"Vanity Fair, published in serial parts in 1847-8, made William Makepeace Thackeray famous - 'all but the top of the tree' he told his mother, 'and having a great fight there with Dickens, if truth be known. ' Behind him lay an extraordinary life - an intense, Anglo-Indian childhood, dominated by the figure of his mother; a fortune lost by his early twenties; a disastrous marriage to a wife who went mad and left him to bring up their two small daughters in conditions of near penury. " "Thackeray's early career was a struggle - ten years of apprentice hack-work that laid the foundations on which his great novels took root and grew. But as D. J. Taylor shows in this new biography - the first major study for twenty years - his later life was no less troubled. A torturous, platonic love affair with the wife of one of his oldest friends, bitter literary quarrels with eminent Victorians, an obsession with earning enough money to keep his family after his death - all these combined to produce a complex, touchy man, acutely sensitive to criticism and fearful of the publicity that accompanied his passage through early-Victorian literary life. Worn out by work and beset by illness, he died at 52, sadly aware that, brilliant as they were, the great novels of his maturity - Pendennis, The History of Henry Esmond and The Newcomes - could never scale the awesome peak claimed by Vanity Fair. "--Jacket.