Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift's life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swift's parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift's public version of his life--the one accepted until recently--was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in...

"Brothers of the Quill takes a familiar eighteenth-century theme - Grub Street, the trials and tribulations of professional writers in the early days of commercial literature - and brings a new perspective to it. It follows the early career of Oliver Goldsmith, who in 1756 arrived destitute in London - an Irish 'vagabond' -and within a few years rose out of Grub Street anonymity to become a celebrated author. It investigates Goldsmith's literary themes...