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The shadow in the garden : a biographer's tale
\"The biographer--so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts--comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas's professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas's first subject, the 'self-doomed' poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the 'tall pines, ' as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the merciless pruning of mortality) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, 'a metaphysician of the ordinary.' Atlas revisits the lives and work of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called 'lives, ' Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them--'as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd'\"-- Back cover.
Book
Thomas Jefferson's lives : biographers and the battle for history
Who was the \"real\" Thomas Jefferson? If this question has an answer, it will probably not be revealed reading the many accounts of his life. For two centuries biographers have provided divergent perspectives on him as a man and conflicting appraisals of his accomplishments. Jefferson was controversial in his own time, and his propensity to polarize continued in the years after his death as biographers battled to control the commanding heights of history. To judge from their depictions, there existed many different Thomas Jeffersons.The essays in this book explore how individual biographers have shaped history-as well as how the interests and preoccupations of the times in which they wrote helped to shape their portrayals of Jefferson. In different eras biographers presented the third president variously as a proponent of individual rights or of majority rule, as a unifier or a fierce partisan, and as a champion of either American nationalism or cosmopolitanism. Conscripted to serve Whigs and Democrats, abolitionists and slaveholders, unionists and secessionists, Populists and Progressives, and seemingly every side of almost every subsequent struggle, the only constant was that Jefferson's image remained a mirror of Americans' self-conscious conceptions of their nation's virtues, values, and vices. Thomas Jefferson's Lives brings together leading scholars of Jefferson and his era, all of whom embrace the challenge to assess some of the most important and enduring accounts of Jefferson's life.Contributors:Jon Meacham, presidential historian * Barbara Oberg, Princeton University * J. Jefferson Looney, Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello * Christine Coalwell McDonald, Westchester Community College * Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University * Jan Ellen Lewis, Rutgers University * Richard Samuelson, California State University, San Bernardino * Nancy Isenberg, Louisiana State University * Joanne B. Freeman, Yale University * Brian Steele, University of Alabama at Birmingham * Herbert Sloan, Barnard College * R. B. Bernstein, City College of New York * Francis D. Cogliano, University of Edinburgh * Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University * Gordon S. Wood, Brown University.
eBook
Thomas Jefferson's lives : biographers and the battle for history
\"Who was the 'real' Thomas Jefferson? If this question has an answer, it will probably not be revealed to anyone attempting to read the many accounts of his life. For two centuries biographers have provided divergent perspectives on him as a man and conflicting appraisals of his accomplishments. Controversial in his own time, Jefferson's propensity to polarize continued in the years after his death as biographers battled to control the commanding heights of history. To judge from their depictions, there existed many different Thomas Jeffersons. This book explores how individual biographers have shaped history -- as well as how the interests and preoccupations of the times in which they wrote helped to shape their portrayals of Jefferson. In different eras biographers presented the third president as a proponent of individual rights and majority rule, as a unifier and a fierce partisan, as well as a champion of American nationalism and global citizenship. Conscripted to serve Whigs and Democrats, abolitionists and slaveholders, unionists and secessionists, Populists and Progressives, and seemingly every side of just about every subsequent struggle, the only constant was that Jefferson's image remained a mirror of Americans' self-conscious understanding of their nation's virtues and vices. Thomas Jefferson's Lives brings together leading scholars of Jefferson and his era, all of whom embrace the challenge to assess some of the most important and enduring accounts of Jefferson's life\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream
Do historians \"write their biographies\" with the subjects they choose to address in their research? In this collection, editors Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber compiled eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their own research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits, at times inspiring specific questions they asked of the nation's immigrant past. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large. Most have been pioneers not only in their respective fields, but also in representing their ethnic group within American academia. Some of the women in the group were in the vanguard of gender diversity in the discipline of history as well as on the faculties of the institutions where they have taught.
The authors in this collection represent a wide array of backgrounds, spanning Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. What they have in common is their passionate engagement with the making of social and personal identities and with finding a voice to explain their personal stories in public terms.
Contributors:Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, John Bodnar, María C. García, David A. Gerber, Violet M. Showers Johnson, Alan M. Kraut, Timothy J. Meagher, Deborah Dash Moore, Dominic A. Pacyga, Barbara M. Posadas, Eileen H. Tamura, Virginia Yans, Judy Yung
eBook
Ellmann's Joyce : the biography of a masterpiece and its maker
\"Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, published in 1959, has been called \"the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.\" Ellmann's Joyce provides the biography of the biography--an eye-opening account of how Ellmann's book came to be, the intrigue surrounding it, and its enduring impact on both criticism and the study of literary lives\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Biography as History
Banner proposes that there are many similarities between social and cultural history. At its best, biography, like history, is based on archival research, interweaves historical categories and methodologies, reflects current political and theoretical concerns, and raises complex issues of truth and proof. It challenges the analyst to move beyond easy platitudes to engage in \"thick description.\" Moreover, given the long tradition among biographers of writing accessible prose, biography challenges the historian to produce lucid writing--not always the standard among academic scholars.
Journal Article
Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography
Lepore contrasts an old genre of historical writing, biography, with a rather new one, microhistory. Unlike biography, which emphasizes the singularity and significance of an individual's life, microhistory takes an individual's life as an allegory of broader issues affecting a culture as a whole. Lepore surveys many works from historical fields to define the contours of microhistory.
Journal Article
Chiang Yee
A young man arrives in England in the 1930s, knowing few words of the English language. Yet, two years later he writes a successful English book on Chinese art, and within the following decade publishes more than a dozen others. This is the true story of Chiang Yee, a renowned writer, artist, and worldwide traveler, best known for theSilent Travellerseries--stories of England, the United States, Ireland, France, Japan, and Australia--all written in his humorous, delightfully refreshing, and enlightening literary style.
This biography is more than a recounting of extraordinary accomplishments. It also embraces the transatlantic life experience of Yee who traveled from China to England and then on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University, to his return to China in 1975, after a forty-two year absence. Interwoven is the history of the communist revolution in China; the battle to save England during World War II; the United States during the McCarthy red scare era; and, eventually, thawing Sino-American relations in the 1970s. Da Zheng uncovers Yee's encounters with racial exclusion and immigration laws, displacement, exile, and the pain and losses he endured hidden behind a popular public image.
eBook
Why Biography?
Kessler-Harris discusses why she chose to write a biography about Lillian Hellman. Hellman remained in such constant and lively dialogue with several of the key social and political currents of her day that makes her life intriguing. She offers access to four arenas that are central to understanding the direction of twentieth-century American society: the revolutionary transformation of sexual life and gender roles; the swirling political currents produced by the challenge of socialism and communism and the tensions of the Cold War; the fluctuating and contested nature of identity and its political uses; and the impact of a newly vibrant culture of celebrity. Through Hellman, she understood a little more fully the politics of the 1950s and after, and something of their larger role in shaping the worldviews of ordinary citizens and intellectuals alike.
Journal Article