By emphasizing their years in exile and how those years affected their writings, Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century provides a unique and fascinating perspective on expatriate writers that cannot be gleaned from any other biographical dictionary. This excellent compilation is recommended for academic libraries, and it could also be useful in large public libraries.

Reference Books Bulletin

This encyclopedia provides an analytical survey of writers in exile who left their homelands for various reasons such as banishment, deportation, voluntary exile, anticipation of imprisonment, harassment, torture, or religious persecution. The various writers of the modern age represented in more than 500 entries have been chosen for having received wide acceptance and high critical evaluation. The length of the entries varies because of the need to reflect a balance of exilic forms and types. Most of the entries written by esteemed critics in specialized fields deal with prominent writers and provide in-depth treatment of the writers' milieu, biography, and works. Titles by each author are listed at the end of the entry and are followed by a list of critical source material on the writer. Group entries such as Holocaust writers, Iranian writers in exile, and expatriates discuss exile as a phenomenon beyond the realm of individual behavior. The editor also includes several representative non-exiled authors whose literary work reflects a profound state of psychic exile.

Czeslaw Milosz, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Elie Wiesel, Joseph Conrad, and Hannah Arendt are among those considered in this exploration of the varieties of exilic experience. Tucker's thoughtful introduction examines literary exile from a myriad of viewpoints, arriving at a formulation of universal features of exilic writing characteristic of the twentieth century. This distinguished resource should find a place in college and university libraries as well as in the reference collections of larger public libraries.