Carl Rollyson – författare

Vivid quotations from those who knew Marie Curie as well as a "points to ponder" section in each chapter are designed to provoke further discussion and research into the life and career of one of the century''s greatest scientists and-as Rollyson shows-one of the most important figures in human history.

At a time when the ethics of science and of scientists has been called into question, Rollyson''s searching examination of Madame Curie''s methods and morality makes this a sharply focused and challenging biography.

The Marie Curie that emerges from this account is a woman of great integrity and self-discipline, acutely conscious of her historic role, keenly devoted to protecting her private life, and yet willing to shape her personality to the public roles demanded of her.

Thus piece by piece, Rollyson accumulated what is now another book about Rebecca West. This new collection tells the story of how his biography got written, of what it means to think like a biographer, and why West''s vision remains relevant. She is one of the great personalities and writers of the modern age, and one that we are just beginning to comprehend.

Rollyson proposes a number of apologias for biography-including the thought that in the right hands the literary biography is a continuation of the writer''s work and life. In such instances there seems to be a symbiosis between biographer and subject. In other cases, biographies spearhead the rediscovery of important writers. He rejects the idea that literary figures are not good subjects for biography because they are not men and women of action. That literary biography is a kind of strip mining, a pathography laying bare the subject''s life to no good purpose is another canard this book demolishes.

The pieces here also expose the genre''s weak points: a proclivity for overstatement and excessive length, the failure of biographers to build upon their predecessors'' work (Rollyson invents a term-biographology-in order to discuss the biographical tradition).

William Faulkner emerged from the ravaged South—half backwoods, half defeated empire—transforming his corner of Mississippi into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and bestowing on the world some of the most revolutionary and enduring literature of the twentieth century. The personal story behind the work has fascinated readers nearly as much as the great novels, but Faulkner has remained elusive despite numerous biographies that have attempted to decipher his private life and his wild genius. In an ambitious biography that will encompass two volumes, Carl Rollyson has created a life of Faulkner for the new millennium.

Rollyson has drawn on an unprecedented amount of material to present the richest rendering of Faulkner yet published. In addition to his own extensive interviews, Rollyson consults the complete—and never fully shared—research of pioneering Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner, who discarded from his authorized biography substantial findings in order to protect the Faulkner family. Rollyson also had unrivaled access to the work of Carvel Collins, whose decades-long inquiry produced one of the greatest troves of primary source material in American letters.

This first volume follows Faulkner from his formative years through his introduction to Hollywood. Rollyson sheds light on Faulkner’s unpromising, even bewildering youth, including a gift for tall tales that blossomed into the greatest of literary creativity. He provides the fullest portrait yet of Faulkner’s family life, in particular his enigmatic marriage, and offers invaluable new insight into the ways in which Faulkner’s long career as a screenwriter influenced his iconic novels.

Integrating Faulkner’s screenplays, fiction, and life, Rollyson argues that the novelist deserves to be reread not just as a literary figure but as a still-relevant force, especially in relation to issues of race, sexuality, and equality. The culmination of years of research in archives that have been largely ignored by previous biographers, The Life of William Faulkner offers a significant challenge and an essential contribution to Faulkner scholarship.

By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The second and concluding volume of Carl Rollyson’s ambitious biography finds Faulkner lamenting the many threats to his creative existence. Feeling, as an artist, he should be above worldly concerns and even morality, he has instead inherited only debts—a symptom of the South’s faded fortunes—and numerous mouths to feed and funerals to fund. And so he turns to the classic temptation for financially struggling writers—Hollywood.

Thus begins roughly a decade of shuttling between his home and family in Mississippi—lifeblood of his art—and the backlots of the Golden Age film industry. Through Faulkner’s Hollywood years, Rollyson introduces such personalities as Humphrey Bogart and Faulkner’s long-time collaborator Howard Hawks, while telling the stories behind films such as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. At the same time, he chronicles with great insight Faulkner''s rapidly crumbling though somehow resilient marriage and his numerous extramarital affairs--including his deeply felt, if ultimately doomed, relationship with Meta Carpenter. (In his grief over their breakup, Faulkner—a dipsomaniac capable of ferocious alcoholic binges—received third-degree burns when he passed out on a hotel-room radiator.)

Where most biographers and critics dismiss Faulkner’s film work as at best a necessary evil, at worst a tragic waste of his peak creative years, Rollyson approaches this period as a valuable window on his artistry. He reveals a fascinating, previously unappreciated cross-pollination between Faulkner’s film and literary work, elements from his fiction appearing in his screenplays and his film collaborations influencing his later novels—fundamentally changing the character of late-career works such as the Snopes trilogy.

Rollyson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the composition of Absalom, Absalom!, widely considered Faulkner’s masterpiece, as well as the film adaptation he authored—unproduced and never published— Revolt in the Earth. He reveals how Faulkner wrestled with the legacy of the South—both its history and its dizzying racial contradictions—and turned it into powerful art in works such as Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust.

Volume 2 of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author''s trajectory from under-appreciated "writer''s writer" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon. In his famous Nobel speech, Faulkner said what inspired him was the human ability to prevail. In the end, this beautifully wrought life shows how Faulkner, the man and the artist, embodies this remarkable capacity to endure and prevail.

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 Bront, and the revolutionary work of Froude and Strachey.

What does it mean to be a disciplined poet? It means writing and rewriting poems until they seem to be as perfect as possible. Dickinson left behind many drafts of her poems--sometimes including alternate wordings, as if to acknowledge that her writing was still seeking perfection.

Dickinsons discipline was self-imposed. She met no publishing deadlines. She did not write for a patron who sponsored her creative efforts. She did not expect the world to acknowledge her poetry as soon as it was written. Yet now she is considered one of the greatest poets ever to have written in the English language. She valued the labor and the results of a job well done. Emily Dickinson is a model not only for writers, but for anyone who wishes calmly and determinedly to pursue a goal, even without the prospect of an immediate reward.

Perseverance is a quality that Thurgood had in abundance. The grandson of a freed slave and the son of a waiter and a schoolteacher, he managed to obtain an excellent education despite the racial segregation of the American school system. Early in his career as a champion of civil rights, he found it hard to make a living, and he endured not only legal setbacks but also threats on his life. Eventually, Thurgood achieved high office, but even as a Supreme Court justice he continued to fight for the rights of those whom society continued to regard as inferior: blacks, women, and poor people.