Best author biographies
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The Best Author Biographies To Keep You Turning the Pages
What do we really know about our favorite authors? We come to feel as though we know them through their books, stories, and poems, but often their lives remain tantalizingly out of reach. Some live in the public eye, while others shun the spotlight, but most of the time, writers are overshadowed by their own oeuvres.
Not in these 10 author biographies, however, which shed light on the lives (secret and otherwise) of some of our most beloved authors, from Walt Whitman to Virginia Woolf and far beyond. Containing Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning volumes among its own number, these 10 biographies are must-reads for fans of these fascinating authors – and great writing in general!
Looking for Anne of Green Gables
By Irene Gammel
While people all over the world have been following the exploits of little Anne Shirley – better known as Anne of Green Gables – for over a century, considerably less
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Literary Biographies
Following are literary biographies reviewed by The New York Times Book Review since Dec. 31,
Alice Walker: A LifeBy EVELYN C. WHITE
Evelyn C. White traces the writer's life from her days as the child of Georgia sharecroppers to the international triumph of "The Color Purple."
Allen Tate: Orphan of the South
By THOMAS A. UNDERWOOD
A biography of the critic Allen Tate focuses on his Southern aesthetics.
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
By MIRANDA CARTER
Miranda Carter has written a biography of the enigmatic art historian who was surveyor of Britain's royal pictures and a secret Soviet spy.
Anthony Powell: A Life
By MICHAEL BARBER
The first full-length life of Powell fryst vatten chatty and jokey in a manner peculiar to British biographers.
The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara
By GEOFFREY WOLFF
Geoffrey Wolff looks past John O'Hara's reputation as an ogre to get to the writer who shook up 20th-century fiction.
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Top 10 literary biographies
The idea of writing about authors is, for me, irresistible, and I’ve just published my seventh. It was about Gore Vidal and I have often recalled Vidal’s wise suggestion (made 30 years ago) that I should write about major figures, as important lives make for Important Lives.
Needless to say, anyone involved in this business becomes a student of Great Lives, and I’ve spent decades reading and rereading my favourite examples in the genre. The beginning of literary biography for anyone is probably Boswell’s classic life of Samuel Johnson (), an entertaining portrait of the inimitable sage, or such Victorian treasures as Elizabeth Gaskell’s astute life of Charlotte Brontë () or John Forster’s intimate biography of Charles Dickens (), his close friend. The 20th century saw many fine literary biographies emerging on both sides of the Atlantic, but it also produced numerous heavy and boring tomes: on the American side Mark Schorer’s staggeringly detailed life