A revelatory portrait of the first great English poet and his times, on the six hundredth anniversary of his death. While Chaucer's comic masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, has brilliantly illuminated human life in the Middle Ages for readers over the past six centuries, the inner life of its creator has remained sometimes elusive and often puzzling. The cheerful authorial spirit that seems so blithely to inhabit the Canterbury pilgrims in their narratives did, after all, survive the Black Death as a child, fight in France during the Hundred Years War, travel as a diplomat in Italy, and serve the government at the time of the Peasants' Revolt and the murder of Richard II. This engaging new life of Geoffrey Chaucer by the critically acclaimed biographer Richard West examines a man whose courtly offices situated him at the center of cultural activity in medieval London and whose work as a poet became a primary force in the evolution of modern English.
