Chaucer's Tale 1386 and the Road to Canterbury

Paul Strohm

eBook - 2014

A lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury TalesIn 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that hehas today—far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a midlevel bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professionalcrisis set him down the road leading to The Canterbury Tales.In the politically and economically fraught London of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer was swept up against his will in a series of disastrous events that would ultimately leave him jobless, homeless, separated from his wife, exiled f...rom his city, and isolated in the countryside of Kent—with no more audience to hear thepoetry he labored over.At the loneliest time of his life, Chaucer made the revolutionary decision to... more