Wilkie Collins. A Biography

London England: Davis - Poynter. Hardback. Wilkie Collins. A Biography. Slight shelf wear to edge of D/J. Price clipped to D/J. For many years the life of Wilkie Collins, the originator of the English detective story (and indeed one of the best-selling authors of a demanding literate era), remaind largely unchronicled. Dying, aged sixty-five in 1889, addicted to the opium he used as a pallative to a chronic and painful illness, Collins remained throughout his intriguing life shy of publicity and distrustful of fame. Posterity has remained incurious, while his lesser and greater contemporaries have inspired biographies by the score. The son of a successful landscape painter, an early apprentiseship first to the tea trade and later as a barrister left Collins hardened in one ambition - to devote his life to writing. Unconventional (to say the least) in his domestic life; a lifelong friend of Dickens and of most of the literary and artistic figures of the day; he wrote more than thirty books and a dozen plays, works which were to have a significant influence on the literature of that period. Perhaps his own dislike of publicity engendered the twentieth century's lack of curiosity about Wilkie Collins - however it may be, this masterly and sympathetic biography has done much to dispel the cobwebs of ignorance which surround a great author and a remarkable man. 315 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions, Reference books ,and all types of Academic Literature.) . Very Good. Cloth. Reprint. 1974.