Thomas Hardy

<b>A masterful portrait (<i>The Philadelphia Inquirer</i>) from a Whitbread Award-winning biographer and author of <i>A Life of My Own</i>. </b> <p/> The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever a socialist and a snob an unhappy husband and a desolate widower Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography Claire Tomalin one of today's preeminent literary biographers investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.