Bøker av Carl Rollyson

Dana Andrews worked with distinguished directors such as john Ford, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan. He played romantic leads alongside the great beauties of the screen: Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Maureen O'Hara, and most notably, Gene Tierney, with whom he shared five films.

The second and final volume in a series that details the daily life of one of America's most powerful, intriguing writers

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.

Volume two of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of William Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated ""writer's writer"" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon.

Portrays a new William Faulkner - a man of astonishing paradoxes. Based on extensive interviews with family and friends of Faulkner, as well as unparalleled access to primary and secondary source materials, this first of what will be a major two-volume work offers a dramatic narrative that breaks the bounds of the traditional literary biography.

The first book to survey the broad range of Ms. Sontag's work, including full discussions of her fiction. "One can ask for no better guidebook."-M. Thomas Inge.

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, "e;The Way We Live Now."e; 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.

Documentary Film: A Primer provides a succinct introduction to the nature of the documentary, drawing on examples from the work of Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Spalding Gray, Cindy Sherman, Susan Sontag, and others. The documentaries discussed cover a range of subjects including the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the worlds of fashion and sports. This incisive foray into the essentials of documentary is then buttressed by an in depth discussion of the career of Jill Craigie, a British director/writer who brought to the cinema an uncompromising socialist and feminist perspective during the Second World War. How Craigie got her films produced by a major studio, and why her work could not be replicated in postwar Britain, reveal not only the way documentaries are made but also why they remain a controversial and problematic genre.A selection of Rollyson's reviews of contemporary documentaries provides a model for discussing the genre. Students and fans of documentaries will find his list of classic documentaries on VHS and DVD and his excerpts from other critics of the genre of special interest. His topics for discussion section make this book a valuable resource for teachers as well.

Most book reviewers know very little about the history or the art of biography. Indeed, if there is any art in biography, it is the rare reviewer that acknowledges it or knows how to discuss it. Usually the reviewer regards biography as an occasion to wax eloquent about what he or she thinks of the subject. Little space, if any, is devoted to the biography's structure or style, to the biographer's peculiar problems, or to how the biography relates to others about the same subject.Carl Rollyson, a professional biographer and weekly columnist (On Biography) for The New York Sun, explores the ramifications of authorized and unauthorized biographies, investigates the relationship between biography and history, biography and fiction, biography and autobiography, as well commenting on certain perennial biographical subjects such as Napoleon, on sub genres such as children's biography, and on the most recent developments in life writing.Rollyson's aim is to reach not merely scholars but that vast general audience addicted to reading biography, enhancing their pleasure by providing insight (or you might say, the inside word) on how biographies are put together.

Essays in Biography is a play on words conveying Carl Rollyson's attempt to explore the nature of biography in pieces about the history of the genre and in portrayals of biographers (Plutarch, Leon Edel, and W. A. Swanberg), literary figures (Lillian Hellman, Jack London), philosophers and critics (Leo Strauss and Hippolyte Taine), political figures (Winston Churchill and Napoleon), and artists (Rembrandt and Rubens). An essay in biography, Rollyson argues, is an effort to comprehend a life that is inherently incomplete and subject to revision. Many of the facts about a biographical subject's life that are blandly presented in reference books have been discovered by biographers at great cost to their reputations. With the history of biography as a censored genre in mind, he encourages readers of biography to look critically at the biographies they read--no matter whether those biographies are book-length narratives or short encyclopedia entries.Many of the pairings in Essays in Biography are meant to evoke Plutarch's presentation of "parallel lives." The biographical essay, Rollyson concludes, is a unique form of knowledge, one that modern critics have devalued by trying to separate the creator from his creation.

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.

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. 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.

Amy Lowell has been extolled as a founding member of the Imagist group, derided as the "demon saleswoman" of poetry, and shunned as a lesbian, cigar-smoking sensationalist. This provocative biography draws on newly discovered material to restore the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet to her full humanity in an era that, at last, is beginning to appreciate the contributions of gays and lesbians to America's heritage.