A Life in Biography

Authorized/Unauthorized; Gossipy/Salacious/; Plodding/Workmanlike/Revisionist

1. Is the subject worthy of a biography. 2. Is the subject too small? 3. Why another biography of?

Why it is important to do a proposal? Why not just write the book? This podcast tells you why.

When does it make sense to use the present tense in a biography? Examples from the work of Noel Riley Fitch, William Faulkner, and yours truly.

Biography is its own form of knowledge, a view that many readers and reviewers of biography are reluctant to acknowledge, or do not even consider.

Listeners who want to know how to navigate the varied access to sources with different subjects, or how to present a new vision without new sources.

What to do when not all parts of your biographical subject’s life are equal, when the first part of the life seems the most exciting, for example, or when interest only really builds in the last part of the subject’s life.

The answer to who deserves a biography is everyone, or anyone. It all depends on the materials you have, if the story moves you, and you know how to tell it.

My tribute to one of the great biographers of our time and why her work matters, and why biography matters.

A quick explanation of how it all started with Marilyn Monroe.

My account for forty years of dealing with fair use, biographical subjects, and publishers.

How dating all the days of a life provide a different way of approaching what is left out in other biographies.

I look at how biographers have begun their biographies and the merits of different kinds of openings and why biography has been called factitious.

I read from the last paragraphs of Plath biographies, commenting on them, and explain my own choices in writing American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath.

Who is the biographer? And why does it matter?

I give a sense of the interplay between Faulkner the man, his fiction, and his film writing.

I explore why it is that Sylvia Plath never seemed to be aware of Rebecca West, a world class writer, who still has so much to say to the readers of Plath and of modern literature.

Why I wrote these two books and what in the world Plath and Faulkner have to do with the world around us.

How I began my work on Faulkner; what I mean by an intertextual biography; why Joan Crawford matters in a Faulkner biography; Faulkner as diplomat; what Faulkner to read first.

A two-minute podcast. Call it “The Elevator Pitch.”

In about twelve minutes I talk about what it was like in the last days of Sylvia Plath, how people have reacted to her death, and why I think it wasn’t all just sad.