E. P. Thompson: William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. ed. (1955/1977)

This biographical study is a window into 19th-century British society and the life of William Morris—the great craftsman, architect, designer, poet, and writer—who remains an influential figure to this day. This account chronicles how his concern with artistic and human values led him to cross what he called the “river of fire” and become a committed socialist—committed not only to the theory of socialism but also to the practice of it in the day-to-day struggle of working women and men in Victorian England. While both the British Labor Movement and the Marxists have venerated Morris, this legacy of his life proves that many of his ideas did not accord with the dominant reforming tendencies, providing a unique perspective on Morris scholarship.

First published by The Merlin Press, London, 1955
Publisher Pantheon Books, New York, 1977
ISBN 0394733207
829 pages

Review (Eli Zaretsky, Studies in Romanticism, 1977)
Review (Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction Studies, 1980)
Thompson’s lecture on Morris to the Williams Morris Society (1959)

Publisher (new edition, 2011)

PDF (109 MB, no OCR)
See also Morris’ novel News from Nowhere (1890/93) in the Internet Archive.

Man Ray: Self Portrait (1963)

In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray – painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer – relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city ‘was not complete until they had been “done” by Man Ray’s camera’.

Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.

Publisher Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1963
402 pages

PDF (58 MB, no OCR)

Malcolm Hayes: Anton von Webern (1995)

In this biography of one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers, Malcolm Hayes sets Webern’s radical technical advances against the Romantic inheritance of nineteenth-century Austro-Germany, tracing the development of a man and his music.

Born into the Imperial, musical heritage of Vienna, Webern became captivated by Renaissance vocal music, and this student passion was to haunt his compositions all his life. A pupil of Schoenberg, he also came to use the twelve-note method, and combined this with his love of chamber music to create a sound that is entirely his own. Despite a prolific rate of composition in his early years, Webern’s music output is small and tends to extreme brevity. Tragically, he was accidentally shot and killed in the Allied occupation of Austria. His work has continued to influence musicians throughout the twentieth century and since.

Publisher Phaidon Press, London, 1995
20th-Century Composers series
ISBN 0714831573, 9780714831572
240 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF (77 MB, no OCR)