Carl Rollyson

Though numerous biographies have been published on William Faulkner, readers are often presented conflicting interpretations of his life and work. Faulkner’s view of himself and his own family was mercurial, and it is widely acknowledged that Faulkner was an unreliable narrator of his own life. As a result, biographies of Faulkner echo and complicate the multitude of ways he portrayed himself, accepting that truth—if it exists—is subjective. Like his work, Faulkner’s own life, then, is not only open to different readings but welcomes them within the landscape of his oeuvre.Faulkner On and Off the Page acknowledges the challenges of "factifying" a life into a textual narrative, while also emphasizing the potential for biography to establish a throughline that traces how literature emerges from life and, in turn, shapes the life narrative Faulkner constructed for himself. Unburdened by the sanctity of the written word, Faulkner embraced mutability and perpetual evolution. This process of reinvention also manifests within the pages of Faulkner's biographies, as each biographer brings a unique context and perspective shaped by generations of Faulkner scholars.Rather than thinking of Faulkner as exclusively the great high modernist who strayed to Hollywood when he needed the money and stayed home when he didn’t, this book portrays an unsettled writer incessantly on the move incorporating what only looked like alien elements into his work, while maintaining a public persona that disparaged anything that did not fit the narrative of the novelist he created in interviews, essays, and speeches. This book attempts to carry on the work of finding the man on the page even as he is shaping a life off of it.

Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath has also been fueled in part by the tragic nature of her death. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath have appeared over the last fifty-five years which mainly focus on her death or contain projections of an array of points of view about the writer. Until now, little sustained attention has been paid to the influences on Plath’s life and work. What movies did she watch? Which books did she read? How did media shape her worldview? In this meticulously researched biography, Carl Rollyson explores the intricate web of literature, cinema, spirituality, psychology, and popular culture that profoundly influenced Plath's life and writing. At the heart of this biography is a compelling exploration of William Sheldon’s seminal work, Psychology and the Promethean Will, which Plath devoured in her quest for self-discovery and understanding. Through Plath’s intense study of this work, readers gain unprecedented access to Plath's innermost thoughts, her therapeutic treatments, and the overarching worldview that fueled her creative genius. Through Sheldon as well as Plath’s other influences, Rollyson offers a captivating survey of the symbiotic relationship between an artist and the world around her and offers readers new insights into the enigmatic mind of one of most important writers of the twentieth century.

Since her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience, ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath was also fueled in part by the nature of her death—a suicide while she was estranged from her husband, Ted Hughes, who was himself a noteworthy British poet. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath, projecting an array of points of view about their subject, has appeared over the last fifty-five years. Now biographer Carl Rollyson, the author of two previous biographical studies of Plath, has surveyed the vast amount of material on Plath, including her biographies, her autobiographical writings, and previously unpublished material, and distilled that data into the two volumes of Sylvia Plath Day by Day. As the follow-up to volume 1, volume 2 commences on February 14, 1955, the day Plath wrote to her mother declaring her intention to study in England, a decision that marked a major turning point in her life. With brief signposts provided by the author, this volume follows Plath through the entirety of her marriage to Hughes, the challenges of simultaneously raising a family and nourishing her own creativity, and the major depressive episodes that ultimately led to her suicide in 1963. By providing new angles and perspectives on the life of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poets, Sylvia Plath Day by Day offers a comprehensive image of its enigmatic subject.

Dana Andrews (1909–1992) worked with distinguished directors such as John Ford, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, William A. Wellman, Mervyn Le Roy, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan. He played romantic leads alongside the great beauties of the modern screen, including Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Linda Darnell, Susan Hayward, Maureen O'Hara, and most important of all, Gene Tierney, with whom he did five films. Retrospectives of his work often elicit high praise for an underrated actor, a master of the minimalist style. His image personified the "male mask" of the 1940s in classic films such as Laura, Fallen Angel, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, in which he played the "masculine ideal of steely impassivity." No comprehensive discussion of film noir can neglect his performances. He was an "actor's actor."Here at last is the complete story of a great actor, his difficult struggle to overcome alcoholism while enjoying the accolades of his contemporaries, a successful term as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and the love of family and friends that never deserted him. Based on diaries, letters, home movies, and other documents, this biography explores the mystery of a poor boy from Texas who made his Hollywood dream come true even as he sought a life apart from the limelight and the backbiting of contemporaries jockeying for prizes and prestige. Called "one of nature's noblemen" by his fellow actor Norman Lloyd, Dana Andrews emerges from Hollywood Enigma as an admirable American success story, fighting his inner demons and ultimately winning.

Since Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963, she has become the subject of a constant stream of books, biographies, and articles. She has been hailed as a groundbreaking poet for her starkly beautiful poems in Ariel and as a brilliant forerunner of the feminist coming-of-age novel in her semiautobiographical The Bell Jar. Each new biography has offered insight and sources with which to measure Plath’s life and influence. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, a two-volume series, offers a distillation of this data without the inherent bias of a narrative.Volume 1 commences with Plath’s birth in Boston in 1932, records her response to her elementary and high school years, her entry into Smith College, and her breakdown and suicide attempt, and ends on February 14, 1955, the day she wrote to Ruth Cohen, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, to accept admission as an "affiliated student at Newnham College to read for the English Tripos." Sylvia Plath Day by Day is for readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the woman and her work. The entries are suitable for dipping into and can be read in a minute or an hour. Ranging over several sources, including Plath’s diaries, journals, letters, stories, and other prose and poetry—including new material and archived material rarely seen by readers—a fresh kaleidoscopic view of the writer emerges.

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.

With the publication of Susan Sontag's diaries, the development of her career can now be evaluated in a more genetic sense, so that the origins of her ideas and plans for publication are made plain in the context of her role as a public intellectual, who is increasingly aware of her impact on her culture. In Understanding Susan Sontag, Carl Rollyson not only provides an introduction to her essays, novels, plays, films, diaries, and uncollected work published in various periodicals, he now has a lens through which to reevaluate classic texts such as Against Interpretation and On Photography, providing both students and advanced scholars a renewed sense of her importance and impact. Rollyson devotes separate chapters to Sontag's biography; her early novels; her landmark essay collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will; her films; her major mid-career books, On Photography and its sequel, Regarding the Pain of Others; and Illness as Metaphor and its sequel, AIDS and Its Metaphors, together with her groundbreaking short story, "The Way We Live Now." Sontag's later essay collections and biographical profiles, collected in Under the Sign of Saturn, Where the Stress Falls, and At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, also receive a fresh assessment, as does her later work in short fiction, the novel, and drama, with a chapter discussing I, etcetera; two historical novels, The Volcano Lover and In America; and her plays, A Parsifal, Alice in Bed, and her adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. Chapters on her diaries and uncollected prose, along with a primary and secondary bibliography, complete this comprehensive study.

With the publication of Susan Sontag's diaries, the development of her career can now be evaluated in a more genetic sense, so that the origins of her ideas and plans for publication are made plain in the context of her role as a public intellectual, who is increasingly aware of her impact on her culture. In Understanding Susan Sontag, Carl Rollyson not only provides an introduction to her essays, novels, plays, films, diaries, and uncollected work published in various periodicals, he now has a lens through which to reevaluate classic texts such as Against Interpretation and On Photography, providing both students and advanced scholars a renewed sense of her importance and impact.Rollyson devotes separate chapters to Sontag’s biography; her early novels; her landmark essay collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will; her films; her major mid-career books, On Photography and its sequel, Regarding the Pain of Others; and Illness as Metaphor and its sequel, AIDS and Its Metaphors, together with her groundbreaking short story, “The Way We Live Now.” Sontag’s later essay collections and biographical profiles, collected in Under the Sign of Saturn, Where the Stress Falls, and At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, also receive a fresh assessment, as does her later work in short fiction, the novel, and drama, with a chapter discussing I, etcetera; two historical novels, The Volcano Lover and In America; and her plays, A Parsifal, Alice in Bed, and her adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. Chapters on her diaries and uncollected prose, along with a primary and secondary bibliography, complete this comprehensive study.

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.

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. The authors reveal as never before her early years in Tucson and Los Angeles, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her longing for her absent father, and her precocious achievements at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Papers, diaries, and lecture notes, many accessible for the first time, spark a passionate fire in this biography.The authors follow Sontag as she abruptly ends an early first marriage, establishes herself in Paris, and embraces the open lifestyle she began as a teenager in Berkeley. As a single mother she struggled with teaching at Columbia University and other colleges while aiming for a career as a novelist and essayist. Eventually she made her own way in New York City after acquiring her one and only publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.In her later years Sontag became a world figure, a tastemaker, dramatist, and political activist who risked her life in besieged Sarajevo. Love affairs with men and women troubled her. Diagnosed with cancer, she responded with determination, and her experience with illness inspired some of her best writing. This biography shows Sontag always craving ""more life"" at whatever cost and depicts her harrowing final decline even as she resisted terminal cancer. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated presents in candid and stark relief a new assessment of a heroic and controversial figure.

From hefty biographies and fact-based novels to photograph collections and memoirs, more books have been written about Marilyn Monroe than any other female over the past century. However, no biography—regardless how authoritative—can contain all of the facts and events of an individual’s life, and Marilyn’s is no exception. In Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events, Carl Rollyson provides a documentary approach to the life and legend of this singular personality. With details of her childhood, her young adult years, her ascent to superstardom, and the hour by hour moments leading to her tragic early death, this volume supplements—and, in some cases, corrects—the accounts of previous biographies. In addition to restoring what is left out in other narratives about Marilyn’s life, this book also illuminates the gaps and discrepancies that still exist in our knowledge of her. Drawing on excerpts from her diaries, journals, letters, and even checks and receipts—as well as reports of others—Rollyson recreates the day-to-day world of a woman who still fascinates us more than fifty years after her death. In addition to the calendar, Rollyson also profiles important figures in Marilyn’s life and includes a brief biography of the actress, providing a context for the timeline. An annotated bibliography of books and websites highlights the most reliable sources about Marilyn. With its vivid recreation of the key events in her life, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day is the perfect book for fans who can’t get enough of this cultural icon.

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. An account of a life, he believes, should adhere to the truth as the biographer sees it, not to the sentiments of others. 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: how to assemble proposals for publishers, conduct interviews and archival research, and joust with editors, subjects and their literary estates. Other biographers have described their process but remained discrete, not wishing to offend their sources and supporters. This author has forgone such caution.

Walter Brennan (1894-1974) was one of the greatest character actors in Hollywood history. He won three Academy Awards and became a national icon starring as Grandpa in The Real McCoys. He appeared in over two hundred motion pictures and became the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting, which celebrated the actor's unique role as the voice of the American Western. His life journey from Swampscott, Massachusetts, to Hollywood, to a twelve thousand-acre cattle ranch in Joseph, Oregon, is one of the great American stories.In the first biography of this epic figure, Carl Rollyson reveals Brennan's consummate mastery of virtually every kind of role while playing against and often stealing scenes from such stars as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne. Rollyson fully explores Brennan's work with Hollywood's greatest directors, such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Fritz Lang. As a father and grandfather, Brennan instilled generations of his family with an outlook on the American Dream that remains a sustaining feature of their lives today. His conservative politics, which grew out of his New England upbringing and his devout Catholicism, receive meticulous attention and a balanced assessment in A Real American Character.Written with the full cooperation of the Brennan family and drawing on material in archives from every region of the United States, this new biography presents an artist and family man who lived and breathed an American idealism that made him the Real McCoy.

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.

Sam Goldwyn's career spanned almost the entire history of Hollywood. He made his first film, The Squaw Man, in 1913, and he died in 1974 at the age of ninety-one. In the many years between, he produced an enormous number of films--including such classics as Wuthering Heights, Street Scene, Arrowsmith, Dodsworth, The Little Foxes, and The Best Years of Our Lives--and worked with many luminaries--Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, Laurence Olivier, George Balanchine, Lillian Hellman, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Eddie Cantor, Busby Berkeley, Danny Kaye, Merle Oberon, and Bob Hope among them. When Samuel Goldfisch was born in the Warsaw ghetto, he was penniless; when Sam Goldwyn died in Los Angeles, he was worth an estimated $19 million. The Search for Sam Goldwyn locates the real Sam Goldwyn and shatters the ""hostile conspiracy of silence"" that protected his legend. In writing Goldwyn's story, Carol Easton has given us a fine examination of ""the civilization known as Hollywood"" and how Goldwyn himself shaped that culture.

The controversial American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), a founding member of the Imagist group that included D. H. Lawrence and H. D., excelled as the impresario for the “new poetry” that became news across the U. S. in the years after World War I. Maligned by T. S. Eliot as the “demon saleswoman” of poetry, and ridiculed by Ezra Pound, Lowell has been treated by previous biographers as an obese, sex-starved, inferior poet who smoked cigars and made a spectacle of herself, canvassing the country on lecture tours that drew crowds in the hundreds for her electrifying performances. In fact, Lowell wrote some of the finest love lyrics of the 20th century and led a full and loving life with her constant companion, the retired actress Ada Russell. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1926. This provocative new biography, the first in forty years, restores Amy Lowell to her full humanity in an era that, at last, is beginning to appreciate the contributions of gays and lesbians to American’s cultural heritage. Drawing on newly discovered letters and papers, Rollyson’s biography finally gives this vibrant poet her due.

Dana Andrews (1909-1992) worked with distinguished directors such as John Ford, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, William A. Wellman, Mervyn Le Roy, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan. He played romantic leads alongside the great beauties of the modern screen, including Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Linda Darnell, Susan Hayward, Maureen O'Hara, and most important of all, Gene Tierney, with whom he did five films. Retrospectives of his work often elicit high praise for an underrated actor, a master of the minimalist style. His image personified the ""male mask"" of the 1940s in classic films such as Laura, Fallen Angel, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, in which he played the ""masculine ideal of steely impassivity."" No comprehensive discussion of film noir can neglect his performances. He was an ""actor's actor."" Here at last is the complete story of a great actor, his difficult struggle to overcome alcoholism while enjoying the accolades of his contemporaries, a successful term as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and the love of family and friends that never deserted him. Based on diaries, letters, home movies, and other documents, this biography explores the mystery of a poor boy from Texas who made his Hollywood dream come true even as he sought a life apart from the limelight and the backbiting of contemporaries jockeying for prizes and prestige. Called ""one of nature's noblemen"" by his fellow actor Norman Lloyd, Dana Andrews emerges from Hollywood Enigma as an admirable American success story, fighting his inner demons and ultimately winning.