Theme: Biography

Kerouac was susceptible to film—a sucker for its promise of riches as well as its flickering poetry—and he imagined an iconic adaptation of On the Road. Not long after the book’s publication, in September 1957, he wrote to Marlon Brando asking him to buy the book and get it made:Read more

Margaret Talbot reads a passage from her book The Entertainer, about Lyle Talbot, her Hollywood actor father.Read more

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One of the more frequent comments made – approvingly or disapprovingly – about my recent biography of that international superstar of Baroque Europe, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, concerns its scandalous content. Why so much scandal, some of it quite shocking, about Bernini, his family, his patrons, and in general, the Rome of his lifetime?Read more

Stanley Corngold seems to have established himself as the doyen of American Kafkaists. Ruth V. Gross’s preface to Kafka for the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Corngold, sets the tone.Read more

In himself, Jobs believed, the tensions between technology, art, and commerce were resolved: a judgment to which Isaacson accedes. As Isaacson tells it, Jobs’ commitment to simple, self-evident design serendipitously reaped staggering corporate gains, without compromising on quality or belittling the customer. Read more

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. On that day he was also made anew—the first of a series of personal makeovers. He left earth’s atmosphere a human being (at the rank of senior lieutenant). He returned to earth a national icon (at the rank of major, a heavenly promotion).Read more

A right thumb, a finger, a tooth. These were the contents of a reliquary acquired several years ago by a collector at an auction in Florence. Little did he know that for centuries the remains had been objects of profane devotion. Read more

Tolstoy spent years on a four-volume, 700-page ABC and reading primer, a work he regarded more highly than War and Peace. (Upon its publication in 1872 it received neither good reviews nor official approval, but with its republication thirteen years later it became a bestsellerRead more

If we are to believe the Beethoven mythology, which is based mostly on his letters and reports from his inner circle, Beethoven had an unshakeable sense of his own importance.Read more

“Find Madame Wagner, and you will find yourself,” the man told me. It wasn’t quite the spiritual quest I had been expecting as I sat waiting for the U-Bahn to arrive.Read more

The wedding of Kurt Vonnegut's parents, Edith Sophia Lieber and Kurt Vonnegut Snr. on November 22, 1913, in Indianapolis, Indiana, was spectacular.Read more

On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde.Read more

I discovered Alfred Kazin’s journals in the summer of 1984. I was researching a book on American public criticism, criticism written for the reading public, or what Virginia Woolf called the “common reader,” rather than for academics. Read more

How to be black in America was the challenge for spirited young men of colour who found their way to Harlem in the troubled years of the 1940s, when music, poetry, dance and art were giving way to drink, drugs, street crime and sex for money.Read more

"The novel, you know,” people whispered whenever Joseph Heller and his wife, Shirley, left a party early. From the first, Joe had made no secret of his ambitions beyond the world of advertisingRead more

On the night of January 6th, Paul McCartney settled into his seat at the Royal Albert Hall. Along with five thousand others in the elegantly domed theater with boxed seats, he was about to witness the London debut of the band everyone was calling the "American Beatles."Read more

The later Bellow’s reputation as a neoconservative has obscured the centrality of his early enthusiasm for Trotskyism to his life and writings. Read more

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If King and Gandhi evoked nonviolence and disciplined civil disobedience as a shield to protect the world from imperial wars, racism, and rampant materialism, Malcolm wielded the specter of self-defense, violence, and revolution Read more