Mr. Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of…
The range of Meyers’s interests and his authoritative command of his subjects is impressive, and unlike Plutarch he does not just do a chapter about two figures and then move on.
The editors of this volume make no effort to compare presidents, but instead want to categorize the types of love letters they wrote in sections titled: Romancing, Separation, Adversity, and Lovers.
This is what happens in big cities, Thomas Jefferson might have said, as the sage of Monticello extolled yeoman farmers and blasted his rival, the urbane Alexander Hamilton, and the peculations of his urban cronies.
Emily Van Dyne shows that Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, sought to dominate the legacy of the dead poet by creating a malign mythology in his book, ‘Birthday Letters.’
Together, Lawrence Wells’s two books explore many fascinating aspects of fiction and biography, of what we choose to believe and why we often want to suspend disbelief.
The appetite for conventional literary biography seems to have narrowed as biographers increasingly exercise their own voices.
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