Showing results by author "Carl Rollyson" in All Categories

Rollyson proposes a number of apologias for biography, including the thought that in the right hands the literary biography is a continuation of the writer's work and life. In such instances, there seems to be a symbiosis between the biographer and subject. In other cases, biographies spearhead the rediscovery of important writers. He rejects the idea that literary figures are not good subjects for biography because they are not men and women of action.

An essay in biography, Rollyson argues, is an effort to comprehend a life that is inherently incomplete and subject to revision. Many of the facts about a biographical subject's life that are blandly presented in reference books have been discovered by biographers at great cost to their reputations. With the history of biography as a censored genre in mind, he encourages consumers of biography to be critical of the biographies they come across - no matter whether those biographies are book-length narratives or short encyclopedia entries.

Too many biographers, he believes, evince no interest in the biographical tradition. Concerned only with possession of their subjects, their proprietorial attitude deforms not only their biographies but also the genre itself. If a biography is reviewed badly (receiving hardly more than a summary of the subject's life with a perfunctory nod to the biographer), it is because the biographical tradition has been disregarded or discounted. This book, in other words, has been created on the behalf of biography, a genre that still awaits a full vindication.

Most book reviewers know very little about the history or the art of biography. Indeed, if there is any art in biography, it is the rare reviewer that acknowledges it or knows how to discuss it. Usually the reviewer regards biography as an occasion to wax eloquent about what he or she thinks of the subject. Little space, if any, is devoted to the biography's structure or style, to the biographer's peculiar problems, or to how the biography relates to others about the same subject.

This engaging collection of essays restores Amy Lowell's rightful place in the history of American literature. Carl Rollyson, author of several major literary biographies, corrects the distorted and often hostile accounts of Lowell that have appeared in biographies of D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and other writers who collaborated with her in establishing the "new poetry" as an integral part of post-World War I American culture.

He provides entertaining and informative accounts of her feud with Mary McCarthy, and her many love affairs and surprising friendships. He also provides a provocative and compelling portrayal of this complex and brilliant woman, who was called everything from a "viper" and "a goddam liar" to "an empathetic genius with a highly original and penetrating mind." Near death, Hellman spoke of being blocked; this biography will show what got in her way.

The biography's new title emphasizes that Rebecca West was a prophet - one not always appreciated in her own day. As early as 1917, she understood where the world was headed and realized that the revolution in Russia held out false hope. Because she took this view as a socialist, those on the left scorned her as an apostate, whereas she understood that Communism would result in a disaster for the British left.

Jill Craigie - filmmaker, writer, pioneering feminist, and devoted wife to former Labour leader Michael Foot - led an extraordinary life. Strikingly attractive, fiercely independent, and politically radical, Craigie established a reputation as a filmmaker with her 1944 film Out of Chaos, becoming the first female director to gain national attention.

Since Wilde's condemnation of modern biography, the genre would appear to have accelerated its descent into bad taste. As Carl Rollyson points out, writers as various as Rebecca West, Ted Hughes, and Joyce Carol Oates have deplored biographers' tendency to cut up lives and render the bloody data so as to make their subjects seem unhealthy, unwholesome, and unsound. Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars; modern novels feature the biographer as grave robber and victimizer.

The controversial American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), a founding member of the Imagist group that included D. H. Lawrence and H. D., excelled as the impresario for the "new poetry" that became news across the U. S. in the years after World War I.

Emily Dickinson exemplified the virtue of self-discipline. She wrote poetry largely for her own pleasure, and to exercise and increase her creative talents. Very few of her poems were published during her own lifetime, yet we know that she wrote consistently - perhaps every day - over several decades. Poetry was her way of knowing herself and understanding the world.

Thurgood Marshall was one of the original forces behind the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the organizations that advocated the rights of African Americans in the 20th century. His pursuit of civil rights reached a highpoint when, as a lawyer, he helped the NAACP win Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ended segregation in education in American public schools.

Dana Andrews (1909-1992) worked with distinguished directors such as John Ford, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, William A. Wellman, Mervyn Le Roy, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan. He played romantic leads alongside the great beauties of the modern screen, including Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Linda Darnell, Susan Hayward, Maureen O'Hara, and most important of all, Gene Tierney, with whom he did five films.

From this comprehensive, yet critically measured wealth of material, Rollyson offers a distinctive and insightful portrait of Marilyn Monroe, highlighted by new perspectives that depict the central importance of acting to the authentic aspects of her being.

Carl Rollyson was Norman Mailer's first literary biographer to draw on unpublished letters and manuscripts as well as on interviews with the writer's friends and foes. Rollyson provides a full account of Mailer's college years, especially his fear of being drafted. Here are the sources of Mailer's mental crisis in the 1950s that led to the stabbing of his second wife, Adele. Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic gets at the sources of Mailer's obsession with violence while also portraying a major literary figure in the making.

Spanning from the 1825 birth of Faulkner’s great-grandfather to Faulkner’s death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner’s life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews.