New Books in Biography & Memoir

Dana Andrews was one of the major films stars of the 1940s, and yet he was never nominated for an Academy Award. The posterboy for the ‘male mask’ archetype that typified the decade, Andrews portrayed the ‘masculine ideal of steely impassivity’ in such classics as Laura and Fallen Angel. In Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews(University Press of Mississippi, 2012) biographer Carl Rollyson cracks the mask, providing intimate insight into Andrews’s extraordinary talent and his life. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rollyson’s account is that, in the end, Andrews appears to have been beloved by everyone. Often, biographies- particularly biographies of Hollywood stars- batter one’s affection for their subjects, illuminating horrible personality traits or an atrocious work ethic or a cruelty towards children, animals, and/or wives. Hollywood Enigma does no such thing. Rather, it tells the story of a man who, in Rollyson’s words, ‘always showed up for work on time, always knew his lines, and was never less than a gentleman.’ That Hollywood Enigma is about a nice man doesn’t make it any less interesting. Origin stories in biographies are notoriously tedious- long lists of grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, like something out of Genesis- but Rollyson lays out Andrews’s story at a brisk and engaging pace. Born in rural Mississippi (a town with such an exquisite sense of humor that it christened itself ‘Don’t’ solely so that its postal abbreviation might be ‘Don’t, Miss.’), he grew up in Texas then moved to California, where he worked as an accountant, a gas station attendant, and at various other odd jobs before an employer helped finance his lessons in opera. That, in turn, led to a gig at the community theater and, nine years after setting foot in L.A., Andrews appeared onscreen. Andrews would a remain a popular star through the 1940s, only to drift into B-movies in the 1950s and 1960s. But he would resurface in the 1970s, hitting upon something of a second act when he began publicly discussing his struggle with alcoholism. Andrews helped de-stigmatize alcoholism- a disease that was still taboo- while also reframing the way people thought about alcoholics. Hollywood Enigma is, ultimately, the story of a man who, in an industry known for its frivolity and excesses, stood out as an enigma precisely because he knew who he was.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and contemporary art. In the early 20th century, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salons in Florence and New York drew astonishing talents to her doorstep. Her gift for bringing artists together so they might collaborate and draw inspiration from one another played out even more grandly at the art colony she and her third husband founded in Taos, New Mexico. Over the years, they would play host to such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Though she’s remembered more for her gift for building artistic communities, Luhan was an artist in her own right. Her book Winter in Taos is considered a classic of New Mexican literature and her four-volume memoir vividly explores the changes in Victorian sexuality, politics, art, and culture as the modern age approached. However, despite their candor, the memoirs were not wholly forthcoming: Luhan’s writings about her struggles with depression, sexuality, and venereal disease were restricted at the behest of her family until the year 2000. In her excellent biography, The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture (University of New Mexico Press, 2012), Lois Rudnick- who has been studying Luhan’s life for over 35 years- explores these newly available documents, presenting Luhan’s writing alongside her own analysis, to draw new conclusions about Luhan’s life, loves, and work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip Bishop‘s biography, The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop (Lyons Press, 2011), which charts the simultaneous rise of the former President and the author’s own great-granduncle. The author does an excellent job illustrating the dynamics of the relationship between Roosevelt and Bishop. For it was to Bishop’s benefit to know Roosevelt, but it was also advantageous for Roosevelt to cultivate an ally in the press like Bishop. Theirs was a mutually beneficial relationship, and the author does an exceptional job of showing how it strengthened and altered with the passage of time, changes in status, increased physical distance, etc. These are the external forces that shape long-term friendships, but they’re seldom explored so intimately and eloquently in biographies of men. The Lion and the Journalist covers a lot of ground. There’s publishing, politics, PR, and the Panama Canal. It’s an unusual historical melange, but it’s riveting. The Lion and the Journalist is also an especially rich entry into the genre of biographies about biographers and their subjects. For it was Bishop who penned the first biography of Roosevelt, laying the foundation from which all future biographers would begin.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive. How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50. One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men’s lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie. From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a breath of fresh air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The portrait is startling. Painted by John Singer Sargent, “Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes” depicts a woman dressed casually, almost masculinely, save a voluminous white skirt. Her hand is held brazenly at her hip as her presence nearly obscures that of her husband, who hovers in the background like a specter. They are Edith and Newton Stokes. As biographer Jean Zimmerman details in her excellent duel biography of the couple, entitled Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). “Both were progressives, and both believed in doing great deeds, whether it was reforming tenements in Newton’s case or getting the vote for women in Edith’s. They fell in love when they were children, a love that lasted until they were parted by death.” Edith eventually became President of the New York Kindergarten Association and of the Municipal Art Commission. Newton spent over a decade laboring on a six-volume history of the city entitled the Iconography of Manhattan. They were a couple defined by the city. Writes Zimmerman: “Edith and Newton were New York City to the bone. He, raised in an Italianate residence at Madison Avenue and 37th Street, which after his time there would become J. P. Morgans townhouse and then a celebrated museum of the arts. She, born a little farther afield, in still countrified Staten Island. They were in love and in Manhattan, which represents an unparalleled state of bliss. They led not so much independent as interdependent lives.” Love, Fiercely provides a fascinating and rich perspective on the rise of New York, the tensions of Gilded Age courtship, the evolving freedoms of women, and the shifting dynamics of a long marriage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, you can appreciate the challenge of putting the city’s joie de vivre into words.However, as a New Orleans native, John Kennedy Toole was steeped in the traditions and flavor of his hometown and, therefore, uniquely qualified to write about it. His novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, is considered one of the best ever written about New Orleans. As Cory MacLauchlin writes in his new biography, Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (Da Capo Press, 2012) “Toole selected, merged, refined, and wove characters together with all the absurdities that form the human condition. And there on the once blank sheet of paper in his private room in Puerto Rico emerged the city he had known all his life, his New Orleans.” MacLauchlin’s task is comparably challenging. He’s got an academic struggling to be a writer, a writer struggling to get published, and a man struggling to survive… and that’s just John Kennedy Toole! But MacLauchlin pulls it off. Deftly avoiding the problems that sometimes plague literary biography, Butterfly in the Typewriter is tightly written and populated with such memorable characters that it’s of interest even if one is unfamiliar with Toole’s work. Perhaps most impressive is the author’s unwillingness to dabble in speculation, a reticence that is increasingly rare and, as a biographer, sometimes taxing to maintain. As MacLauchlin writes: “In my pursuit to understand Toole, I neither aimed to diagnose him, nor cast him in the mold of tortured artist […] I have sought to understand Toole on his own terms […] to compose a biographical narrative in which Toole would recognize himself if he were alive to read it.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

When I was in Seminary I was assigned many theological tomes to read and one was especially difficult to get through. It was Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge. This work was dense, long, and I must confess, wound up mostly unread. So when I came across Dr. Paul Gutjahr‘s Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2011), I knew I had to find out why someone would write a biography about this man. It turns out there is much more to Hodge than I imagined. Dr. Gutjahr sets Charles Hodge in context and takes us through all of his 80 years letting us see into his family, friendships and battles. He concludes showing how Hodge is still influencing Christianity in America today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Texas poet/author/historian Dave Oliphant‘s KD: A Jazz Biography (Wings Press, 2012) is a poetic tribute to the life of Jazz trumpeter and one of the original Jazz Messengers, Kenny Dorham. Dorham, who played with some of the jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, Monk and many, many others, is less well known than many of his contemporaries, but Oliphant’s highly allusive and alliterative rhythms and rhymes open one’s ears, eyes and heart to the Texas-born and raised trumpet player. Oliphant describes Dorham’s small town roots: Ken’s prodigious ear at five years old Could pick out keyboard boogies cold & from Sis’s 78s he could already tell Louie on trumpet an equal of Gabriel Oliphant also describes touches on Dorham’s gigs and experiences in New York City, the West Coast, Paris, South America, Scandinavia, and his untimely death from kidney disease at the age of 48 in 1972. a brain filled with unseen notes heard within his inner ears then out of tubes & a gold or silver bell the valve lubes had speeded along Messengers’ word a prophetic phrase blues or bossa beat a chase or a smoky-toned running line to blend with any instrument compete with none but under the brothers’ sign KD: A Jazz Biography is also a trove of takes on Dorham’s performances. Readers will find themselves downloading songs and comparing Oliphant’s insights with their own. There are also comparisons to Dorham’s trumpet player peers, in particular, Clifford Brown. For those who take pride in the diversity of their jazz libraries, this is a book that is as unique, original and dignified as Dorham himself. Oliphant weaves his own extended literary, historical, biologic, poetic, and popular culture knowledge into this extended poem about one of jazz’s lesser-known but nonetheless highly talented and original players. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the Stockholm 1912 games. But his victory was marred by a controversial International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruling that stripped him of his medals six months later. In Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Bison Books, 2012), the first comprehensive biography of Thorpe, biographer Kate Buford explores how Thorpe’s Native American heritage shaped his life, but also the impact Thorpe himself had upon American sports. Ultimately, he was the country’s first celebrity athlete, excelling at both baseball and football. His life was memorialized in a 1951 film and, in 1963, Thorpe was among the charter class inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Despite his other successes, the revocation of Jim Thorpe’s medals remains a source of contention for his admirers, Buford among them.In 1982, the IOC approved the reinstatement of Thorpe’s medals and during London 2012, the Hammersmith tube station has been temporarily renamed in Thorpe’s honor. But, despite public outcry, the IOC still refuses to enter Thorpe’s scores into the official record of Olympic events. As Buford writes: “A gentle person, intelligent and funny, with many flaws, Jim Thorpe was not a complicated man. But what happened to him was.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up the throne. It’s precisely this oversimplification of the facts that Anne Sebba seeks to correct in her excellent new biography That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). The first woman to write a full biography of the Duchess, Sebba provides a much-needed rehabilitation of this polarizing figure. The bite of the title succinctly captures the bitterness and antipathy directed towards Wallis Simpson- during her life and after- but Sebba’s impeccable research illuminates a woman far more complex than the popular imagination has allowed. This is myth-busting to the nth degree. With access to previously undiscovered letters, Sebba creates an account of the Duchess’s life that is, at times, downright revelatory. For instance, Wallis Simpson didn’t intend to marry the Prince of Wales. Who knew?! As Sebba writes: “She was not in love with Edward himself but in love with the opulence, the lifestyle, the way doors opened for her, the way he made all her childish dreams come true. She was sure it was a fairytale that would end, but while it lasted she could not bring herself to end it herself.” Ultimately, this was the stuff of tragedy rather than fairytale, but the story is riveting nonetheless. “That Woman,” an American woman who captivated a Prince to the point of obsession. As Sebba writes: “Few who knew them well would describe what they shared as love.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography