NBCC Winner on Poets' Friendship
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 8/12/2002
Adam Sisman, who won the National Book Critics Circle award last year for a book about Dr. Johnson's biographer, Boswell, is writing a new book called The Friendship, about the celebrated relationship between poets Wordsworth and Coleridge at the dawn of English Romanticism. Viking Penguin senior editor Paul Slovak bought North American rights in Sisman's new work from agent Andrew Wylie and hopes to publish in 2005. According to the author, the initial relationship between the budding poets resulted in great poetry from both, but proved ultimately disastrous to them. He will explore not only their influences upon each other, but the whole question of male friendship—"so powerful and yet so fragile." Sisman's NBCC winner, Boswell's Presumptuous Task, will appear as a Penguin paperback in October.
