A Life in Biography

Biography By the Day 05.11.2022 16:25 ↓

What it is like trying to capture a day by day account of William Faulkner’s life.

How Diane Diekman became a biographer and her work in progress on Randy Travis 29.10.2022 44:12 ↓

How a biographer begins with nothing—no contacts, no track record—and is successful anyway, writing biographies of Faron Young and Marty Robbins. And wait until you hear about her newsletter!

Becoming You 22.10.2022 44:12 ↓

Are you the same person you were when you were a child? How this question pertains to biography—the one you are writing and mine.

How James Meredith broke the segregation barrier at Ole Miss 08.10.2022 27:18 ↓

A conversation with Kathleen Wickham about her book, James Meredith: Breaking the Barrier” and her other work dealing with journalists who covered the 1962 riot at Ole Miss

Allison Gilbert & Julia Scheeres: Listen, World! Their biography of the intrepid Elsie Robinson 01.10.2022 47:28 ↓

Elsie Robinson had 20 millions readers but no archive. How two biographers set about reconstructing her life.

Work in Progress: A Biography of Marilyn Chambers 24.09.2022 40:39 ↓

The first biography of the adult film star and how a biographer goes about the research, finding an agent and publisher.

A conversation to Jerry Muller about Jacob Taubes, the Professor of Apocalypse 19.09.2022 49:48 ↓

We range over the many places and people of an erotic and intellectual life spanning Europe, the U.S., and Israel with Susan Sontag, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Marcuse, and many more radical thinkers.

A talk with Beverly Gray about Roger Corman, Ron Howard, and what it takes to do a biography 10.09.2022 45:52 ↓

How do you become a biographer? Hear one story about it and Beverly Gray’s adventures with Roger Corman and Ron Howard

A Biography of Jack Ruby, you say? 03.09.2022 39:15 ↓

Listen to Danny Fingeroth speak from an undisclosed location about his work in progress.

Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and the Biographical Quest 20.08.2022 48:47 ↓

LIsten to Aaron Sachs talk about his new book, Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. I call it a palimpsest of biography in my New York Sun Review.

A talk about Jackie Ronne, polar explorer with her accomplished biographer, Joanna Kafarowski 06.08.2022 38:20 ↓

How history gets rewritten in biographies of women

Why another biography of Ernest Hemingway? 30.07.2022 42:59 ↓

A talk with Wylie McLallen about Hemingway and the rise of modern literature, publishers of biography, and much else.

Coming attractions 24.07.2022 2:44 ↓

Polar exploration and Warren Harding as explained from an Amtrak platform in Charleston, West Virginia

A conversation with Jim Dougherty about his wife’s great biography of Nazi Reinhard Heydrich 09.07.2022 26:00 ↓

85 year old Jim Dougherty’s compelling saga about a great biography that was almost not published.

A conversation with Andrew Wilson about Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith & more 02.07.2022 40:37 ↓

Biographer Andrew Wilson talks about his work in fiction and fact, biographies and novels.

A Biography in Progress: Beth Phillips discusses Clifford Odets and why his work and life matter 26.06.2022 7:30:42 ↓

What it takes for a biographer to do justice to a major American playwright

The Biography I did not write 18.06.2022 13:58 ↓

It is probably just as well

To quote Robert Caro: “Turn Ever Page” 11.06.2022 39:20 ↓

The history of publishing Plath’s letters and why it matters to biography

A talk with Alison Macor about her new book, The Making of The Best Years of Our Lives 04.06.2022 1:23:00 ↓

A lesson here for how to write group biography as well the history of an epic film.

War, trauma, and art in the life of Rudolf H. Sauter, and the process of biography 28.05.2022 36:24 ↓

A wide ranging discussion of an artist interned during World War I and what he made of his life and art coming out of that trauma.

A Faulknerian novel in which Faulkner appears 21.05.2022 34:00 ↓

What happens when a novelist reads, writes like his subject, and puts that subject in a novel?

The Gatekeepers 12.05.2022 6:54:58 ↓

You know what I mean, don’t you?

A conversation with Michelle Morgan one of the masters of Marilyn Monroe biography 07.05.2022 46:36 ↓

We delve deeply into a kind of time capsule of 1956, when Marilyn met the Queen and so much else

A conversation with David O. Stewart about the worlds of biography and fiction 30.04.2022 37:09 ↓

The overlapping worlds of biography and fiction and how they are inter-dependent

A talk with master biographer, Nigel Hamilton. 23.04.2022 40:07 ↓

About the making of a biographer and what keeps him at it.