The first book about the Nobel Laureate’s transformative but conflicted time in the Golden State.
‘There is much to learn from this book about Miłosz and California, yes, but also about poetry and the world.’— Ilya Kaminsky
Czesław Miłosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley—more time than any other single place he lived—and he wrote many of his most enduring works there. This is the first book to look at his life through a California lens. Filled with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a novel, it is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a perfect introduction for newcomers.
Miłosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Miłosz learned from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.
A propos de l’auteur
Cynthia L. Haven writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and has contributed to publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today. She edited Czesław Miłosz: Conversations and An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. She is also the author of Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, as well as a visiting writer and scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In 2018 she was named a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, an award conferred for the purpose of researching and writing this book. Follow her on Twitter @chaven.
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