Volume 31, Number 16 · October 25, 1984
Animated Paradox
By Robert M. Adams
Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age Vol. I, Mr. Swift and his Contemporaries
by Irvin Ehrenpreis
294 pp., $20.00
Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age Vol. II, Dr. Swift
by Irvin Ehrenpreis
782 pp., $35.00
Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age Vol. III, Dean Swift
by Irvin Ehrenpreis
Harvard University Press, 1,066 pp., $35.00
Even in an age of outsize literary biographies, Irvin Ehrenpreis's life of Jonathan Swift counts as a superdreadnought. The first two volumes occupied more than a thousand pages, exclusive of apparatus; the third, which has now appeared, almost equals in size the previous two. This is by no means a record, but it's impressive. Swift's life was long, rich, and extraordinarily complicated; it spanned seventy-eight years of turbulent history in the growth of two nations, stretching across the reigns of six monarchs, and saw the transformation of England from a distant island kingdom barely recovering from the effects of an indecisive civil war to the first power of Europe.
Review, 3385 words
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