Books like Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

Stephen Greenblatt explores how William Shakespeare’s life, family, and the currents of Elizabethan England shaped the world’s greatest playwright.

1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 28 cm1030L Lexile

Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape--the industry, the animals, even the flowers--that would appear in Shakespeare's plays. He takes us through Shakespeare's London neighborhood and the fertile, competitive theater world where he worked as actor and writer. He shows us Shakespeare as a businessman, and as a constant reviser of his writing. In joining these intimate details with profound intuitions about the playwright and his work, Ackroyd has produced an altogether engaging masterpiece.From the Trade Paperback edition.

"Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention."--Back cover.

Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator and diarist, kept a private diary that captures the turbulent world of Restoration London and explores his inner life of relations with women, fears and ambitions, and political shifts.