A Life in Biography
Carl Rollyson
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.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Jun 26, 2022 • 7h 31min
A Biography in Progress: Beth Phillips discusses Clifford Odets and why his work and life matter
What it takes for a biographer to do justice to a major American playwright
Jun 18, 2022 • 14min
The Biography I did not write
It is probably just as well
Jun 11, 2022 • 39min
To quote Robert Caro: “Turn Ever Page”
The history of publishing Plath’s letters and why it matters to biography
Jun 4, 2022 • 1h 23min
A talk with Alison Macor about her new book, The Making of The Best Years of Our Lives
A lesson here for how to write group biography as well the history of an epic film.
May 28, 2022 • 36min
War, trauma, and art in the life of Rudolf H. Sauter, and the process of biography
A wide ranging discussion of an artist interned during World War I and what he made of his life and art coming out of that trauma.
May 21, 2022 • 34min
A Faulknerian novel in which Faulkner appears
What happens when a novelist reads, writes like his subject, and puts that subject in a novel?
May 12, 2022 • 6h 55min
The Gatekeepers
You know what I mean, don’t you?
May 7, 2022 • 47min
A conversation with Michelle Morgan one of the masters of Marilyn Monroe biography
We delve deeply into a kind of time capsule of 1956, when Marilyn met the Queen and so much else
Apr 30, 2022 • 37min
A conversation with David O. Stewart about the worlds of biography and fiction
The overlapping worlds of biography and fiction and how they are inter-dependent
Apr 23, 2022 • 40min
A talk with master biographer, Nigel Hamilton.
About the making of a biographer and what keeps him at it.
