BooksRock.com - Kids Books At Amazing Low Prices!

Often scathingly funny, frequently tender, and always completely engaging, The Gatekeeper is Terry Eagleton's memoirs, his deep-etched portraits of those who influenced him, either by example or by contrast: his father, headmasters, priests, and Cambridge dons. He was a shy, bookish, asthmatic boy keenly aware of social inferiority yet determined to make his intellectual way. The Gatekeeper mixes the soberly serious with the downright hilarious, skewer-sharp satire with unashamed fondness, the personal with the political. Most of it all it reveals a young man learning to reconcile oppositions: a double-edged portrait of the intellectual as a young man.

Terry Eagleton is Wharton Professor of English Literature at St. Catherine's College, Oxford. One of the world's leading literary critics, his many academic books include Literary Theory: An Introduction. He is also author of the play Saint Oscar and the novel Saints and Scholars, along with two widely acclaimed studies of Ireland, Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger and Crazy John and the Bishop.