The Writer's Brush

A new book appears this month with a Brontë connection:

The Writer's Brush by Donald Friedman
Mid-Lit Press

Price: $40.00
480 pages
trade cloth
ISBN: 9780922811762
LCCN #: 2007011535

"The itch to make dark marks on white paper is shared by many writers and artists," begins John Updike in his essay in The Writer's Brush, and this stunning collection will amaze lovers of the literary and fine arts alike. Author Donald Friedman has gathered together reproductions of paintings, drawings, and sculpture—many from private collections, never before published—by a pantheon of great writer-artists, including thirteen Nobel laureates.

The result is astounding. Whether viewing the beautiful landscapes that Hermann Hesse credited with saving his life, the manuscript sketches that Fyodor Dostoevsky made of his characters, or the can-can dancers secretly drawn by Joseph Conrad, readers of The Writer's Brush will gain new insights into the lives and minds of their favorite writers and the nature of the creative process itself.

Accompanying the artwork are fascinating biographies that provide little-known details of the writers' lives in the visual arts and offer the writers' own observations on their art and the relationships they saw between word and image. While written for a broad audience, The Writer's Brush is also an essential reference work, with alphabetical and chronological listings of its subjects (the names boldfaced when they appear in other essays, for easy cross-referencing) and an extensive bibliography.

Friedman notes in his introduction that, for many of the writers anthologized here, a coin toss could have determined whether to spend the day standing in a smock or seated with a pen. The Writer's Brush brings together for the first time—in one, unique, affordable volume—both worlds of these writers in the definitive work on the writer-artist.

FORTHCOMING SEPTEMBER 2007.

The volume includes works of the Brontë sisters as well. If you are interested in their artistic work, including Branwell's artwork, Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars's The Art of the Brontës is the unsurpassed place to go.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books