Over seven decades of literary activity,… Vladimir Nabokov, upbraiding a poet friend for writing a newspaper column, declared, "I am writing my novel.
Over seven decades of literary activity, he had produced fourteen novels, countless essays, and dozens of stories, the majority of his fiction set in a South Indian town that he called Malgudi.
Merwin's insistence on a poetry of imaginative utility, against the encroachments of decades of literary fads, has succeeded in giving his imagined worlds some of the tangible pleasures and horrors we associate with real ones.
To those for whom these three aspects of Naipaul's life and work are as mysterious as they are enthralling, his latest volume of essays, from four decades of literary endeavour, splendidly edited and introduced by Pankaj Mishra, comes as a timely Enigma machine in the decoding of Naipaul's complex reports from the front line of his battles with existence.
Hermione Lee's fascinating biography of Penelope Fitzgerald charts a life that travelled the full 360 degrees on the wheel of fortune – from early promise and privilege down to dramatic middle-aged doldrums then back up to a late-blooming two decades of literary productivity and success.
It was the work for which Didion was best known and most esteemed in the many decades of literary production that preceded "The Year of Magical Thinking," the memoir of marriage and bereavement that, when it was published, in 2005, granted her a vast, popular success.
His friend and one-time publisher, Jason Epstein, talks affectionately of good Norman' and bad Norman', the good and the bad co-existing heroically and unquenchably over nearly six decades of literary life on a scale unknown in Britain and rare in America, too.
He left his house in Gough Square (now the most famous of Johnson museums) for smaller lodgings in 1759, ending the major decade of his literary activity famous and poor.
Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work (1912 25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output.
They are all on full display in Been Doon So Long (University of California Press, $34.95), an anthology — or "vinthology," as Mr. Grahm puts it — of several decades worth of literary satires, reveries, incessant yet clever puns and gnomic prognostications.
Decades of borderline literary obscurity seem not to have bothered him.
