A Long the Riverrun

In these 20 enjoyable lectures, articles, prefaces and reviews covering a span of 30 years, a great American literary biographer writes with insight, wisdom, humor and charm about the subjects of his major works (Wilde, Yeats and Joyce) as well as about Washington Irving, George Eliot, Henry James, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, Frank O'Connor, Samuel Beckett and Henri Michaux. Additional contents include an essay on the Edwardians, a lecture on Freud and literary biography and a previously unpublished study of the background to Joyce's play Exiles , demonstrating that exile was a state to which Joyce was peculiarly suited. The collection will be of interest to general readers as well as to scholars and specialists. (Mar.)