Too strong for fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy

DAVENPORT, Marcia

Science Fiction

Scribner

Informative biography of Wolfgang Mozart, the amazing composer and musician who wrote his first work, a difficult concerto, when he was four years old

Mozart

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Avon/Books

From her humble beginnings as a Slavic peasant, Lena Geyer rose to become one of the greatest singers of all-to reach the top of the glittering musical world. Her story has been gathered from those who knew her best: Her cherished music master Pizzetti, her closest confidant, her husband, and her manager. What emerges is the complex and challenging life of a woman who wasn't afraid to aim for the stars...and reach them!

Of Lena Geyer

Literature & Fiction

My Brother's Keeper

Traces the lives of Seymour and Randall Holt including their later years which were spent in a run-down mansion amid piles of newspapers and a collection of pianos

Harriet Piers, an American divorcee vacationing in Italy, and Carlo Dalverio, a married Italian, decide to have a harmless affair, but find they can not avoid falling in love

Constant Image

Originally published in 1942, The Valley of Decision was an instant success, and its story of four generations of the Scott family—owners and operators of a Pittsburgh iron and steel works—has since captured the imagination of generations of readers. Absorbing and complex, it chronicles the family’s saga from the economic panic of 1873 through the dramatic rise of American industry and trade unionism, through waves of immigration, class conflict, natural disaster, World War I, and Pearl Harbor. In 1945 it was made into a major motion picture starring Greer Garson and Gregory Peck.             This reissue features a new foreword by noted steel industry historian John Hoerr, author of And the Wolf Finally Came, who places the novel in context as a classic depiction of twentieth-century America.

Valley of Decision

Genre Fiction

[Read by Wanda McCaddon] Realistic, moving, engrossing, and positively brilliant, this biography recreates Mozart, the man and his music, against the background of the world he lived in. For Marcia Davenport, the research and writing of Mozart was truly a labor of love, during which she retraced every journey he made, saw every dwelling (then extant) in which he had ever lived, every theatre where his works were first performed, and every library and museum where his manuscripts were then to be seen. In this eloquent work of historical reconstruction, Davenport lets her characters tell their own stories. She builds from Mozart's infancy toward the climactic meeting in 1787 of Mozart, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and Casanova in Prague, when Don Giovanni was being written, to Mozart's tragically early death. The result is a biography of such commanding stature that it has remained unassailable since its publication in 1932.

The Valley of Decision

Popular Library

Too Strong for Fantasy

"I always meant to be a writer from my earliest recall", writes Marcia Davenport in her memoir, "Too Strong For Fantasy", "and like all such people I lived from infancy in the world of stories and books, most of them fantasy. When I began to outgrow fantasy, history seized me by the throat and has held on ever since. History is inseparable from place and politics and political men". The daughter of the great lyric soprano Alma Gluck, and the step-gaughter of the renowned violinist Efrem Zimbalist, Davenport's earliest memories are of music and of Arturo Toscanini, whom she calls "the dearest friend that I have ever had". She began her writing career at the age of 25, on the editoral staff of "The New Yorker", where she knew Harold Ross, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, and James Thurber. Davenport's passion for music and for history led her to write a biography of Mozart, the first by an American; published in 1932, it has never been out of print. Encouraged by the great Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins, she then wrote five novels, including "The Valley of Decision," which is her best remembered. In the 1960s, at an age when "detachment and a sense of humour temper an undue preoccupation with oneself", she wrote this autobiography. Davenport provides superb descriptions of Toscanini in action - for years she attended not only his every performance but his rehearsels as well. Her account of working with Maxwell Perkins is the most precise explanation of how Perkins drew the best from an author. Through her husband, Russell W. Davenport, who became managing director of "Fortune" and "Life", she mingled with America's political elite and became an active participant in the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell Wilkie. Much of "Too Strong For Fantasy" concerns Czechoslovakia, a country and people she came to love. Ironically, because of her long and close friendship with Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia who died mysteriously in 1948, and her moving account of his death, the communist government suppressed the book. It has only recently been published in Czech. In "Too Strong For Fantasy" a perceptive writer re-creates an era of unequalled excellence in music, and of passionate political conviction, set against the back-drop of a world torn by war and distorted by communist ideology.

United States

Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Originally published in 1942, The Valley of Decision was an instant success, and its story of four generations of the Scott family—owners and operators of a Pittsburgh iron and steel works—has since captured the imagination of generations of readers. Absorbing and complex, it chronicles the family’s saga from the economic panic of 1873 through the dramatic rise of American industry and trade unionism, through waves of immigration, class conflict, natural disaster, World War I, and Pearl Harbor. In 1945 it was made into a major motion picture starring Greer Garson and Gregory Peck. This reissue features a new foreword by noted steel industry historian John Hoerr, author of And the Wolf Finally Came, who places the novel in context as a classic depiction of twentieth-century America.

The Valley Of Decision (Regional)

University of Pittsburgh Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DAVENPORT, Marcia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by DAVENPORT, Marcia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DAVENPORT, Marcia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Too strong for fantasy

Mozart

Of Lena Geyer

My Brother's Keeper

Constant Image

Valley of Decision

Mozart

The Valley of Decision

Too Strong for Fantasy

The Valley Of Decision (Regional)