Biography In Its Time
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
1:00 p.m.-6:30 p.m.
Elebash Recital Hall
Click the session titles below to view video recordings of each session.
1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.
Telling Musical Lives
Gary Giddins (Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, Celebrating Bird), moderator. Thomas Brothers (Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism), Paul de Barros(Shall We Play That One Together?: The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland), Robert Hilburn (Johnny Cash: The Life).
2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
Biography and Literary Theory
Elisabeth Sifton (No Ordinary Men), moderator. Evelyn Barish (The Double Life of Paul de Man), Caryl Emerson (Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics).
4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
American Writers: The Fragility of Fame
Jay Parini (One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner), moderator. Hans Bak (The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987), Susan Cheever (E.E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life), Dorothy Gallagher(Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life).
5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m.
Biographers and History
Simon Winchester (The Men Who United the States), moderator. David Nasaw (The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy), Amanda Vaill (Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War), Brenda Wineapple (Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877).
Speakers
Hans Bak is professor of American Literature and American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He is the author of Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years, and the editor of Writing Lives: American Biography and Autobiography, and The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987, published in December 2013 by Harvard.
Evelyn Barish is a professor emerita of English at The Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and the author of Emerson: The Roots of Prophesy, for which she won the Christian Gauss Award. Her biography The Double Life of Paul de Man was published in 2014 by W.W. Norton & Company.
Thomas Brothers is a professor of music at Duke University, where he teaches jazz, rock, African-American music and late medieval music. He is the author of, among other books, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words, and Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism, published in 2014 by W.W. Norton & Company.
Susan Cheever is the author of American Bloomsbury, Louisa May Alcott, Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter, and many other books. Her biography E.E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life was published in February 2014 by Random House. She is now working on a narrative history of alcoholism, Drinking in America: Our Secret History.
Paul de Barros is has covered jazz and world music in Seattle for over 35 years, almost all of that time for the Seattle Times, although he also freelances widely. He is the author of Shall We Play That One Together?: The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland, published by St. Martin’s Press.
Caryl Emerson is is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her work has focused on Mikhail Bakhtin, 19th c. Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), opera, vocal, and incidental music. Her current projects include recuperation of the modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Her books include Boris Godunov, The Life of Musorgsky, and The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature.
Dorothy Gallagher is author of Hannah’s Daughters, a history of six generations of an American family; All the Right Enemies, a biography of the Italian-American anarchist Carlo Tresca; and two memoirs, How I Came Into My Inheritance and Strangers in the House. Her biography Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life was published in February 2014 by Yale University Press.
Gary Giddins wrote the “Weather Bird” jazz column in the Village Voice for 30 years, and is the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, where he also teaches. His books include Riding on a Blue Note, Rhythm-a-Ning, Faces in the Crowd, Satchmo, Visions of Jazz, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, Weather Bird, Natural Selection, Jazz (with Scott DeVeaux), and Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema. His new edition of Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker was published in 2013 by the University of Minnesota.
Robert Hilburn was the pop music critic and editor of the Los Angeles Times from 1970-2005. He is the author of a memoir, Corn Flakes with John Lennon and Other Tales from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Life, and his 2013 biography Johnny Cash: The Life, published by Little, Brown and Company, was named by many critics as one of the best books of 2013.
David Nasaw is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center, and co-founder of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. He is the author of Andrew Carnegie, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, winner of the Bancroft Prize, and The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize named by many critics as one of the best books of 2012.
Jay Parini, a poet, novelist, and biographer, is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and Jesus. His biographical novels include Benjamin’s Crossing, The Passages of H.M., and The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year, which was made into a major Hollywood film in 2009.
Elisabeth Sifton has been an editor and book publisher for many decades. She is the author of The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, about the background to the famous prayer written by her father, Reinhold Niebuhr, and, with Fritz Stern, of No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State, published in 2013 by New York Review Books.
Amanda Vaill is the author of the bestselling Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy – A Lost Generation Love Story, and Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins. Her new book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, a work of narrative historical nonfiction, published in April 2014 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Simon Winchester is the author of many books, including the bestsellers The Professor and the Madman, Atlantic, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa. In 2006 he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. His newest book is The Men Who United the States, published by HarperCollins in 2013.
Brenda Wineapple, former Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, teaches in the MFA programs at The New School and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She is the author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leon Stein, and Hawthorne: A Life. Her newest book, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, published by HarperCollins, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2013.