Best Selling Books by Stanley Weintraub

The epic story of the 1950 Christmas season, when American troops faced extreme cold, a determined enemy, and long odds

People known to Bernard Shaw had every reason to fear becoming recognisable characters in his plays. However, as eminent Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub reveals in this collection, Shaw''s relationships to real or imagined personalities could be both curiously unexpected and deliciously complex.

Describes the pre-presidency political and wartime career of America''s 32nd president, from his time in the Navy to his fraying marriage to his cousin Eleanor and how falling ill with polio was unable to stop his rise to power in Washington DC.

Just a few of the words of presidential wisdom found in Dear Young Friend: “I rejoice that you have learnt to write,…for as this is done with a goosequill, you know the value of a goose.” –Thomas Jefferson, to his granddaughter, Cornelia Randolph “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a bit of silly affection if were to begin now?” –Abraham Lincoln to Grace Bedell “If we are successful [in the election], it will not be handsome behavior for any of my family to exhibit exultation or talk boastingly, or be in vain about it.” –Rutherford B. Hayes, to his son “Ruddy” “The other sixty cents are for my other six grandchildren. They are not born yet.” –Theodore Roosevelt, to Marjorie Sterrett, who was collecting dimes to fund a battleship “The John Birchers are just Ku Klux without the nightshirts.” –Harry Truman to David S. McCracken “If you really believe, you will see them. My [Irish] ‘little people’ are very small, wear tall black stovepipe hats, green coats and pants, and have long, white beards.” –John Kennedy to Mark Aaron Perdue Presidents since Washington have written to children. Chief executives prior to the overwhelmingly busy present even went through the White House mail themselves, choosing what to answer—a task in the e-mail age now impossible. Some earlier presidents, even as late as Eisenhower, confided opinions to young people that they rarely confessed to their peers. The letters range in subject form the monumental to the immaterial—although almost nothing is insignificant to a child.

At twenty, "the Fra Angelico of Satanism," as Roger Fry was to call Aubrey Beardsley, was working as an obscure clerk in a London life insurance company. Three years later he was the most notorious--and perhaps the most influential--artist in England. His controversial drawings for Oscar Wilde''s Salome were so daring and different that someone quipped that Wilde''s play illustrated Beardsley''s art. His work as art editor of the two most famous magazines of the 1890''s, The Yellow Book and The Savoy, consolidated his fame although he was unreasonably dragged into the Wilde scandal and nearly destroyed by it. By the time he produced his strikingly scabrous drawings for a pornographer publisher''s Lysistrata he was dying, yet still incredibly productive. But he had already indelibly stamped the age with his name. In a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review in 1967, art critic John Russell wrote of Beardsley that "as a biography--a life''s story" the book "needs no successsor." Aubrey Beardsley: Imp of the Perverse began as an updating of the original biography but new material at hand and the need to reinterpret Beardsley from the perspective of augmented life-records made a mere updating impractical, especially since the climate for publishing has become far more receptive to truth in biography, however explicit.

By mid-1917, with the world war going badly on all fronts, and casualties burgeoning, Prime Minister David Lloyd George met with General Edmund Allenby, fresh from France. Lloyd George wanted “Jerusalem for Christmas” as a holiday “present” for the increasingly disillusioned British people. Its seizure would also eliminate the Ottomans, who had inflicted the dismaying disaster at the Dardanelles, as a factor in the war. As Allenby departed, the PM handed him George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land, remarking that it was a better guide to reaching Jerusalem than anything “in the pigeon holes of the War Office”. Having been raised on the Bible, Allenby, as this narrative illustrates, did indeed exploit it. He would also have unanticipated expertise from an unknown and unmilitary officer, T. E. Lawrence, who turned his Arabian “sideshow” into campaigns distracting the Turks and their German military leadership. The desert war would be hard-fought, but, that December, after centuries in Muslim hands and with its sacred sites intact, Jerusalem fell.

This book traces the progress and texture of the friendship between T.E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw.

"William Golding has written some of the most exciting fiction of the postwar period. This resourceful study of his novels examines them from the perspective of an original thesis: that each represents a response to a specific book by an earlier writer, transformed by Golding''s artistry into a wholly new work bearing his unmistakable imprint. By exploring the origins of Golding''s novels, the authors redefine the total creative process and clearly show the particular force and relevance of each work. Any serious reader of fiction will be interested in this original exposition of the Golding canon from Lord of the Flies, Golding''s reaction to a Victorian boys'' book, to The Spire, his Ibsenite novel"--Back cover.

A biography of the close friend of Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, Osbert Sitwell, Oscar Wilde and others of the London literary scene during the early 20th century.

Biographer of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Stanley Wientraub employs previously little-used or unknown diaries, letters, memoirs and reportage from both sides of the Atlantic to throw fresh light on Edward VII''s half-century of waiting to become King. The book provides a picture of the Prince and his worlds: his difficult and frustrating childhood, his introductions to gentlemanly sins at Oxford and Cambridge, and his chilly arranged marriage to the pretty but dull Princess Alexandra, from whom he frenetically escaped in a succession of balls, races, spas, gambling, carousing and whoring.

Although the Victorian era closed, literally, with the death of the Queen in January 1901, the post-Victorian transition had begun decades earlier. Farewell, Victoria! presents Stanley Weintraub''s engaging perspectives on late-Victorian literature, primarily but not exclusively its fiction, which looked backward to popular antecedents and forward to the societal and technological future. The early 1880s saw the close of iconic Victorian literary careers--Disraeli, Rossetti, Eliot, Meredith, and Trollope among others. It was also the decade of new reputations that would continue in some cases into the middle of the next century. The 1890s witnessed a plethora of experiments in modernity. The Yellow Book and The Savoy, graphic realism and a redefinition of morals, futuristic prophecy and exotic fantasy would expand taste, enlarge the market for books, and write a finis to leftovers from the past. Publisher''s note.

Historian Stanley Weintraub, author of Silent Night, combines two winning topics—Christmas and the Civil War—in General Sherman’s Christmas, new from Smithsonian Books. Focusing on the holiday season of 1864, when General Sherman relentlessly pushed his troops across Georgia to capture Savannah, General Sherman’s Christmas includes the voices of soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict and is illustrated with striking period prints, making it the perfect holiday present for every history buff.

1997 marks the centenary of Queen Victoria''s Diamond Jubilee. This biography captures her personality and describes her life from the dramatic prelude of her birth in 1819 to her death in the first months of the 20th century.

This moving story of horror taking a holiday (People) vividly recounts one of history''s most powerful Christmas stories. Using the stories of the men who were there, Weintraub illuminates this extraordinary moment in time.

Includes typescript letter by Henry Miller to Stanley Weintraub, editor of "The Shaw Bulletin", with corrected typescript for a review of "The Strange Triangle of G.B.S.", dated March 19, 1957, that was published in "The Shaw Bulletin", May 1957; also "The Shaw Bulletin" for Jan. and May 1957.