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biography

A very Texan story: Shelby Hearon writes Barbara Jordan’s biography

February 25, 2019 - Nina Tarnawsky

People always want you to be born where you are. They want you to have leaped from the womb a public figure. It just doesn’t go that way. I am the composite of my experience and all the people who had something to do with it. And I’m going to try to lay that out. —Barbara Charline Jordan [Read more…] about A very Texan story: Shelby Hearon writes Barbara Jordan’s biography

Filed Under: Research + Teaching Tagged With: Barbara Jordan, biography, Shelby Hearon Papers

Love and jazz

September 28, 2018 - Austin Downey

Maxine Gordon has loved jazz music all her life. From going to hear Miles Davis and John Coltrane as a teenager, to working as a road manager and promoter when she was a young woman, to becoming the personal manager and ultimately the wife of one of the most influential jazz artists of the twentieth century, Maxine has seen it all. She makes full use of these experiences in her new book, Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon (University of California Press). [Read more…] about Love and jazz

Filed Under: Exhibitions + Events, Film, Research + Teaching Tagged With: African-American, biography, Jazz, Music

The Art of American Crime: Q&A with Dr. Jerome Loving on Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song”

March 2, 2017 - Marissa Kessenich

In a review for The New Republic, Sarah Weinman says of Jerome Loving’s recently released biography, “Jack and Norman is a book that makes one wonder why it took so long for someone to write a full-length treatment of the whole mess.” [Read more…] about The Art of American Crime: Q&A with Dr. Jerome Loving on Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song”

Filed Under: Authors, Books + Manuscripts, Research + Teaching Tagged With: ” The Executioner’s Song, biography, In the Belly of the Beast, Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song, Jack Henry Abbott, Jerome Loving, nonfiction, Norman Mailer

Frederick Douglass and the Mass Meeting for Civil Rights

February 21, 2017 - Danielle Sigler

A portrait of Frederick Douglass from the frontispiece of My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855).

February 20, 2017, marks the 122nd anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s death. Douglass (1818–1895), an abolitionist and activist for civil rights, was a gifted writer and orator. [Read more…] about Frederick Douglass and the Mass Meeting for Civil Rights

Filed Under: Authors, Research + Teaching Tagged With: abolition, abolitionist, African American History Month, African-American, biography, Black History Month, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Act, Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Danielle Brune Sigler, Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Slave Act, My Bondage and My Freedom, prejudice, slavery, Supreme Court

Biography sheds light on William Cameron Menzies, the first production designer

February 4, 2016 - Harry Ransom Center

Gone With The Wind production designer William Cameron Menzies.

While researching his recent book William Cameron Menzies: The Shape of Films to Come, author James Curtis visited the Ransom Center to seek insight about Menzies’s career. Menzies worked with producer David O. Selznick on several projects, including Gone With The Wind and Spellbound. Using the Selznick collection at the Ransom Center, Curtis was able to research the work and efforts of the film industry’s first production designer. Below, Curtis recounts some of his findings. [Read more…] about Biography sheds light on William Cameron Menzies, the first production designer

Filed Under: Film, Research + Teaching Tagged With: art director, biography, David O. Selznick, Gone with the Wind, James Curtis, mkex, production designer, William Cameron Menzies

Biographer Hermione Lee discovers author Penelope Fitzgerald’s “heart and meaning” in the archives

March 17, 2015 - Marlene Renz

Cover of "Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life" by Hermione Lee.

Hermione Lee is a well-known biographer of literary figures, admired for scrupulously researching her subjects. Her recent book, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (2013), details the life of the late-blooming author as Lee discovered her in the archives.

 

Lee will speak at the Ransom Center about her experiences pursuing subjects through their archives on Wednesday, April 8 at 4 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public, but seating is first-come first-served.

 

In anticipation of Lee’s visit, Cultural Compass reached out to her about her work and research.

 

 

How do you choose your subjects for a biography?

I choose my subjects out of a passionate admiration for their work, a desire to communicate that admiration and interest in their lives as broadly as possible, and a sense that I haven’t yet read the biography I want to read about them–so had better write it myself.

 

 

During her lifetime Penelope Fitzgerald wrote three biographies.  What was it like applying the same act of analysis to her?

I would have liked to take a leaf out of her book and write a very slim, cryptic, suggestive book about her, since she felt it “insulted the reader to explain too much.” But as I was writing the first biography of her and as she is not a mainstream, popular writer, I felt I needed to write at more length and with more detail than she would have done herself. However, my motives were the same as the motives which led her to write biography: a desire to communicate to as wide an audience as possible the heart and meaning of her life and work. Fitzgerald’s biography of Charlotte Mew, an unjustly neglected early-twentieth-century English woman poet, was particularly in my mind when I was writing my biography.

 

 

There are more than 800 footnotes in your book.  Is that average or unusual in a biography?

Some biographers put their footnotes on line, some don’t have many, some have many more. I like readers to know where the facts have come from.

 

 

Fitzgerald was a private person.  How does that make the work of a biographer more challenging?

There were times when I felt she would have resisted what I was doing, had she still been alive, but there were also times when I hoped that the attention I was drawing to her writing would have pleased her. Many of her secrets remain with her, and I admire and appreciate that, even though it can also be frustrating.

 

 

Can you talk about your research in the Ransom Center’s Penelope Fitzgerald archive? What insight did her personal papers provide?

My work in the archive was invaluable to me. It contains many of her manuscripts, letters to readers and publishers, notebooks, and first drafts. I understood her writing much better-particularly her brilliant use of sources for her novels–when I had worked in the archive.

 

 

Were you drawn to a particular item in the collection?

I was very moved by the last, unfinished story in her notebook, which ends, like so much of her life, with a mystery and a secret. I end my biography with it.

 

 

You are working on a biography of Tom Stoppard.  Have you worked with the Stoppard papers in the Ransom Center’s collections?

I am starting work in the archive now, with great excitement and anticipation.

 

 

Related content:

Remembering Penelope Fitzgerald: “We Can Only Hope It Keeps Going.”

 

 

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Cover of "Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life" by Hermione Lee.
Cover of “Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life” by Hermione Lee.

Filed Under: Authors, Books + Manuscripts, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archives, biography, Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald, Research, Tom Stoppard

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