This year the Women Writing Women’s Lives Dorothy O. Helly Lecture’s featured speaker is Sydney Ladensohn Stern, who will be talking about her in-progress biography of Hollywood and Broadway legend, Irene Mayer Selznick.

The event will take place in-person on March 18, 2024 at 4:00 in the Skylight Room at The Graduate Center.

Irene Selznick left her life as Hollywood royalty—she was the daughter of MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer and the wife of “Gone with the Wind” producer David O. Selznick–to reinvent herself in New York as a successful Broadway producer, starting with “A Streetcar Named Desire.”                         

Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s first book, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990) was followed in 1997 by her first biography, Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (presently re-issued in pb with a new afterward). Her latest, The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics was noted it as a “model biography” by the WSJ, and film critic, Molly Haskell, called it “fascinating dual portrait.”

Many thanks to our co-sponsors:  The Center for the Humanities, The Feminist Press, The Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Graduate Center MA Programs in Biography and Memoir and Liberal Studies, and the PhD Programs in History and English.

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