David Laskin shares the stories of four friendships that have defined the course of American Literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, and Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.An illuminating study of the nature of friendship itself, A Common Life is a fascinating narrative of the entanglements of art and life. In each of the friendships that Laskin portrays, he demonstrates how the two writers met at a critical turning point in their lives and careers and how they profoundly affected the course of both. “A delightful, unusual and often illuminating study of a kind of influences wrought on eight famous American writers by their intimate friendships with each other.” — Louis Auchincloss