2000 is a genre-defying collection, mingles “nonfiction musings” and fictional pieces. The title novella is a piece of imagined history retelling the true story of how Ernest Hemingway lost a suitcase of his works on a train.
His most recent novel (2013) is The Years, his most recent work of non-fiction, (2017) is Curiouser and Curiouser: Essays. In 2015 he published The Art of Youth: Crane, Carrington, Gershwin, and the Nature of First Acts. 2016 saw the publication of the Omnibus collection, Dear Wizard: The Letters of Nicholas Delbanco and Jon Manchip White. In 2011, he republished Sherbrookes. This book brings his trilogy of novels (Possession, Sherbrookes, Stillness from, consecutively, 1977, '78 and '80 ) between the covers of a single book. Shebrookes is not simply a reissue of the three original novels together, but a revised edition of the trilogy without being a complete revision of the original story.
Delbanco is married to Elena Greenhouse since September 12, 1970. Delbanco's daughter with Elena Greenhouse, Francesca, is married to director Nicholas Stoller. His daughter Andrea is married to the New Jersey lawyer, Alexander Shalom.