Life & Times
2 total works
Miles Davis was one of the great jazz musicians, bandleaders and composers. His recordings include several of the most acclaimed and popular jazz albums, from the relaxed style of Birth of the Cool to the orchestral Sketches of Spain and the iconic Kind of Blue. And he never ceased to innovate. As the 1960s moved into the 1970s, he developed a darker, more complex sound and began increasingly to use electric instruments. The crowning achievement of his experiments, Bitches Brew, became the best-selling jazz album of all time.
The United States was only two decades old when Edgar Allan Poe was born. He stands at the very beginning of American literature, an orphaned, rootless, haunted man who in just forty years gave short story writing its modern cast, pioneered detective fiction, and wrote some of the most memorable lyric poems in the English language. Poe's life was riven by scandal: endless conflict with his foster-father, disgrace at university and in the army, marrying his 13-year-old cousin, episodes of drunkeness and fierce personal rivalries with fellow writers and editors. Even Poe's death was gothic and mysterious, the theories ranging from rabies to murder. In this short Life & Times biography, Brian Morton attempts to put the Poe legend in context and in so doing reveals one of the most important and influential writers of modern times in his true light.