Mostrando resultados por autor "Carl Rollyson" en Todas las categorías

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.

Professional biographer Carl Rollyson has pioneered a new kind of biography for children and adults alike. His narrative of Marie Curie's life is rendered in simple, precise prose. Each chapter is designed to provoke further discussion and research into the life and career of one of the century's greatest scientists and - as Rollyson shows - one of the most important figures in human history.

Drawing on the rich literature of historiography (including the writings of R. G. Collingwood and Herbert Butterfield), and on a wide-ranging body of scholarship on the historical novel (including discussions of Scott, Thackeray, and Conrad), Rollyson shrewdly probes Faulkner's dynamic and changing uses of the past. Also taking advantage of his own work as a biographer, Rollyson has updated, revised, and expanded his original book - extending his dialogue with recent Faulkner critics.

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.

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.

This memoir of a professional biographer's life tells the inside story of how he became interested in his subjects and reveals the mechanics of the trade: how to assemble proposals for publishers, conduct interviews and archival research, and joust with editors, subjects, and their literary estates. Other biographers have described their process but remained discrete, not wishing to offend their sources and supporters. This author has forgone such caution.

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.

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.

Biography as a literary genre is largely the product of the 18th century and of one seminal work, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell's innovations revolutionized the genre and made it the target of suppression and censorship. He sought not only to memorialize a great man but also to reveal his flaws. Boswell reported long stretches of Johnson's conversation, noted his mannerisms, and in general gave an intimate picture such as no biography had ever before dared to attempt.

The first biography of Martha Gellhorn, produced during her lifetime. This comprehensive biography provides crucial information about her early life in St. Louis, her travels abroad, her work for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, her meeting and subsequent storied marriage to Ernest Hemingway, and her decision to leave him and resume her career as novelist and war reporter.

Carl Rollyson's Biography: A User's Guide is an informative and entertaining text for those interested in biography. No aspect of the genre, from A to Z, goes uncovered: issues around authorized and unauthorized biography, censorship, libel, fair use, public domain (referred to as "PD" by publishers and editors), and a great deal more - including examples drawn from published biographies, as well as general and specific assessments of the biographer's art.

The first book to survey the broad range of Ms. Sontag's work, including full discussions of her fiction. One can ask for no better guidebook.

This volume represents more than 25 years of writing about female icons and biography. Rollyson provides the bits and pieces that resulted not only in his biography of Marilyn Monroe but also in much of the work he has subsequently done on Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and on the nature of biography itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.