Happy New Year, Friends of the Leon Levy Center for Biography!

 

Below, our first events (all virtual, all free) of 2022:

 

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“When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.” So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith. In this new biography, Julian Zelizer tracks Heschel’s early years and foundational influences—his childhood in Warsaw and early education in Hasidism, his studies in late 1920s and early 1930s Berlin, and the fortuitous opportunity, which brought him to the United States and saved him from the Holocaust, to teach at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. This deep and complex portrait places Heschel at the crucial intersection between religion and progressive politics in mid-twentieth-century America. To this day Heschel remains a symbol of the fight to make progressive Jewish values relevant in the secular world.

 

Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN Political Analyst and a regular guest on NPR’s “Here and Now.” He is the author and editor of 22 books, including, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, and Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. The New York Times named the book as an Editor’s Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books in 2020. He is currently working on a new book about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the 1964 Democratic Convention.  Zelizer, who has published over 1000 op-eds, has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and New America. He also co-hosts a podcast called Politics & Polls.

 

David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. Blight is the author of Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War, among many other works. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

 

Julian E. Zelizer on Abraham Joshua Heschel

in conversation with David W. Blight

Thursday, January 20, 6 pm on Zoom

Register here: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0td–spz4iEtCovtInRpflCXQs_QamnZxP

 

 

 

 

Born in Kentucky, Elizabeth Hardwick left for New York City on a Greyhound bus in 1939 and quickly made a name for herself as a formidable member of the intellectual elite. Her eventful life included stretches of dire poverty, romantic escapades, and dustups with authors she eviscerated in The New York Review of Books, of which she was a cofounder. She formed lasting friendships with literary notables―including Mary McCarthy, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Sontag―who appreciated her sharp wit and relish for gossip, progressive politics, and great literature.

 

Hardwick’s life and writing were shaped by a turbulent marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, whom she adored, standing by faithfully through his episodes of bipolar illness. Lowell’s decision to publish excerpts from her private letters in The Dolphin greatly distressed Hardwick and ignited a major literary controversy. Hardwick emerged from the scandal with the clarity and wisdom that illuminate her brilliant work―most notably Sleepless Nights, a daring, lyrical, and keenly perceptive collage of reflections and glimpses of people encountered as they stumble through lives of deprivation or privilege.

 

A Splendid Intelligence finally gives Hardwick her due as one of the great postwar cultural critics. Ranging over a broad territory―from the depiction of women in classic novels to the civil rights movement, from theater in New York to life in Brazil, Kentucky, and Maine―Hardwick’s essays remain strikingly original, fiercely opinionated, and exquisitely wrought. In this lively and illuminating biography, Cathy Curtis offers an intimate portrait of an exceptional woman who vigorously forged her own identity on and off the page.

In addition to her new life of Elizabeth Hardwick, Cathy Curtis is the author of three biographies of women artists (all published by Oxford University Press): Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter (2015), A Generous Vision: the Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning (2017), and Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter (2019).

Ian Buruma, a regular contributor to and former editor of the New York Review of Books, is the author of, among other works: Behind the Mask, God’s Dust, Playing the Game and Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. Buruma has won several prizes for his books, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film and the Shadows of War.

 

Cathy Curtis on Elizabeth Hardwick

in conversation with Ian Buruma

Tuesday, January 25, 6 pm on Zoom

Register here: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrceGgpjkoH9C1I2GU4JQn_CG_kHWZTMCX

 

 

 

 

 

G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the 20th century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitzand The Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile.

The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier from Sebald’s birth as a second-generation German at the end of the Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and paradoxical coldness, saving humour and an elusive mix of fact and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique, ferociously original portrait that pushes the boundaries of biography just as its subject pushed the boundaries of fiction.

Carole Angier is the author of Jean Rhys: Life & Work, which won the Writer’s Guild Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, and The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography, following the publication of which she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She taught academic and creative writing for many years and has edited several books of refugee writing. She lives in Oxfordshire.

Thad Ziolkowski is the Associate Director of the Leon Levy Center and the author of Our Son the Arson, a collection of poems, the memoir On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and Wichita, a novel. His book The Drop, which explores the relationship between surfing and addiction, was published by HarperCollins in 2021. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum,Travel & Leisure and  Interview Magazine. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University.

 

Carole Angier on W. G. Sebald

in conversation with Thad Ziolkowski

Wednesday, February 2, 4 pm (NB) on Zoom

Register here: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAtf-2trT8uEtFr2y7N1Wf3hKMz_Aywu_EA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Janet Malcolm was famous for her incisive writing in The New Yorker and for her seminal books, The Journalist and the Murderer and The Silent Woman, about the battle over the posthumous reputation of Sylvia Plath. Her views about the tricky, sometimes immoral, relationship between writers and their subjects, and her skepticism about the biographer’s craft, continue to provoke debate in the literary world. Michael Greenberg, memoirist, journalist, and friend of Malcolm’s, will lead a panel of distinguished writers in a discussion of Malcolm’s most controversial ideas.

Michael Greenberg’s memoir, Hurry Down Sunshine, has been translated into eighteen languages and was named a best book of the year by Time Magazine, Library Journal and Amazon.com.  A collection of his essays, Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, was published in 2009. From 2003 – 2009, Greenberg wrote the “Freelance” column in the Times Literary Supplement. In 2010 – 2012 he was the author and creator of “The Accidentalist” column in Bookforum.  He teaches writing in the MFA program at Columbia University and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan, American Financier and Alice James, A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.  She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and served as Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2003 – 2017.  Her new book, about John Singer Sargent’s twelve portraits of the London art dealer Asher Wertheimer and his family, will be published in 2022 or 2023.

Katie Roiphe is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. She is the author of The Power Notebooks, The Violet Hour, In Praise of Messy Lives and Uncommon Arrangements, among other books. She has written for The New York Times, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Benjamin Taylor’s memoir Here We Are appeared from Penguin Books in 2020. His previous memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice; his Proust: The Search was named a Best Book of 2016 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review and by Robert McCrum in The Guardian; and his Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay was named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker.  He is also the author of two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, winner of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Taylor’s Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather is scheduled to appear from Viking Press in 2023.

 

Roundtable Discussion of Janet Malcolm’s Work

Michael Greenberg, Jean Strouse, Katie Roiphe and Benjamin Taylor

Wednesday, February 16 at 6 pm on Zoom

https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAtceCsqzIpG9My9jVMF8Arykmbjkwz1alu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biography is a committed relationship, not unlike marriage. But it’s also a form of serial monogamy. What attracts a biographer to successive subjects, especially when they vary radically? When, in some cases, they were born centuries apart? When a writer of literary lives takes on a scientist or a politician? When a new engagement means leaving an established comfort zone of history, gender, or culture? The adventure of exogamy is the theme of “Departures,” a roundtable moderated by the celebrated biographer Judith Thurman, with three other eminent practitioners of life writing who have explored new ground: Paul Auster, Stacy Schiff and Martha Saxton.

Judith Thurman, who delivered the Annual Leon Levy Lecture at the Graduate Center in 2020, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1987, and as a Staff Writer specializing in profiles and cultural criticism since 2000. She is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-winning film, Out of Africa. Her second biography, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, won the Los Angeles Times and the Salon Book Awards for Biography. She is also the author of Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, a collection of her essays. Thurman is a chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, 4 3 2 1, Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012 he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of Fiction. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages.

 

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. Her most recent books, Cleopatra: A Life and The Witches, have both been #1 bestsellers. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has been named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

Martha Saxton worked in publishing before becoming a freelance writer and publishing biographies of Jayne Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott. Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America, which came out in 2003, is a study of women’s behavior in three communities. After co-authoring a textbook and an illustrated book on missionaries and the missionary impulse, Saxton returned to biography with The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington, which was published in 2019 by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She is currently working on a study of Edward Gibbon.

Roundtable Discussion of Biographic “Departures”

Judith Thurman, Paul Auster, Stacy Schiff & Martha Saxton

Wednesday, February 23, 6 pm on Zoom

https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcrdeGgpzIqHN2QakB8yoJEjVMHw-TH0p8F

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best known for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle’s voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle’s life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle’s visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle’s invocation―her “bringing to life”―writes Rudick, “is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle’s life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness.”

Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23, pursuing a revelatory vision informed both by the monumental works of Antonin Gaudí and the Facteur Cheval, and by aspects of her own life. In addition to her Tirs (“shooting paintings”) and Nanas and her celebrated large-scale projects―including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany―Saint Phalle produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with her family, marriage to Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with Jean Tinguely, numerous health crises and her late, productive years in Southern California. Saint Phalle has most recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2015, and at MoMA P.S.1, in 2021.

Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature and comics has been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum and elsewhere. She was managing editor of the Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021).
 
Dan Nadel is curator-at-large for the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis. His recent books include Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945 -1976 (Bad Dimension Press, 2020) and It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940 -1980 (New York Review Comics, 2021), which accompanies his forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago Comics, 1960 to Now. Nadel is writing the biography of the celebrated and controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb.

 

Nicole Rudick on Niki de Saint Phalle

in conversation with Dan Nadel

Wednesday, March 2, 6 pm on Zoom

Register here:  https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYrcequpjIuH9BRgstl9Ua_WOYA1LWr-vJe​