Work
Nadel's book, Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, was the first full-length biography of Uris. It was based on the archives at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin and interviews with Uris's family. Nadel saw Uris's work as attacking anti-semitism with a fictional heroic Jewish past, but broadening the appeal to a non-Jewish readership. Nadel revealed that Uris lived the life he described in a fictional setting, with many war experiences and travel to dangerous spots.
Nadel published Joyce and the Jews in 1989, the first book to appear in print tackling the topic. The book explored both Joyce's personal relations with Jews and the influence of Judaic motifs on his writing. Nadel also looked at references to the Talmud in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. As a critic focusing on the influence of Jews and Judaism on Joyce, Nadel did not address the centrality of the Jewishness of Leopold Bloom, one of the central characters of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses.:4 Nadel did note the shared impact of the concept of exodus on Jews and on Joyce, a voluntary exile from an Ireland then under the dominion of England.:268
Nadel's biography of David Mamet, David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre, the first such, qualified the playwright's own description of an unhappy childhood. It also tried to place Mamet's prolific output as an artist in a sociobiographical context, in an expanding arc from immediate family to Euro-American cultural influence.:285 Nadel has also published a biography of Leonard Cohen, the singer, song-writer, poet and novelist, titled Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. He has also written about Ezra Pound.
Nadel co-edited The Victorian Muse, Gertrude Stein, The Making of Literature and a collection of previously unpublished Ezra Pound letters. He has also edited the Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, and organized conferences about the work of Joyce. He has edited an Oxford reprint of the American classic, The Education of Henry Adams, and Iolani: or, Tahiti as it was, by Wilkie Collins. Nadel is also the author of Tom Stoppard: A Life, on the prolific British theater playwright.
Read more about this topic: Ira Nadel
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalms, 8:2.
“Man was kreated a little lower than the angells and has bin gittin a little lower ever sinse.” (Josh Billings, His Sayings, ch. 28, 1865)
“‘Tis not need we know our every thought
Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought
Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit,
Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit
And serve our jape’s turn for a night or two.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)