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  Essays in Biography , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 200min

  Essays in Biography is a play on words conveying Carl Rollyson's attempt to explore the nature of biography in pieces about the history of the genre and in portrayals of biographers (Plutarch, Leon Edel, and W. A. Swanberg), literary figures (Lillian Hellman, Jack London), philosophers and critics (Leo Strauss and Hippolyte Taine), political figures (Winston Churchill and Napoleon), and artists (Rembrandt and Rubens). An essay in biography, Rollyson argues, is an effort to comprehend a life that is inherently incomplete and subject to revision. Many of the facts about a biographical subject's life that are blandly presented in reference books have been discovered by biographers at great cost to their reputations. With the history of biography as a censored genre in mind, he encourages consumers of biography to be critical of the biographies they come across - no matter whether those biographies are book-length narratives or short encyclopedia entries. Many of the pairings in Essays in Biography are meant to evoke Plutarch's presentation of "parallel lives". The biographical essay, Rollyson concludes, is a unique form of knowledge, one that modern critics have devalued by trying to separate the creator from his creation. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Russell Stamets. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/044424/bk_acx0_044424_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan: Hollywood Legends Series , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 594min

  Walter Brennan (1894-1974) was one of the greatest character actors in Hollywood history. He won three Academy Awards and became a national icon starring as Grandpa in The Real McCoys. He appeared in over 200 motion pictures and became the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting, which celebrated the actor's unique role as the voice of the American Western. His life journey from Swampscott, Massachusetts, to Hollywood, to a 12,000-acre cattle ranch in Joseph, Oregon, is one of the great American stories. In the first biography of this epic figure, Carl Rollyson reveals Brennan's consummate mastery of virtually every kind of role while playing against and often stealing scenes from such stars as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne. Rollyson fully explores Brennan's work with Hollywood's greatest directors, such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Fritz Lang. As a father and grandfather, Brennan instilled generations of his family with an outlook on the American Dream that remains a sustaining feature of their lives today. His conservative politics, which grew out of his New England upbringing and his devout Catholicism, receive meticulous attention and a balanced assessment in A Real American Character. Written with the full cooperation of the Brennan family and drawing on material in archives from every region of the United States, this new biography presents an artist and family man who lived and breathed an American idealism that made him the real McCoy. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Neil Reeves. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/048084/bk_acx0_048084_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated: Hollywood Legends Series , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 694min

  In American popular culture, Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) has evolved in stature from movie superstar to American icon. Monroe's own understanding of her place in the American imagination and her effort to perfect her talent as an actress are explored with great sensitivity in Carl Rollyson's engaging narrative. He shows how movies became crucial events in the shaping of Monroe's identity. He regards her enduring gifts as a creative artist, discussing how her smaller roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve established the context for her career, while in-depth chapters on her more important roles in Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, and The Misfits provide the centerpiece of his examination of her life and career. Through extensive interviews with many of Monroe's colleagues, close friends, and other biographers, and a careful rethinking of the literature written about her, Rollyson is able to describe her use of Method acting and her studies with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg, head of the Actors' Studio in New York. The author also analyzes several of Monroe's own drawings, diary notes, and letters that have recently become available. With over thirty black and white photographs (some published for the first time), a new foreword, and a new afterword, this volume brings Rollyson's 1986 book up to date. From this comprehensive, yet critically measured wealth of material, Rollyson offers a distinctive and insightful portrait of Marilyn Monroe, highlighted by new perspectives that depict the central importance of acting to the authentic aspects of her being. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: John Stamper. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/022625/bk_acx0_022625_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Understanding Susan Sontag , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 336min

  With the publication of Susan Sontag's diaries, the development of her career can now be evaluated in a more genetic sense, so that the origins of her ideas and plans for publication are made plain in the context of her role as a public intellectual who is increasingly aware of her impact on her culture. In Understanding Susan Sontag, Carl Rollyson not only provides an introduction to her essays, novels, plays, films, diaries, and uncollected work published in various periodicals, he now has a lens through which to reevaluate classic texts such as Against Interpretation and On Photography, providing both students and advanced scholars a renewed sense of her importance and impact. Rollyson devotes separate chapters to Sontag's biography; her early novels; her landmark essay collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will; her films; her major mid-career books, On Photography and its sequel, Regarding the Pain of Others; and Illness as Metaphor and its sequel, AIDS and Its Metaphors, together with her groundbreaking short story, "The Way We Live Now." Sontag's later essay collections and biographical profiles, collected in Under the Sign of Saturn, Where the Stress Falls, and At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, also receive a fresh assessment, as does her later work in short fiction, the novel, and drama, with a chapter discussing I, etcetera; two historical novels, The Volcano Lover and In America; and her plays, A Parsifal, Alice in Bed, and her adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. Chapters on her diaries and uncollected prose, along with a primary and secondary bibliography, complete this comprehensive study. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Lesley Ann Fogle. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/083975/bk_acx0_083975_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 422min

  The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary 71-year writing career. The general introductory studies of West are outdated and do not take into account her posthumous publications, or her large literary archive of unpublished letters and manuscripts. Previous scholarly books have chopped West up into categories and genres instead of following the evolution of her career. Rollyson, author of Rebecca West: A Saga of the Century, draws on new scholarship and his interviews with West's contemporaries to provide the first organic account of her esthetic and political vision. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Paul Bloede. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/051986/bk_acx0_051986_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Biography: A User's Guide , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 743min

  Carl Rollyson's Biography: A User's Guide is an informative and entertaining text for those interested in biography. No aspect of the genre, from A to Z, goes uncovered: issues around authorized and unauthorized biography, censorship, libel, fair use, public domain (referred to as "PD" by publishers and editors), and a great deal more - including examples drawn from published biographies, as well as general and specific assessments of the biographer's art. Mr. Rollyson demonstrates that biography has more dimensions than are generally gleaned from book reviews and academic discourse. In a lively and provocative style, he argues with other biographers and critics, avoiding the polite and vague tones of many reference books on the subject. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Andrew Firda. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/058881/bk_acx0_058881_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 1133min

  Jill Craigie - filmmaker, writer, pioneering feminist, and devoted wife to former Labour leader Michael Foot - led an extraordinary life. Strikingly attractive, fiercely independent, and politically radical, Craigie established a reputation as a filmmaker with her 1944 film Out of Chaos, becoming the first female director to gain national attention. Talented and versatile, she wrote several film scripts, numerous articles, radio plays, and successful columns, but she always struggled as a woman and a socialist in a male-dominated, conservative industry. Her 50-year marriage to Michael Foot, the love of her life, involved her in politics at the highest level. The couple's mutual interest in literature and the arts made their Hampstead house a meeting place for artists, writers, actors, and politicians alike. Carl Rollyson has created an intimate and honest portrait of this charismatic figure, who never ceased to push the boundaries of what it meant to be a 20th-century woman. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Helen Lloyd. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/038592/bk_acx0_038592_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 524min

  This volume represents more than 25 years of writing about female icons and biography. Rollyson provides the bits and pieces that resulted not only in his biography of Marilyn Monroe but also in much of the work he has subsequently done on Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and on the nature of biography itself. This book includes a selection of Rollyson's New York Sun book reviews dealing with female icons such as Mary Stuart, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Brontës, Marie Curie, Harriet Tubman, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Sylvia Plath. Rollyson's writing about icons has provoked him to question the process by which selves are defined. Discovering the shaping mechanisms of the self is simultaneously a way of understanding how biographies are built. In the end, this book should be of interest not merely to devotees of Monroe, Sontag, and other icons but also to anyone curious about the nature of biography and the biographer. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Diane Lehman. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/049398/bk_acx0_049398_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 1166min

  This second edition of Carl Rollyson's standard biography begins with a portrait that attempts to evoke the living person in all her dimensions. It concludes with an interview with one of her favorite secretaries, Elizabeth Leyshon, who eluded him in the 1990s but provided new insights into her employer's character for this book. The biography's new title emphasizes that Rebecca West was a prophet - one not always appreciated in her own day. As early as 1917, she understood where the world was headed and realized that the revolution in Russia held out false hope. Because she took this view as a socialist, those on the left scorned her as an apostate, whereas she understood that Communism would result in a disaster for the British left. Those wishing to gauge the range of West's fiction and nonfiction should listen to Woman as Artist and Thinker, published by iUniverse. Rollyson has made his words anew, sharpening sentences, omitting words and paragraphs - sometimes entire sections - in order to provide a refreshing, more engaging, and spirited account of one of the world's major writers. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Kathleen Godwin. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/041879/bk_acx0_041879_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  British Biography , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 779min

  Biography as a literary genre is largely the product of the 18th century and of one seminal work, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell's innovations revolutionized the genre and made it the target of suppression and censorship. He sought not only to memorialize a great man but also to reveal his flaws. Boswell reported long stretches of Johnson's conversation, noted his mannerisms, and in general gave an intimate picture such as no biography had ever before dared to attempt. After Boswell, there was a retreat from his bolder innovations, which amounted to self-censorship on the biographer's part. When Thomas Carlyle's biographer, James Anthony Froude, braved this trend against truth and allowed his subject's dark side to show, he was vilified in the press. The tensions between discretion and candor have endured in British biography since Froude, a point Carl Rollyson makes in the reviews of contemporary British biographers he includes in British Biography, which also contains Johnson's full-length biography of Richard Savage, excerpts from Boswell's Life of Johnson as well selections from and commentaries on Southey's biography of Nelson, Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë, and the revolutionary work of Froude and Strachey. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Byrwec Ellison. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/057212/bk_acx0_057212_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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