Bøger af Carl Rollyson

A unique analysis of the media, literature, and pop culture that shaped Sylvia Plath's literary achievement

The second and final volume in a series that details the daily life of one of America's most powerful, intriguing writers

A fascinating investigation into the life and art of one of America's greatest poets

William Faulkner has been the topic of numerous biographies, papers, and international attention. Yet there are no collected resources providing a comprehensive scope of Faulkner's life and work before now. William Faulkner Day by Day provides unique insight into the daily life of one of America's favorite writers. Beyond biography, this book is an effort to recover the diurnal Faulkner, to write in the present tense about past events as if they are happening now. More importantly, this book is concerned with more than the writer's life. Instead, it examines the whole man-the daily, mundane, profound, life changing, and everything in between. Spanning from the 1825 birth of Faulkner's great-grandfather to Faulkner's death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner's life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews. Populated by the characters of Faulkner's life-including family and friends both little known and internationally famous-this book is for Faulkner readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the man and his work.

The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of legend. Educated at Smith College, she had a conflicted relationship with her mother, Aurelia. She then married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the Sturm und Drang of literary celebrity. Her poems were fought over, rejected, accepted-and ultimately embraced by readers everywhere. At age thirty she committed suicide by putting her head in an oven while her children slept on the floor above in rooms she had sealed off from the poisonous gas. Ariel, a collection of poems she wrote at white-hot speed during her final months, became a modern classic. Her novel, The Bell Jar, has become a part of the literary canon, appearing on student reading lists worldwide. On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, Carl Rollyson gives us a new biography of Plath that shows her as a powerful figure who embraced both high and low culture to become the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature, a writer who wanted nothing less than to become central to the mythology of modern consciousness. American Isis is the first biography of Sylvia Plath to use materials newly deposited in the Ted Hughes archive at the British Library-including forty-one letters between Plath and Hughes-to create a fresh and startling look at this American icon.

Volume two of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of William Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated ""writer's writer"" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon.

The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary seventy-one year writing career. The general introductory studies of West are outdated and do not take into account her posthumous publications, or her large literary archive of unpublished letters and manuscripts. Previous scholarly books have chopped West up into categories and genres instead of following the evolution of her career.

This is the only comprehensive, annotated bibliography of writing about biography. Rollyson, a biographer and scholar of biography, includes chapters on the history of biography (beginning in the Greco-Roman period and concluding with biographers such as Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann). Ample sections on psychobiography, the new feminist biography, and on biographers who appear in works of fiction, are also included. Cited in many recent books on the genre of biography, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography, is an essential research tool as well as a clearly written work for those wishing to browse through the commentary on this important genre.

Martha Gellhorn died in February 1998, just shy of her 90th birthday. Well before her death, she had become a legend. She reported on wars from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s, and her travel books are considered classics. Her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, affairs with legendary lovers like H. G. Wells, and her relationships with two presidents, Roosevelt and Kennedy, reflect her campaigns against tyranny and deprivation, as well as her outrage at the corruption and cruelty of modern governments. This controversial and acclaimed biography portrays a vibrant and troubled woman who never tired of fighting for causes she considered just.

Originally selected by Faulkner scholars Blotner and Litz for their series on the author, this pathbreaking monograph contains a comprehensive and provocative discussion of Faulkner's historical vision. Drawing on the rich literature of historiography (including the writings of R. G. Collingwood and Herbert Butterfield), and on a wide-ranging body of scholarship on the historical novel (including discussions of Scott, Thackeray, and Conrad), Rollyson shrewdly probes Faulkner's dynamic and changing uses of the past. Also taking advantage of his own work as a biographer, Rollyson has updated, revised, and expanded his original bookextending his dialogue with recent Faulkner critics.

In American popular culture, Marilyn Monroe(1926-1962) has evolved in stature from movie superstar to American icon. Monroe's own understanding of her place in the American imagination and her effort to perfect her talent as an actress are explored with great sensitivity in Carl Rollyson's engaging narrative. He shows how movies became crucial events in the shaping of Monroe's identity. He regards her enduring gifts as a creative artist, discussing how her smaller roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve established the context for her career, while in-depth chapters on her more important roles in Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, and The Misfits provide the centerpiece of his examination of her life and career. Through extensive interviews with many of Monroe's colleagues, close friends, and other biographers, and a careful rethinking of the literature written about her, Rollyson is able to describe her use of Method acting and her studies with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg, head of the Actors' Studio in New York. The author also analyzes several of Monroe's own drawings, diary notes, and letters that have recently become available. With over thirty black and white photographs (some published for the first time), a new foreword, and a new afterword, this volume brings Rollyson's 1986 book up to date. From this comprehensive, yet critically measured wealth of material, Rollyson offers a distinctive and insightful portrait of Marilyn Monroe, highlighted by new perspectives that depict the central importance of acting to the authentic aspects of her being.

Dana Andrews worked with distinguished directors such as john Ford, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan. He played romantic leads alongside the great beauties of the screen: Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Maureen O'Hara, and most notably, Gene Tierney, with whom he shared five films.

Documentary Film: A Primer provides a succinct introduction to the nature of the documentary, drawing on examples from the work of Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Spalding Gray, Cindy Sherman, Susan Sontag, and others. The documentaries discussed cover a range of subjects including the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the worlds of fashion and sports. This incisive foray into the essentials of documentary is then buttressed by an in depth discussion of the career of Jill Craigie, a British director/writer who brought to the cinema an uncompromising socialist and feminist perspective during the Second World War. How Craigie got her films produced by a major studio, and why her work could not be replicated in postwar Britain, reveal not only the way documentaries are made but also why they remain a controversial and problematic genre.A selection of Rollyson's reviews of contemporary documentaries provides a model for discussing the genre. Students and fans of documentaries will find his list of classic documentaries on VHS and DVD and his excerpts from other critics of the genre of special interest. His topics for discussion section make this book a valuable resource for teachers as well.

Most book reviewers know very little about the history or the art of biography. Indeed, if there is any art in biography, it is the rare reviewer that acknowledges it or knows how to discuss it. Usually the reviewer regards biography as an occasion to wax eloquent about what he or she thinks of the subject. Little space, if any, is devoted to the biography's structure or style, to the biographer's peculiar problems, or to how the biography relates to others about the same subject.Carl Rollyson, a professional biographer and weekly columnist (On Biography) for The New York Sun, explores the ramifications of authorized and unauthorized biographies, investigates the relationship between biography and history, biography and fiction, biography and autobiography, as well commenting on certain perennial biographical subjects such as Napoleon, on sub genres such as children's biography, and on the most recent developments in life writing.Rollyson's aim is to reach not merely scholars but that vast general audience addicted to reading biography, enhancing their pleasure by providing insight (or you might say, the inside word) on how biographies are put together.

Essays in Biography is a play on words conveying Carl Rollyson's attempt to explore the nature of biography in pieces about the history of the genre and in portrayals of biographers (Plutarch, Leon Edel, and W. A. Swanberg), literary figures (Lillian Hellman, Jack London), philosophers and critics (Leo Strauss and Hippolyte Taine), political figures (Winston Churchill and Napoleon), and artists (Rembrandt and Rubens). An essay in biography, Rollyson argues, is an effort to comprehend a life that is inherently incomplete and subject to revision. Many of the facts about a biographical subject's life that are blandly presented in reference books have been discovered by biographers at great cost to their reputations. With the history of biography as a censored genre in mind, he encourages readers of biography to look critically at the biographies they read--no matter whether those biographies are book-length narratives or short encyclopedia entries.Many of the pairings in Essays in Biography are meant to evoke Plutarch's presentation of "parallel lives." The biographical essay, Rollyson concludes, is a unique form of knowledge, one that modern critics have devalued by trying to separate the creator from his creation.

This first biography of Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is now fully revised and updated, providing an even more intimate portrayal of the influential writer's life and career. The authors base this revision on Sontag's newly released private correspondence - including emails - and the letters and memoirs of those who knew her best.

Some critics rank biographers just above serial murderers. The author of this book, a self-described member of the Samuel Johnson school, doesn't share this view. This memoir of a professional biographer's life tells the inside story of how he became interested in his subjects and reveals the mechanics of the trade.

Walter Brennan (1894-1974) was one of the greatest character actors in Hollywood history. He appeared in over two hundred motion pictures and became the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. In this biography, Carl Rollyson reveals Brennan's mastery of virtually every kind of role while playing against and often stealing scenes from such stars as Gary Cooper and John Wayne.

Amy Lowell has been extolled as a founding member of the Imagist group, derided as the "demon saleswoman" of poetry, and shunned as a lesbian, cigar-smoking sensationalist. This provocative biography draws on newly discovered material to restore the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet to her full humanity in an era that, at last, is beginning to appreciate the contributions of gays and lesbians to America's heritage.