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​