A masterful portrait (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from a Whitbread Award-winning biographer The vels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is kwn about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a sb, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his vels 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.
