Journal of a Solitude

Journal of a Solitude
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2014-07-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1497646332

The poet and author’s “beautiful . . . wise and warm” journal of time spent in her New Hampshire home alone with her garden, her books, the seasons, and herself (Eugenia Thornton, Cleveland Plain Dealer). “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” —May Sarton May Sarton’s parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her “real” life—not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude—both an exhilarating and terrifying state. She likens writing to “cracking open the inner world again,” which sometimes plunges her into depression. She confesses her fears, her disappointments, her unresolved angers. Sarton’s garden is her great, abiding joy, sustaining her through seasons of psychic and emotional pain. Journal of a Solitude is a moving and profound meditation on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. Both uplifting and cathartic, it sweeps us along on Sarton’s pilgrimage inward. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

The Journals of May Sarton Volume One

The Journals of May Sarton Volume One
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 499
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1504047508

Now in one volume: Three exquisite meditations on nature, healing, and the pleasures of the solitary life from a New York Times–bestselling author. In a long life spent recording her personal observations, poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton redefined the journal as a literary form. This extraordinary volume collects three of her most beloved works. Journal of a Solitude: Sarton’s bestselling memoir chronicles a solitary year spent at the house she bought and renovated in the quiet village of Nelson, New Hampshire. Her revealing insights are a moving and profound reflection on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. Plant Dreaming Deep: Sarton’s intensely personal account of how she transformed a dilapidated eighteenth-century farmhouse into a home is a loving, beautifully crafted memoir illuminated by themes of friendship, love, nature, and the struggles of the creative life. Recovering: In this affecting diary of one year’s hardships and healing, Sarton focuses on her sixty-sixth year, which was marked by the turmoil of a mastectomy, the end of a treasured relationship, and the loneliness that visits a life of chosen solitude. By turns uplifting, cathartic, and revelatory, Sarton’s journals still strike a chord in the hearts of contemporary readers. Through them, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “we are able to see our own experiences reflected in hers and we are enriched.”

At Eighty-two

At Eighty-two
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393316223

Finished before her death, these entries reflect back on Sarton's life and on her years as a teacher, poet, author, lover, and friend.

As We Are Now

As We Are Now
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 150
Release: 1992-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393309577

Includes the page proofs of her novel.

After the Stroke

After the Stroke
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1988
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393306309

Author and poet, May Sarton, chronicles her battles for "real life" and health after suffering a stroke.

Recovering

Recovering
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2014-12-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1497685451

An affecting diary of one year’s hardships and healing, by one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary memoirists For decades, readers have celebrated May Sarton’s journals for their candid look at relationships, success and failure, communion with nature, and the curious stages of aging. In Recovering, Sarton focuses on her sixty-sixth year—one marked by the turmoil of a mastectomy, the end of a treasured relationship, and the loneliness that visits a life of chosen solitude. Each deeply felt entry in the journal, written between 1978 and 1979, is laced with poignancy and honesty as she grapples with a cold reception for her latest novel, the sad descent of a close friend into senility, and other struggles. Despite the trials of this one painful year, Sarton writes of her progression toward a hard-won renewal, achieved through good friendships, the levity provided by her cherished dog, and peaceful days in her garden. A candid account of Sarton’s revival from personal darkness back into light, Recovering is another stunning entry in the author’s irrepressible oeuvre.

Plant Dreaming Deep

Plant Dreaming Deep
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2014-07-22
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1497646324

The author’s tribute to the 18th-century New England farmhouse she called home: “[A] tender and often poignant book by a woman of many insights” (The New York Times Book Review). In Plant Dreaming Deep, Sarton shares an intensely personal account of transforming a house into a home. She begins with an introduction to the enchanting village of Nelson, where she first meets her house. Sarton finds she must “dream the house alive” inside herself before taking the major step of signing the deed. She paints the walls white in order to catch the light and searches for the precise shade of yellow for the kitchen floor. She discovers peace and beauty in solitude, whether she is toiling in the garden or writing at her desk. This is a loving, beautifully crafted memoir illuminated by themes of friendship, love, nature, and the struggles of the creative life. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

At Seventy

At Seventy
Author: May Sarton
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2014-12-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1497685443

Winner of the American Book Award: May Sarton’s honest and engrossing journal of her seventieth year, spent living and working on the Maine coast. May Sarton’s journals are a captivating look at a rich artistic life. In this, her ode to aging, she savors the daily pleasures of tending to her garden, caring for her dogs, and entertaining guests at her beloved Maine home by the sea. Her reminiscences are raw, and her observations are infused with the poetic candor for which Sarton—over the course of her decades-long career—became known. An enlightening glimpse into a time—the early 1980s—and an age, At Seventy is at once specific and universal, providing a unique window into septuagenarian life that readers of all generations will enjoy. At times mournful and at others hopeful, this is a beautiful memoir of the year in which Sarton, looking back on it all, could proclaim, “I am more myself than I have ever been.”

May Sarton

May Sarton
Author: Margot Peters
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2011-05-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307788539

The first biography of May Sarton: a brilliant revelation of the life and work of a literary figure who influenced her thousands of readers not only by her novels and poetry, but by her life and her writings about it. May Sarton's career stretched from 1930 (early sonnets published in Poetry magazine) to 1995 (her journal At Eighty-Two). She wrote more than twenty novels, and twenty-five books of poems and journals. The acclaimed biographer Margot Peters was given full access to Sarton's letters, journals, and notes, and during five years of research came to know Sarton herself--the complex woman and artist. She gives us a compelling portrait of Sarton the actress, the poet, the novelist, the feminist, the writer who struggled for literary acceptance. She shows us, beneath Sarton's exhilarating, irresistible spirit, the needy courtier and seducer, the woman whose creativity was propelled by the psychic drama she created in others. We watch young May at age two as she is abruptly uprooted from her native Belgium by World War I, a child ignored both by her mother, who was intent on her own artistic vision and reluctant to cope with a child, and by her father, obsessed with his academic research. We see Sarton as a young girl in America, and then later, at nineteen, choosing a life in the theatre, landing a job in Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory, and gathering what would become a tight-knit coterie of friends and lovers . . . Sarton beginning to write poetry and novels . . . Sarton making friends with Elizabeth Bowen and Julian Huxley, Erika and Klaus Mann, Virginia Woolf, the poet H.D.--charming and enlisting them with her work, her vitality, her hunger for love, driven by her need to conquer (among her conquests: Bowen, Huxley, and later his wife, Juliette). We see her intense friendships with literary pals, including Muriel Rukeyser (her lover), and Louise Bogan, Sarton's "literary sibling, who at once encouraged her and excluded her from a world in which Bogan was a central figure. We see Sarton begin to create in the spiritual journals that inspired the devotion of readers the image of a strong, independent woman who lived peacefully with solitude--an image that contradicted the reality of her neediness, loneliness, and isolation as she pushed away loved ones with her demands and betrayals. A fascinating portrait of one of our major literary figures--a book that for the first time reveals the life that she herself kept hidden.