Books
His works as author include The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969; revised 1991, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), James Joyce (1970), Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (1993), and his childhood memoir A Double Thread (2001). His works as an editor and anthologist include After Shakespeare: Writing inspired by the world’s greatest author (2002), The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (1983), The Oxford Book of Essays (1991), The Oxford Book of Comic Verse (1994), The New Oxford Book of English Prose (1998), The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2006), The Modern Movement, Dickens and the Twentieth Century (reissued 2008), and The Oxford Book of Parodies (2010).
Several of his books won prizes. He also won praise from fellow writers.
“The publication of John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, when I was a bookish teenager, undoubtedly determined for me the direction I wanted my life to take... It became my Bible,” wrote A.N. Wilson in The Spectator magazine in 2006.
John Gielgud wrote “I read John Gross’s fascinating Shylock book straight through twice and enjoyed it more than I can say.”
John Updike called The New Oxford Book of English Prose “a marvelous gem… I wonder if there has ever been an anthology quite like it – with so vast a field – the virtually infinite expanse of English-language prose – for the anthologist to roam… I have been rapturously rolling around in John Gross’s amazing book for days.”
Harold Pinter, who grew up in the same working class East End London neighbourhood as Gross, wrote of Gross’s childhood memoir, A Double Thread, “It is a most rich, immensely readable and very moving book. I recognized so much.”
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Famous quotes containing the word books:
“The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don’t talk about it.”
—Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b. 1925)
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“The books may say that nine-month-olds crawl, say their first words, and are afraid of strangers. Your exuberantly concrete and special nine-month-old hasn’t read them. She may be walking already, not saying a word and smiling gleefully at every stranger she sees. . . . You can support her best by helping her learn what she’s trying to learn, not what the books say a typical child ought to be learning.”
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)