A Life in Biography

William Souder explains his attraction to Steinbeck, what it takes to do a biography, the audience you can expect to reach as a biographer, and much much more.

A wide ranging discussion of Larry Wells’s memories of the Faulkner family, of Faulkner biographers, Joseph Blotner and Carvel Collins, and what it takes to research and write biography, which often feels like a Henry James story.

We talk about how Heather Clark became interested in Plath, how she came to write the biography, how biography is a product of its age, and much more.

A wide-ranging discussion of biography, how to work on literary figures Melville’s “black consciousness” and much more.

Slavery, capitalism, what went into the making of Washington’s life and those of his contemporaries—plus Alexis Coe puts THE BIG QUESTION to me.

More discussion of how to shake up the genre of presidential biography.

A wide ranging discussion of presidential biography and why Alexis Coe decided on what has been called a “historiographical intervention.”

My experience over 40 years of contacting sources and how they responded, and how I got them to respond.

Much talk about Emily’s book, Loving Sylvia Plath, how students and other readers react to Plath, and the role biography plays in the mixed reactions to her work.

Discussing my experience and Faulkner’s in Hollywood and how all that gets on the page.

Describing my experience and Faulkner’s in Hollywood and how it all gets onto the page.

Talking with Peter K. Steinberg, co-editor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath.

A conversation about Frida Kahlo and her three years in America with a great cast of characters, including Henry Ford, the Rockefeller’s, Georgia O’Keefee, Louis Nevelson and much, much more.

Dealing with family and friends.

We discuss the first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, his achievements and failures, his rise from the bottom third to the top third of U.S. presidents, and much more about what a biography can accomplish.

Working on Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot, Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Amy Lowell, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner.

I discuss novels about Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, Martha Gellhorn, H. G. Wells and mull over a universe in which biography and biographical novels can co-exist.

An account of the campaigns orchestrated against biographers, using as examples biographies of T. E. Lawrence and Susan Sontag.

The sorry state of reviewing biography as reviewers turns in what amounts to book reports, letting down the genre of biography and those who practice it.

I read and discuss a section from The Life of William Faulkner, pointing out my use of evidence, and concluding that I am my own best evidence.

I consider the question in the light of biographies of Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Olson Welles, John F. Kennedy, and others.

A wide ranging discussion of the anathemas against biography perpetuated by modern writers, including Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Anthony Powell.

What does Psychologizing biography mean? How I have used it.

I read a review of my book, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, in order to discuss the methodology of biography and of the reviewer.

What to say about the epistemology of biography and why it is sometimes better to not have been there, but to see it all from afar and yet in closeup, as the past is recreated in the biographer’s imagination.