Augustus
By: John Williams ; introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn
Series: New York Review Books Classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 305
ISBN-13: 9781590178218; 9781590178225
Copyright date: 1971
Subjects: Fiction; History; Emperors; FICTION / Historical; FICTION / Biographical; FICTION / Literary
Description: "Winner of the 1973 National Book Award. In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a[n] historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus is the final triumph of a writer who has come to be recognized around the world as an American master. "[In Augustus,] John Williams re-creates the Roman Empire from the death of Julius Caesar to the last days of Augustus, the machinations of the court, the Senate, and the people, from the sickly boy to the sickly man who almost dies during expeditions[;] to what would seem to be the ruthless ruler. Read it in conjunction with Robert Graves's more flamboyant I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian." --Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation"--
Notes: Introduction copyrighted 2015.