Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Thomas More A Biography by Richard Marius ISBN 13: 9780394459820. The first full-scale biography of Thomas More in half a century, this study draws a three-dimensional portrait that shows this complex, many- faceted man as lawyer and public man, humanist and author, family man, devout Christian layman, King's Chancellor, and martyr. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. [Richard Marius's Thomas More] will be the definitive popular biography. Custody of the popular memory of a figure like More is of some real importance, and Marius's custody is exemplary. His book is accessible enough to be read by a wide audience but complete and original enough to merit reading by a specialized audience. It is as subtle and satisfying a portrait as I have encountered in years.-Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times Book Review. About the Author : Richard Marius was a historian, novelist, playwright, and a member of the Harvard faculty. THOMAS MORE: A Biography. A thorough, balanced, but sometimes numbingly discursive life of ""a complex, haunted, and not altogether admirable man."" Marius, currently head of Harvard's Expository Writing Program, is a Reformation historian who started working on More as a graduate student at Yale and has edited several volumes of the Yale edition of More's complete works; he brings a quarter-century of experience to this job, and it shows. Most lives of More, from the fine one written in 1557 by his son-in-law, William Roper, down to the generally accepted standard biography by R. W. Chambers (1935), have been biased in his favor. Marius, by contrast, takes great pains to portray fairly this ""cruelly divided"" character, a monkish ascetic who rose to the heights of secular power (and loved it), an exemplary husband who never forgave himself for succumbing to sexual desire, a gentle father who wrote furiously abusive religious propaganda, a champion of freedom of conscience who burned heretics for following theirs. Marius' work is also distinguished by its effort to draw on More's immense (and generally depressing) oeuvre to understand his soul. Thus, while conceding the many witty touches in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), Marius notes how this polemical blast ""reveals the cast-iron rules-maker"" who wrote Utopia, a closed mind with ""an icy inflexibility and an unyielding resolve to make the worst of his opponents."" Marius' biggest problem is that he wants to tell the reader everything. When it comes to the obscure, ugly case of Richard Hunne, he spins out pages of tedious speculation. Every allusion is explicated: Marius summarizes The Praise of Folly, the political claims of Pope Gregory VII (1073- 85), even the New Testament story of John the Baptist and Herod Antipas. More's behavior during his persecution by Henry VIII--cunning when there was still a chance to escape, quietly heroic when there was not--has always been a great story, and Marius does it justice. But his final assessment sees More, like his face in the brilliant Holbein portrait, as deeply ambivalent and perhaps unfathomable. Despite its prolixity, this is now the fullest, fairest, most carefully nuanced account of More available. Richard Marius, 66, Novelist And Historian of Reformation. Richard Marius, a scholar of the Reformation, novelist and speechwriter who ran the Harvard Expository Writing Program for 16 years, died Nov. 5 at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 66. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Lanier Smythe. Dr. Marius's scholarly works on Thomas More and Martin Luther and his four novels were well received, but he became embroiled in a dispute in 1995 when he was accused of displaying an anti-Semitic bias that prompted Vice President Al Gore to withdraw an offer to hire him as a speechwriter. Dr. Marius had served as an unpaid speechwriter for Mr. Gore for several years, and had just accepted a full-time position as his speechwriter when Martin Peretz, editor in chief of The New Republic, complained that Dr. Marius had exhibited bias in a book review published in The Harvard Magazine in 1992. In the review, Dr. Marius said that the manner in which Israel was treating Palestinians was ''eerily similar to the stories of the Gestapo'' during World War II. Dr. Marius denied any anti-Semitic beliefs and later called the reaction to his review ''a little bit extreme.'' Richard Curry Marius was born in London County, Tenn., on July 29, 1933. After graduating in 1954 from the University of Tennessee with a degree in journalism, he earned a bachelor of divinity degree from the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in 1958, and then a master's degree and a doctorate in the history of the Reformation from Yale University. Dr. Marius's 1985 biography, ''Thomas More,'' which stripped More of the sanctity attributed to him by many admirers, was nominated for a National Book Award. His best-known novel, ''The Coming of Rain'' (1969), was given a generally favorable review in The New York Times Book Review by Joyce Carol Oates. She called it ''a slender, tragic, perhaps beautiful story of the ruins of dreams'' that is weakened occasionally by ''melodramatic complications.'' Dr. Marius recast the novel as a play, which was produced by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1998. In 1994 Dr. Marius left the Expository Writing Program, which he had led since 1978, but remained at Harvard as a senior lecturer until he retired in 1998. In addition to his wife, the chairwoman of humanities at Suffolk University in Boston, Dr. Marius is survived by two sons from a previous marriage, Richard Henri Marius of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and Frederick Stewart Marius of Winchester, Mass.; a son from his marriage to Dr. Smythe, John Bartlett Marius of New York; a brother, John, of Lenoir City, Tenn.; and two grandchildren. Richard Marius (1933-1999) Richard Marius, historian and novelist, was born in Martel, the son of a Greek father and a Methodist mother from Bradley County. Looking back on his childhood, Marius later identified three elements that contributed to his writing career: a love of the English language, the experiences of a vividly remembered childhood, and his profession as a historian. Among those childhood memories, he recalled his mother reading to him from the Bible and the classics of English and American literature and growing up in rural East Tennessee during the Great Depression and World War II. After attending public schools in Lenoir City, Marius graduated summa cum laude in Journalism from the University of Tennessee in 1954. He earned his B.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1958), but not finding the ministry to his liking, he took his M.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) from Yale. He taught history at Gettysburg College and the University of Tennessee before becoming director of Expository Writing at Harvard University, where he taught English until his death in 1999. While at the University of Tennessee, Marius wrote his first novel, The Coming of Rain (1971), a period novel heavy with memory set in fictional Bourbonville in East Tennessee twenty years after the Civil War. In characterization, plot structure, imagery, and pure craftsmanship, The Coming of Rain ranks among the finest novels written by a Tennessean about Tennessee. The author dramatized the work for stage production. Marius followed with Bound for the Promised Land (1976), an episodic novel of a Tennessee man in search of his father in the American West; After the War (1992), set once again in Bourbonville after World War I, with Paul Alexander, a Greek immigrant like Marius’s father, as the protagonist; and An Affair of Honor (1998), also set in Tennessee. Other writings include Luther (1974), Thomas More: A Biography (1985), The McGraw-Hill College Handbook (with Harvey Weiner, 1984), A Writer’s Companion (1985), and The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry (co-edited with Keith Frome, 1994). His biography Martin Luther (1999) was his last major work. Marius died at Belmont, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1999. Selected Bibliography. The Coming of Rain (novel), 1969 Luther (nonfiction), 1974 Bound for the Promised Land (novel), 1976 Thomas More: A Biography , 1984 The McGraw-Hill College Handbook (nonfiction), 1985 A Writer’s Companion (nonfiction), 1985 After the War (novel), 1992 Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death (biography), 1999. Thomas More: A Biography (1984) Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Sir Thomas More the man for all seasons; saint or sinner? Being a flagellator, hair shirt wearer and devout catholic, he would have called himself a sinner, but history has tended to look back on him as a saint. He is seen to be a man who was martyred for his faith by a tyrannical Henry VIII and his corrupt Tudor court. More was beatified in 1886 and canonized in 1935 and the bandwagon has rolled along since then culminating in at least two blockbuster movies. Richard Marius' long and scholarly biography published in 1985; paints a more ambiguous picture. King Henry VIII made Thomas More his Lord Chancellor following the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, More had already made a name for himself at court as a lawyer and man of letters and his strong but amiable personality had made him well liked; he had a gift for oratory and had been useful on diplomatic missions, but Wolsey was a hard act to follow. The Cardinal had made his home at Hampton Court into a power base that rivalled Henry's court at Westminster and More was always going to struggle following in the footsteps of the big man.