biography
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Spouses and the Creative People They Marry
Writers love writing about other writers’s wives. The spouse of a creative person has recently become a popular subject to novelize. But this fad is just a cheap trick, says Sarah Weinman in New Republic, that frees authors from the biographic…
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The Life Behind the Stories
Step inside Neil Gaiman’s surreal artistic world with Hayley Campbell’s recently released book examining his personal archives. Drawings, notes, and letters in The Art of Neil Gaiman give cult fans and curious newcomers an intimate insight into the fantasy novelist’s…
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Hair-Combing with Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Gabriel García Márquez accolades continue to roll in—over at The Paris Review, the complete text of Silvana Paternostro’s oral biography of Márquez is available. It’s full of enlightening tidbits from the author’s friends and family, like: GUILLERMO ANGULO: His greatest inspiration was his grandmother. One of his…
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Biography and the Digital Self
After centuries of shuffling papers, biographers must now deal with the sudden digitization of the self, and the behavioral changes that have followed. Over at The Millions, Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin considers how email technology has affected biography—and what’s gotten lost in…
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Rockwell and the Law of Opposites
In the New Yorker, Lee Siegel sheds light on the oft-seen contradiction between artists and their art in her review of Deborah Solomon’s biography “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell.” In contrast to his idealized paintings of…
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The Rumpus Interview with Tom Reiss
Journalist and biographer Tom Reiss sits down and explores the idea that, “however obscure his subjects might be, he [is] a writer first and foremost, obsessed with getting the details right while crafting a story that could propel even a…
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Saturday History Lessons: On Emily Hale and T.S. Eliot
One February night in T.S. Eliot’s mid-twenties, he went his aunt’s house in Boston. It was 1913, and the occasion was one of those delightful-sounding “evenings of amateur theatricals” that no one bothers with anymore. (It’s a tradition that really…