influence (literary, artistic, etc.)

Contains seventeen essays which explore the influence authors Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had on each other's work, and the role of France, where the two men first met, on their relationship and careers.

Collects twenty-seven memoirs of important friendships and intellectual relationships between fellow writers, composers, and scientists, including Seamus Heaney and Thomas Flanagan, Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy, Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, and Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.

Author David Shields comments on various works that he has read and offers his opinions and thoughts on each as well as reflects how each work has affected him.

Explores the influence of two women on the work of nineteenth-century author Henry James, including his cousin Minny Temple, the heroine of his youth in New England, and writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, a friend of his middle years.