The Realists

Portraits of Eight Novelists

by C. P. Snow

Macmillan, 1978, [First Edition], ISBN 0333244389, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, ex-library with stickers to front and back endpapers, tape residue on covers and endpapers, stamps to half title and publishers pages, dustjacket shows a little edge and shelf wear with a little rubbing, sticker to spine  (see photographs)

“In The Realists C. P. Snow, who has made his own considerable contribution to twentieth-century fiction, turns his attention to eight of the greatest ‘realistic’ writers – Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Galdos, Henry James and Proust.  In their works, he believes, ‘the lessons about individual human beings are some of the deepest, the most complete, ever written, saying things of startling originality’.
Ranging freely over the literature of England, France, Russia and Spain, the author explores with acute sympathy and insight not only the novels of these great writers, but also their lives, their characters and their social backgrounds, examining how these factors, all of them fascinating some bizarre, shaped their work.
The eight essays making up the Realists illuminate the lives and achievements of the chosen ‘realists’ and will be read with pleasure and profit by expert, student and general reader alike.”