Hesketh Pearson: 10 books

‘You are a genuine soaker in Shakespeare, and have not read him as a task. You have him by heart.’—Bernard Shaw wrote in a letter to Hesketh Pearson. Before he became a well-known biographer, Hesketh Pearson was an actor. Few facts are known about Shakespeare, but with an actor’s eye...

This book, first published in 1951, is a Postscript to Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality—Hesketh Pearson’s biography of Bernard Shaw, published in 1942, which became the standard work on Bernard Shaw. It was unique among other books on the same subject because Shaw himself gave every possible...

First published in 1942, Hesketh Pearson’s much lauded biography has been hailed as the standard work on George Bernard Shaw. Pearson was fortunate to have written it with the close cooperation of Shaw. Not only did Shaw check and correct all the facts, contribute and authenticate or reject anecdotes...

A sympathetic and illuminating portrait of the creator of one of the most famous characters in English literature. Hesketh Pearson was interested in the many contradictions in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the conventional Scottish doctor who pursued the occult, was interested in spiritualism and fairies,...

Hesketh Pearson’s biography is the first to combine the story of the two men whose lives were inseparable in the history of literature. The book starts with Samuel Johnson’s career up to the moment he met Boswell, then we follow James Boswell’s until he met Johnson, and took him on a journey...

The American painter, James McNeil Whistler, is the subject of Hesketh Pearson’s biography. Whistler’s personality aroused more controversy in the nineteenth-century art world than that of anyone else. He is best known for his twilight scenes or ‘nocturnes’ such as the Thames at Battersea...

The operas of William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan are an institution. Hesketh Pearson’s biography is of the two men who together formed a famous partnership and he is interested in them as individual, quite different personalities – one of the explanations behind their equally famous quarrel....

This is a portrait of a man whose life was more extraordinary than his novels. As a child he suffered from infantile paralysis, as a young man he experienced a tragic love affair, in middle age he endured prolonged illness and in old age financial ruin. Yet despite his difficult life Walter Scott...

Conan Doyle (1859-1930) will always be remembered for the character of Sherlock Holmes, but he was a prolific writer—of short stories, of science fiction and historical fiction1including The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. In his comprehensive biography, Pearson considers how his life is reflected...

A witty and fascinating account of nineteenth-century Anglo-American marriages—from the daughter of a Baltimore merchant who married Napoleon’s brother to the Baltimore lady who married Edward VIII… In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the...