World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender

Spender was one of his generation’s most celebrated poets, a writer living at the intersection of literature and politics in Europe between the two world wars. His portrait of his friends–Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood–render a romantic world of literary genius. Spender uses a poet’s language to create an honest and tender exploration of amity and the many possibilities of love. First published in 1951, World Within World simultaneously shocked and bedazzled the literary establishment for its frank discussion of Eros in the modern world.

Out of print for several years, this Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the critic John Bayley and an Afterword that Spender wrote in 1994 describing his reaction to the charges that David Leavitt plagiarized this autobiography in a novel.