Conrad Aiken (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Edward Butscher
- First Published: 1988
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1889-1925
- Setting: Savannah, Georgia; New Bedford and Cambridge, Massachusetts; and London and East Sussex, England
- Principal Characters: Conrad Aiken, William Ford Aiken, Anna Aiken, Jane Delano Kempton, T. S. Eliot, Jessie Mcdonald Aiken
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Mothers, Sex or sexuality, Murder or homicide, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Nineteenth century, Poetry or poets, 1910’s, 1920’s, Adultery, 1900’s
- Locales: London, England, Cambridge, MA, Savannah, GA
Biographer Edward Butscher seems drawn to subjects whose lives are marked by trauma and who therefore are appropriate material for his psychoanalytical approach. His first biography was a controversial psychoanalytical study of American writer Sylvia Plath, whose tortured life ended in suicide; the present work, his second biography, is a Freudian study of Conrad Aiken, whose life was tragically marred when he was only eleven by the murder-suicide of his mother and father.
Butscher makes no apologies for his highly “interpretative” approach, prefacing volume 1 of this life of...
[The entire page is 1928 words long]
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