A Life in Biography

More with Tim Christian & Carol Sklenicka about the principles, practices & mechanics of biography with examples from our work

Episode 66: Talking with Tim Christian (biographer of Mary Hemingway) and Carol Sklenicka (biographers of Raymond Carver and Alice Adams) about the principles and practices of biography.

What it means to circle around your subject in a biography and how that circling is hermeneutical. I draw on my biography of Lillian Hellman for examples.

My encounters with Janet Malcolm’s assault on biography, beginning in 1994 and continuing through several books of mine in the new millennium.

The biographer of Raymond Carver explains what drew her to Alice Adams and the history of the generation that came into its own after World War II

A talk with Kai Bird about his Shakespearean/Faulknerian biography of Jimmy Carter

A wide-ranging discussion of why Ethel Rosenberg matters, what is new in her story, and why American writers continue to be obsessed with her life.

I draw on my experience of writing biographies of William Faulkner, Michael Foot, and Amy Lowell, to explain why biographies have to be about the whole person, notwithstanding the charge of literary prurience.

What you need to know about reading, writing, and reviewing biography.

My view of what has happened to Bailey’s biography of Roth, how reviewers and readers have responded, and why what I’ve seen so far is inadequate.

What goes into a dual biography, and what a sociologist can bring to the study of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

A wide-ranging interview about how biography gets done, both authorized and unauthorized, with Nadel’s subjects, Leonard Cohen & Philip Roth, and more.

What happens during and after interviews, with examples drawn from my biographies of Lillian Hellman, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, and Michael Foot.

What happens during and after interviews with subjects ranging from Walter Matthau to Ellen Burstyn to Richard Wilbur.

Mike Peros describes how he became a biographer, how he researched his biographies of José Ferrer and Dan Duryea, and much more.

Through the examples of Marilyn Monroe, Amy Lowell, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath, I explain why so many biographies of the same subject are published.

A conversation with Bob Batchelor about his work from John Updike to Stan Lee and much more about biography and its place in the world and in our imaginations.

A wide ranging discussion of the choices a biographer makes and how John Matteson put together his group of figures present at the battle of Frederickburg

A wide ranging of discussion of a great character actress, active in both silent and sound film, her relationships with Ronald Colman and Bette Davis, and her career as a writer of novels and memoirs.

What it takes to write a biography of the Mankiewicz brothers and other issues biographers encounter.

A wide ranging discussion of Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s new biography, including reflections on the biographer as villain and how biography can be an act of restitution.

I speak with Richard Bradford about how he became a biographer, the role biography should play in literary study, and why he chose to write about Ernest Hemingway, Patricia Highsmith and others.

All things biographical and how Faulkner, the man and the writer, approached the Civil War.

How does a biographer recreate the past the milieu of a subject’s life. I draw on my own experience in biographies of William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, Rebecca West, Michael Foot, and others.