Richardson’s chosen form is the “intellectual biography,” which means he attempts to read not only everything his subjects wrote, but everything they read as well. This immersion allows Richardson to tell the story of his subjects as if he were their contemporary, and to provide an uncanny portrait of that facet of the writer’s life that makes him or her worth remembering at all: the writer’s work and thought. “Aside from his learning, which is prodigious,” says Banville, “Richardson writes a wonderfully fluent, agile prose; he has a poet’s sense of nuance and a novelist’s grasp of dramatic rhythm… Can there be any more exciting critical writing than this?”

Richardson’s honors include the Melcher prize, the Parkman Prize, and the Bancroft Prize and in 1998 he was awarded an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also been a Guggenheim, a Huntington Library, and a National Humanities Center Fellow. He and his wife, Annie Dillard, have called Key West home since 1994 and he is a former board member and current honorary board member of the Key West Literary Seminar. His most recent books, are First We Read Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process; The Heart of William James; and October, or Autumnal Tints, by Henry Thoreau with original watercolors by Lincoln Perry.

Online Resources

Richardson interview by J.C. Hallman in Bookslut
Profile by Hal Crowther
Richardson talks James on NPR

Selected Bibliography

First We Read Then We Write (2010)
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006)
Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995)
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986)

—as editor
October, or Autumnal Tints [Henry Thoreau; Lincoln Perry] (2012)
The Heart of William James (2010)

In an interview with Bookslut, Parini discussed his work on the lives of writers as both novelist and biographer: “I make few distinction between straight biographies and novels. They both are works of fiction. Fiction means ‘shaping’ in Latin. I shape reality in both genres. … They both involve creating narratives, and narrative is what I like: telling a story. The story of a life can be told in the conventional way of biography … or in fictional form. Fiction allows you more freedom: you can imagine motives, dig into the unconscious of a character, go inside a character’s head. … I think what I can bring to a biography is a writer’s sense of what kind of discipline and commitment it takes to assemble a shelf of books over a lifetime. To me it’s got an inherent drama, the whole cycle of production and rejection, agony, elation, all of the different things that go into producing a body of work.”

Parini is also a poet, with five volumes of poetry, including a volume of selected poems called The Art of Subtraction. Other nonfiction books include Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Literature and Politics; The Art of Teaching; Why Poetry Matters; and Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America.

Online Resources

jayparini.com
Parini on Elizabeth Bishop
Parini interviewed by Paul Holler for Bookslut
Parini interviews Gore Vidal at KWLS 2009 (audio)

Selected Bibliography

The Passages of H.M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (2010)
Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008)
The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (2005)
One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004)
Robert Frost: A Life (1999)
John Steinbeck (1995)
The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year (1990)
Theodore Roethke, an American Romantic (1979)

Online Resources

Judith Thurman on Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Selected Bibliography

Coming soon…

Online Resources

rosalindbrackenbury.com
Becoming George Sand reviewed in NYTBR

Selected Bibliography

Becoming George Sand (2011)

Salamon’s previous books include Hospital, which tells how complex cultural matters complicate medical care in a big urban hospital, and Rambam’s Ladder, which has attracted wide attention in the philanthropic world and has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Dutch. She is also the author of The Devil’s Candy, which follows the adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities into a film and is considered a Hollywood classic about filmmaking gone awry.

Salamon was a reporter and the film critic for the Wall Street Journal for many years, and was a staff writer and critic at the New York Times. Her journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Bazaar, and the New Republic, and includes profiles of writers including Norman Mailer, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), Azar Nafisi, and Clarice Lispector.

Online Resources

juliesalamon.com
Review of Wendy… in NYTimes
Salamon profile of Norman Mailer
Salamon on Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) #1
On Azar Nafisi #2

Selected Bibliography

Wendy and the Lost Boys (2011)
Hospital (2009)
Rambam’s Ladder (2003)
The Devil’s Candy (1991)

Online Resources

Atlas & Co.
Dwight Garner’s “Stray Questions for James Atlas”

Selected Bibliography

Coming soon…

Dyer says his writing process is akin to the “version” phenomena in Jamaican music, where the foundation of an artist’s original recording is repurposed to create an entirely new song. In this spirit, says Dyer, his novel Paris Trance is a version of or response to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, while Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice serves as the backbone for Dyer’s own Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. In stressing the role of literary influence in his work, Dyer also quotes George Steiner’s assertion that “latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply.”

A selection of Dyer’s work as an essayist, including pieces on writers Denis Johnson, Albert Camus, Don DeLillo, and Susan Sontag, was recently published as Otherwise Known and the Human Condition and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. His newest book is Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, in which Dyer explores Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s great Stalker.

Dyer’s column, “Reading Life,” appears monthly in the New York Times Book Review.

Online Resources

Interviewed by Jonathan Lethem in BOMB
Zona, excerpted in the Paris Review
Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
Next Time, Try ‘Unflagging’ (Reading Life, NYT)
geoffdyer.com

Selected Bibliography

Zona (2012)
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011)
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009)
Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (2003)
Paris Trance (1998)
Out of Sheer Rage (1997)

Online Resources

Coming soon…

Selected Bibliography

Coming soon…

Wineapple has received a 2009 Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities. A regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The Nation, she is the editor of The Selected Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier for the Library of America’s American Poets Project and the anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing, a volume in The Writers’ World series editor. She is now writing a book on America, 1848-1877.

Wineapple is currently the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at The Graduate School, CUNY, and teaches in the MFA programs at The New School and Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Online Resources

Coming soon…

Selected Bibliography

Coming soon…

In all, White is author of more than 25 books. His work, beginning in 1973 with publication of Forgetting Elena and continuing through his latest novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, is distinguished throughout by a candor and outspokenness on behalf of the generation of gay men who witnessed the Stonewall uprising and the effects of the AIDS epidemic. Colm Tóibín, writing for the New York Review of Books, sees in the biographies of Genet, Proust, and Rimbaud “a dotted line to the gay past” and remarks that White has become “a passionate and graceful witness to his own life, to the life of New York itself, and to the changing mores of what became the gay community.”

White has also written hundreds of book reviews and essays for publications including the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement (London). His subjects have included, among many others, the writers Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, Curzio Malaparte, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters. He teaches writing at Princeton University and lives in New York City.

Online Resources

Edmund White in KWLS Audio Archives
Colm Tóibín reviews White for NYRB
The Paris Review interview
edmundwhite.com

Selected Bibliography

Jack Holmes and His Friend (2012)
Sacred Monsters (2011)
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008)
Hotel de Dream (2007)
Marcel Proust (1999)
The Burning Library (1994)
Genet: A Biography (1993)
A Boy’s Own Story (1983)
Forgetting Elena (1973)