Leon Levy Center for Biography Archive

3/18: Writing Writers’ Lives: 5th Annual Leon Levy Biography Conference

Writing Writers’ Lives: 5th Annual Leon Levy Biography Conference
1pm Monday, March 18. Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center

1pm – 2pm       Writing the American Renaissance
John Matteson (The Lives of Margaret Fuller), moderator. Jeffrey Cramer (The Portable Thoreau, ed.), Megan Marshall (Margaret Fuller: A New American Life), David S. Reynolds (Walt Whitman’s America).

2:15pm – 3:15pm     Writing Jewish Lives
Ruth Franklin (Shirley Jackson), moderator. Greg Bellow (Saul Bellow’s Heart), Joshua Rubenstein (Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life), Steven Weitzman (Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom). Co-sponsored by the Jewish Lives series of Yale University Press.

3:30pm – 4:30pm     Hermione Lee (Virginia Woolf) in Conversation with Gary Giddins (Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams).

[coffee break]

5pm – 6pm       American Modernists
Carol Sklenicka (Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life), moderator. Blake Bailey (Cheever: A Life), Alice Kessler-Harris (A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman), Richard Lingeman (American Journey: Theodore Dreiser).

6:15pm – 7:15pm         Founding Fathers as Literary Figures
Annette Gordon-Reed (The Hemingses of Monticello), moderator. R.B. Bernstein (Thomas Jefferson), Eric Foner (Tom Paine and Revolutionary America), Peter Onuf (The Mind of Thomas Jefferson).

Free. RSVP by email: biography@gc.cuny.edu

3/5: Balanchine and David Foster Wallace: Two Books by Former Fellows

Balanchine and David Foster Wallace: Two Books by Former Fellows
7pm Tuesday, March 5. Skylight Room (9100), The Graduate Center

Elizabeth Kendall and D.T. Max in conversation about the biographies they completed as resident fellows of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Kendall’s Balanchine and the Lost Muse (Oxford, July 2013) is the first dual biography of the early lives of two key figures in Russian ballet, legendary choreographer George Balanchine and his childhood friend and extraordinary ballerina Liidia (Lidochka) Ivanova. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Viking, August 2012) was a New York Times bestseller named by several critics as one of the best books of the year.

Free. RSVP by email: biography@gc.cuny.edu