A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendships and Influence

David Laskin shares the stories of four friendships that have defined the course of American Literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, and Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

An illuminating study of the nature of friendship itself, A Common Life is a fascinating narrative of the entanglements of art and life.

In each of the friendships that Laskin portrays, he demonstrates how the two writers met at a critical...