Thomas Hardy

A retired scholar of Victorian and modern literature in general and of Hardy (1840-1928) in particular, Gibson has assembled not only the well known interviews with the writer by such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, and T. E. Lawrence, but also accounts of over a hundred lesser known people of their meetings with him. They are arranged in chronological chapters, covering his first 30 years of obscurity, the two decades of fame as a novelist, and the final years of veneration as a poet. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)