William Palmer
The Golden Trashery
Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse
By Douglas M Parker
Ivan R Dee 316pp £20 order from our bookshop
Ogden Nash was one of the most popular poets in the English-speaking world at one time, but this is the first full-length biography. Apart from a rather odd encounter with Ezra Pound, his world hardly impinged on that inhabited by the poets from Eliot to Lowell whose work formed the critically approved canon in his lifetime. The difference can be seen from the index to Douglas M Parker’s book, which includes such figures unfamiliar to literature as Bette Davis, Jeanette MacDonald and the wonderfully named Mortimer Snerd.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Reading Taylor’s book has also made me join a book club. I did not like the January book; I did enjoy drinking gin while saying why.'
@clamorousvoice explores the history of women readers.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-readers
'When the language starts functioning as a character in fiction, when it is there drawing attention to itself ... It’s not anything that anybody really takes seriously.'
Our interview with Anthony Burgess from 1983.
http://ow.ly/5u0y50yrjoO
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe