This book contains all the essays and reviews that W. H. Auden wrote
during the years when he was living in England, and also includes the
full original versions of his two illustrated travel books, Letters from
Iceland (written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice) and Journey to a
War (written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood). Auden's early
prose ranges from extravagant indiscreet travel diaries through sharply
observed critiques of writers from John Skelton to Winston Churchill. It
includes studies of Communism and Christianity; audaciously wide-ranging
essays on literature, psychology, and politics; and writings about
gossip, sex, prisons, and schools.The editor's notes include
explanations of contemporary and private allusions. The long "Last Will
and Testament" written in verse by Auden and MacNeice, which Evelyn
Waugh described as a "gossip column, " is annotated in full. The book
will interest not only Auden's many admirers, but everyone concerned
with twentieth-century literature and culture.About the series: In 1928,
Stephen Spender hand-printed thirty copies of a small volume of poems by
his friend W. H. Auden--the first published book by a man who was to
become the dominant literary figure of his generation and one of the
century's greatest poets. Sixty years later, Princeton University Press
inaugurated an edition of the complete works of Auden, which is intended
to serve as the definitive text for all the works Auden published or
intended to publish in the form in which he expected to see them
printed: his plays and other drama, libretti, essays and reviews, and
poems.The Complete Works of W. H. Auden will provide a unique
opportunity to solve the numeroustextual problems connected with the
severe revisions Auden made in his own works. The texts are newly edited
from Auden's manuscripts by Edward Mendelson, the literary executor of
the Auden estate.
