Stephen E. Tabachnick

Stephen E. Tabachnick was Rex Warner's doctoral student at the University of Connecticut. He specializes in British literature from 1880 to 1940, and has taught at several universities in the U.S....

Fiercer Than Tigers
The Life and Works of Rex Warner

Stephen E. Tabachnick

Rex Warner was considered a literary legend in the 1930s and 1940s. His works remain powerful reflections on the turbulent politics of the New Deal and WWII period. As Warner grew increasingly disillusioned with the modern world, his writing interests turned to ancient times via myth retelling, translations, and historical novels. Fiercer Than Tigers explores the composition, reception, and significance of Rex Warner's work, as well as his personal life, his friendships with C. Day Lewis, W. H. Auden and contemporary Greek writers, his intellectual journeys, and political beliefs. His most noteworthy writing includes his translation of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, which sold nearly one million copies; his historical novels The Young Caesar, Imperial Caesar, Pericles the Athenian and The Converts; original fiction including The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor, and The Aerodrome; and the translation that contributed to poet George Seferis' winning of the Nobel Prize.

Tabachnick's personal acquaintance with Rex Warner, his access to unpublished sources in repositories and private hands across the United States, Greece, and England, and his many interviews with Warner's former friends, colleagues, students and relatives provide a firm basis for his presentation of the life events that influenced Warner's works. Fiercer Than Tigers offers a straightforward, accurate, and balanced account of the life and career of an unjustly neglected writer while it illuminates the historical period through which he passed.

PRAISE FOR FIERCER THAN TIGERS:

"In this meticulously researched and annotated biography, Tabachnick demonstrates that, while Warner was not the leading writer of his generation, he was a representative figure in the split between his classical and Victorian heritage and the pull toward socialism, in his shift from leftist idealism to liberal humanism, in his wide network of friends and almost as wide a network of literary jobs--in fact, that Warner was "one of the last representatives of the old Victorian literary ethos…." Fiercer Than Tigers is thus not only a portrait of the man but a look from the inside at the ways that a whole literary generation, and not just the Auden group, thought, felt, and earned their livings."
—Robert Murray Davis,author of Evelyn Waugh and The Forms of His Time

Reviews

"...it is Tabachnick's very humility that has stimulated him to write such a sensitive and scrupulous book. Including extensive notes and a comprehensive bibliography, this exemplary biography is appropriate for academic libraries serving readers at all levels."

- C. Rollyson

Choice

"...At a late stage of his life, moody, sad and probably hungover, wishing he'd written better books, been more accomplished or more Auden-like as a writer, Warner confided that he'd 'ballocksed up' his life. No one who has read any of his bird poems, or his allegories, or his Seferis translations, or his Thucydides, or his Xenophon ("The Persian Expedition")--or for that matter, Stephen Tabachnick's account of it all--could agree with that."
--Valentine Cunningham, May 16, 2003 TLS