Talks and interviews about the life of biography as experienced by a biographer over forty years and fourteen biographies, dealing with subjects ranging from Sylvia Plath to William Faulkner, Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag, and much more.
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You think you know the Plath story? Ah, but who gets to tell it, and why do they do so, and how does someone like Ted Hughes commandeer the narrative?
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Ghostwriter, biographer, novelist, Shakespeare, Faulkner—we cover it all in Lawrence Wells’s work
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What happens when a writer is hired to do a biographical novel seeking to prove Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, and how years later, the project becomes two books of nonfiction and fiction
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Marcia Biderman writes biography like a mystery story. There is much to learn from her.
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This won’t take long.
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Advice you may not want to take.
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An important Faulkner critic and biographer introduces us to new way of understanding Faulkner, his fiction, and his life
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A loading issue made me repost this exciting talk with Roger Lewis.
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A talk with Jared Stearns about his new biography of Marilyn Chambers and the world of hardcore
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How does a biographer deal with the world of pornography and so-called porn stars. Jared Stearns knows how in his biography, Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers.
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The Existential Loneliness of the Long Distance Biographer
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1:09:42
This podcast is not as pretentious or self-pitying as you might suppose.
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Ray Boomhower talks about what it is like to be a journalist in Vietnam and about what it is like writing biographies of journalists.
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I had fun with this one. I really let it rip, if I do say so myself.
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Lois Banner, biographer of Marilyn Monroe, turns to Garbo, learns Swedish, and discovers all sorts of important sources not to be found in previous biographies.
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Mary Dearborn does a valiant job of dealing with my interruptions in our discussion of her splendid biography of Carson McCullers.
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You might want to read Plath’s poem “Mirror” as I explain my reactions to it as a biographer.
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How Rebecca Rego Barry discovered Carolyn Wells, and why she wrote a biography of a forgotten literary figure, and how she did it.
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Paul Alexander talks about his new state of the art biography of Billie Holiday. I listened and I learned.
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My listeners respond and I comment on their comments
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A rambling meditation on the biographer as exile.
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A talk with Marian Janssen, biographer of Carolyn Kizer, one of the wild women of American poetry
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A talk with the delightful Marian Janssen who describes her career as a biographer and why she chose to write about the American poet Carolyn Kizer.
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I explain what happened when I became part of the lives of my two subjects while researching and writing To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie and A Private Life of Michael Foot
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You’ve heard of Chaplin and Keaton, but Al Christie?—the subject of Mark Kearney’s new biography
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Al Christie: Hollywood’s Forgotten Film Pioneer by Mark Kearney. A wide ranging discussion of a pioneer Hollywood filmmaker, how to write his biography, and what implications there are for biographers of film figures.
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How to do a biography as an audiobook
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Tim Christian describes the process of doing an audiobook, with some very specific advice and technical specifications.
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Biographer Ruth Laney discusses her decades of work on the life and world of Ernest J. Gaines
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Cherie Quarters: The Place and People That Inspire Ernest J. Gaines: biography, memoir, history, and an evocation of the material world out of which a great American writer fashioned his fiction.
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A brief podcast, what you might call a short snort, about those who malign biography.
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A talk with Henry Schlesinger about his book on Honey Traps and the biographies of alluring spies.
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A slightly trimmed version of my talk with Chris Wallace about biographers and political lives
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What happens when the biographer becomes part of the story? Chris Wallace shows us in her unique book, Political Lives.
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A conversation with Chris Wallace about her book Political Lives and how biographers get the story
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A discussion of a unique book by Chris Wallace, a journalist turned scholar, and how biographers interact with their subjects.
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Join David Fantle and Tom Johnson for a lively discussion of the backstory and performances and production of the MGM musical, Summer Stock
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How to deal with a figure so involved with conspiracy theories: What does a biography have to add to history?
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What happens when a biographer turns from the themes of his biography to a series of novels that are biographical and then some.
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What happened when T. S. Matthews decided to write the first biography of T. S. Eliot? Find out!
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A conversation with Karen Christensen about her edition of Writing The Great Tom as well as her own work on a biography of Valerie Eliot.
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An example from my Lillian Hellman biography.
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Larry Lockridge discusses his biography of his father Ross Lockridge and his novel Raintree County
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Listen to a fascinating discussion of how biographers deal with success and suicide and what happens when you discover details that fundamentally alter what is known about your subject.
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Why is it that some important actors are remembered and not others? Find out by listening to this discussion about Dan Van Neste’s biography of Warner Baxter.
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Movie making in Hollywood’s heyday, but also much that applies to today, to Netflix, Amazon, and the world of streaming
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Two biographers who befriended their subject and lived to tell an inspiring tale of a life well lived and a biography well written.
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Sexologist, gerontologist, novelist, poet, anarchist—just some of the work that Alex Comfort accomplished, the subject of a brilliant new biography.
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A podcast that reflects on how I got started on studying Sylvia Plath and why I’ve written so many books about her.
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Rachel Shteir takes us inside of making of her Jewish Lives biography of the author of The Feminine Mystique
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My response to an email asking me for help
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Forthcoming podcasts on new biographies of Betty Friedan, Warner Baxter, Alex Comfort, Eleanor Powell, Jack Ruby, T. S. Eliot and my working in progress on presidential biography
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My conversation with neurologist Steven Lomazow about his revelatory book about FDR and the impact of his health on biographies of Roosevelt
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Just remember: You are the one in charge of fair use. Don’t give your rights away.
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My talk with Marsha Gordon about her sensational new biography of an important writer you probably have never heard of.
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Knowing your subject may mean knowing his or her discourse, and the same can be said of reading biographies when considering the voices of biographer and subject.
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How I go about each day as a biographer, the sources I use, as I assemble my own archive and write my biography—in this case the one I’m working on now: Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero
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Find out
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A wide ranging discussion of how to write about science and medicine in a biographical narrative, with some talk of other biographers including Kai Bird and Hermione Lee
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A continuation of the previous podcast about the variables in understanding a writer and his world.
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