The Literary Biographer's Craft w/D. T. Max '84
Whose Life Is it Anyway?:
The Literary Biographer’s Craft
A reading & conversation with literary biographers Blakey Bailey, Ruth Franklin, and D.T. Max moderated by Margaret Talbot
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
7:30 PM
Purchase a single ticket for $15 (buy)
Folger Shakespeare Library – Elizabethan Theatre
201 East Capitol Street SE
Washington, DC 20003 (map)
Blake Bailey is author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, Cheever: A Life, and, most recently, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. Bailey’s articles and reviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, Slate, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
Read Blake Bailey’s interview with the Daily Beast’s Noah Charney here, and a Q&A with the Economist‘s Intelligent Life blog here.
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and a contributing editor at The New Republic. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, was published by Oxford University Press last year. She is currently working on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson, to be published by Norton in 2016.
Read Deborah Kalb’s Q&A with Ruth Franklin here and Jonathan Kirsch’s review A Thousand Darknesses in the Jewish Journal here.
D.T. Max is a graduate of Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace and The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, their two young children, and a rescued beagle who came to them named Max.
Read D.T. Max’s Q&A with the Washington Posts‘s Neely Tucker here as well as a long-form interview with the Millions here.
Margaret Talbot (moderator) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine since 2003 and was formerly a Contributing Writer for The New York Times magazine. She has also written for The New Republic, The Atlantic, and other publications, and has been a regular on the Slate Double X and New Yorker podcasts. Her first book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and my Father’s Twentieth Century, recounts the story of her father’s (stage and screen actor Lyle Talbot) exceptionally long and varied career from 1931-1960.