American BiographyiUniverse, 22 лют. 2006 р. - 302 стор. This collection of reviews, selected from Rollyson's New York Sun column, is as much about the romance of biography as it is about the American lives. Certain concerns resonate throughout the book: the American left's failure to reckon with Communist subversion, McCarthyism, and Stalinism, the problematic nature of authorized biography, the history of American biography, definitive biographies, literary biography, the differences between autobiography and biography, the importance of interviews in biographies of contemporary figures, the differences between history and biography, comparative biographies, the virtues of short biographies and of biographies for children, the tendency of biographers to fictionalize and of novelists to biographize, psychology and biography, Rollyson's own experience as a biographer, and the way biographers treat one another's work. Too many biographers, he believes, evince no interest in the biographical tradition. Concerned only with possession of their subjects, their proprietorial attitude deforms not only their biographies but also the genre itself. If biography is reviewed badly (receiving hardly more than a summary of the subject's life with a perfunctory nod to the biographer), it is because the biographical tradition has been disregarded or discounted. This book, in other words, has been written on the behalf of biography, a genre that still awaits a full vindication. |
Зміст
| 13 | |
BILL CLINTON | 26 |
JONATHAN EDWARDS | 42 |
ZELDA FITZGERALD | 57 |
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN | 64 |
ARSHILE GORKY | 72 |
ALEXANDER HAMILTON | 78 |
LILLIAN HELLMAN | 85 |
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS | 172 |
GREGORY PECK | 178 |
POCAHONTAS | 185 |
RONALD REAGAN | 192 |
KENNETH REXROTH | 199 |
THEODORE ROOSEVELT | 207 |
HENRY ROTH | 214 |
CARL SANDBURG | 220 |
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH | 93 |
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS | 101 |
HENRY JAMES | 107 |
JOHN JAY | 114 |
WELDON KEES | 120 |
CANADA LEE | 127 |
ABRAHAM LINCOLN | 133 |
CAROLE LOMBARD | 142 |
AUDRE LORD | 148 |
MICHAEL MCGIVNEY | 156 |
MARGARET MEAD AND RUTH BENEDICT | 159 |
LEE MILLER | 166 |
BETTY SHABAZZ | 228 |
JEAN STAFFORD | 234 |
EDWARD TELLER | 241 |
CLARENCE THOMAS | 244 |
MARK TWAIN | 251 |
GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THOMAS JEFFERSON | 257 |
MARTHA WASHINGTON | 263 |
EUDORA WELTY | 269 |
WOODROW WILSON | 276 |
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT | 282 |
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acknowledges American Arshile Gorky artist Audubon believed Betty Shabazz biog biogra biographer’s biography Bowles Brookhiser called career character Clinton Coffin Colson Communist critics definitive difficult Dreiser EDWARD HOPPER Edwards Edwards’s example Farrell father Faulkner fiction field figure film find fine first Franklin friends Gellhorn genre Gordon Gorky H. L. MENCKEN Hamilton Hemingway Henry James Highsmith historian Hopper husband interviews James’s Jefferson John JOHN JAMES AUDUBON Kaplan Kazan Kennedy Lillian Hellman Lincoln literary literature lives Marilyn Monroe Mark Twain marriage Martha Martha Gellhorn McCarthy McCarthy’s McGivney Mencken Morris narrative never novel novelist office Oppenheimer Paul Bowles pher Plath Poe’s poet political portrait President Professor Dallek readers reviewers Rexroth role Ronald Reagan Roosevelt Ross seems sense Shriver significant Soviet Stafford story Sylvia Sylvia Plath tion Tubman wanted Washington Welty wife Wilson woman women words writing wrote Zelda
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Сторінка 146 - Comes the thought of other years. And I think how many thousands Of care-encumbered men, Each bearing his burden of sorrow, Have crossed the bridge since then. I see the long procession Still passing to and fro, The young heart hot and restless, And the old subdued and slow ! And forever and forever, As long as the river flows, As long as the heart has passions, As long as life has woes ; The moon and its broken reflection And its shadows shall appear, As the symbol of love in heaven, And its wavering...
Сторінка 52 - The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.
Сторінка 258 - The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.
Сторінка 258 - My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.
Сторінка 102 - He's telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!" and at his bidding dim forms began to mount the fences and follow him up to his veranda. "Now go on!
Сторінка 42 - Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell ; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf...
Сторінка 22 - I had always felt extremely circumscribed in music. It seemed to me there were a great many things I wanted to say that were too precise to express in musical terms. Writing music was not enough of a cathartic.
Сторінка 263 - How joyfully I catch at the happy occasion of renewing a correspondence which I feared was disrelished on your part, I leave to time, that never failing expositor of all things, and to a monitor equally faithful in my own breast, to testify. In silence I now express my joy; silence, which in some cases, I wish the present, speaks more intelligently than the sweetest eloquence.
Сторінка 165 - Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.