Richard Norton Smith, C-SPAN's "in-house historian"

Richard Norton Smith, who visits us on Thursday, 11/20, talks to the TU's Paul Grondahl about what it was like to wrestle with writing a monumental biography of Nelson Rockefeller for 14 years:

"His long slog on Rockefeller was less a case of writer's block and more of information overload, as he kept uncovering fresh material and boxes of Rocky's previously sealed archives were made available to Smith. Stressed to the max about the ballooning biography, Smith suffered two heart attacks on Nov. 30, 2010. 'I can't remember four or five days. Luckily, a neighbor got concerned and came to my apartment,' he recalled. 'He got me to the hospital right away, and they discovered I'd had a heart attack and there was a blood clot in my heart. I had another heart attack the next day.'"

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/A-Rocky-story-5891118.php

More about the upcoming events with Smith:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/smith_richard_norton14.html

Read More......

Praise for John Lahr's new book

John Lahr, who visits the Writers Institute this Wednesday, Oct. 1st,  receives high praise from some notable admirers for his new biography, Tennessee Williams:  Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (2014).

More about Lahr's upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lahr_john14.html

‘Splendid beyond words. It would be hard to imagine a more satisfying biography.’Bill Bryson
 
‘Could this be the best theater book I’ve ever read? It just might be. Tennessee Williams had two great pieces of luck. Elia Kazan to direct his work and now John Lahr to make thrilling sense of his life’John Guare, author of Six Degrees of Separation, House of Blue Leaves, Atlantic City

This is a masterpiece about a genius. Only John Lahr, with his perceptions about the theater, about writers, about poetry and about people could have written this book. What a marvelous read, with brilliantly detailed research.’Helen Mirren

‘John Lahr’s magnificent biography…gathers material from a vast array of sources, including Williams’s diaries, poems, letters and the recollections of countless friends and colleagues,to trace how the personal and the creative lives interweave throughout the whole span of Williams’s oeuvre. The result is at once sensitive and magisterial, and it fulfils the ultimate test for a literary biography by convincing you that the works cannot be understood without it. Once you have read it, it becomes part of their meaning.’John Carey, lead review, Sunday London Times

‘This is by far the best book ever written about America’s greatest playwright. John Lahr, the longtime drama critic for the New Yorker, knows his way around Broadway better than anyone. He is a witty and elegant stylist, a scrupulous researcher, a passionate yet canny advocate… Hebrings us as close to Williams as we are ever likely to get.’J.D. McClatchy,Wall Street Journal

Read More......

Devil in the Grove to be a Major Motion Picture

Devil in the Grove, by Gilbert King (who visits Albany today), will be a Hollywood film from Lionsgate studios, which reportedly sees the film as a high priority.

Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, the co-writers of Ridley Scott's forthcoming biblical epic, Exodus, will write the script. Allison Shearmur, who produced The Hunger Games, is producing.

Read more in Deadline Hollywood:  http://www.deadline.com/2013/06/lionsgate-acquires-pulitzer-prize-winner-devil-in-the-grove-seminal-civil-rights-case-for-thurgood-marshall/

Read More......

WWII Historian Joe Persico Publishes New Book

Leading World War II historian and Guilderland resident Joseph Persico has a new book, Roosevelt's Centurions (2013), about the war-time President's relationships with his various commanders and generals.

Persico is also the author of the words that are engraved for posterity on the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D. C.:  "Here we mark the price of freedom."

Paul Grondahl of the Times Union has an interview with Persico about the new book: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Revelations-about-Roosevelt-4585140.php

Persico, who ghost-wrote Colin Powell's My American Journey, last visited the Institute in 2004: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/persicojoseph.html

Read More......

John Randel Exhibit at Museum of City of New York

John Randel's impact on New York City was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of the City The Greatest Grid-- The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011.
of New York:

You can still view much of the exhibit online:  http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/past/The-Greatest-Grid.html

Randel is the subject of a new biography by Marguerite Holloway, who visits on Thursday.

More about her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

Read More......

Disorderly Story of the Orderly NYC Street Grid

Marguerite Holloway, who will give a slide show presentation at the State Museum on Thursday, is the author of the new book, The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr.

Here's an excerpt from a review in Slate:

"Randel, who was born in Albany in 1787, grew up during “a surveying boom,” when a large portion of prominent American males—Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and later, Lincoln—served in the profession at some point. “His was the era of laying lines on the land,” Holloway declares. It was “a culture and a period in which reason and measured action were prized and dominion over the natural world—through exploration, experiment, science, cartography, and infrastructure—was celebrated.” Beginning in about 1804, Randel was hired to assist New York State surveyor-general Simeon Dewitt in his plan to grid upstate New York. Dewitt was influenced by the earlier plan to grid the entire United States, outlined in the 1785 “Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing of Lands in the Western Territory”—the reason why flyover country looks like a waffle iron."

Read more in Slate.

Read about Holloway's visit:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

Read More......

Marguerite Holloway Interviewed in the TU

Marguerite Holloway, who visits us on Thursday, is interviewed in the Times Union about her new book on Albany native and mad genius of the 19th century, John Randel, Jr. The book's title is The Measure of Manhattan.

"Randel's a window into an incredible era in American history.... He's also a fascinating character. He has this precise and careful mathematic rigor, but he's also mercurial and passionate, even irrational — getting involved in all sorts of lawsuits and losing tons of money."

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Manhattan-matrix-4410267.php#ixzz2PtXy0OcF

More about her visit this coming Thursday:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

Read More......

Lincoln Fans are "Just Nutty"

The TU's Paul Grondahl writes about David W. Blight's current project, a new biography of Frederick Douglass based on newly discovered sources, as well as Blight's opinion of people who are obsessed with Abraham Lincoln. Blight visit Albany tomorrow, 7:30 p.m. at the State Museum.

[Blight] is currently immersed in writing a biography of Frederick Douglass, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2013, a subject he has been researching since his doctoral dissertation 23 years ago.

"You have to make a subject an obsession to write seriously about it, although I have moments I'd like to get Frederick Douglass out of my life," Blight said. What spurred him to sign a book contract for a biography of the abolitionist, orator and writer was his discovery three years ago of nine personal scrapbooks kept by Douglass' sons, mostly newspaper clippings that documented the final 35 years of the life of their father, who died in 1895. The scrapbooks are owned by a collector in Savannah, Ga., who made them available to Blight.

"I figured if there can be more than 11,000 books on Lincoln, I can write the fifth or sixth biography of Douglass," Blight said.

He added, "I've only written essays on Lincoln, but I've encountered a lot of Lincoln people and their obsession is crazy. They need a shrink. They're just nutty."

More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Civil-War-historian-to-speak-4021294.php

Read More......

Doris Kearns-Goodwin's Lincoln on Big Screen

Doris Kearns-Goodwin, a repeat guest at the Institute, is the author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which will coming to theaters in November 2012 as a movie directed by Stephen Spielberg, and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln [pictured here].

"And contrary to the rumors that often follow the There Will Be Blood star's methodology, the director says that his lead wasn't pretending to be Lincoln for months at a time. 'Daniel was always conscious of his contemporary surroundings,' Spielberg says. 'Daniel never went into a fugue state. He did not channel Lincoln. All that stuff is just more about gossip than it is about technique."

More about the film in Entertainment Weekly.

Kearns-Goodwin last visited us in 2009 to share the stage with former Governor Mario Cuomo and celebrate the New York State Writers Institute's 25th Anniversary.

Read More......

Gandhi in South Africa

Here's an exerpt from Great Soul, Joseph Lelyveld's bestselling new biography of Gandhi, which he presents tomorrow at the New York State Writers Institute:

Prologue: An Unwelcome Visitor

"It was a brief only a briefless lawyer might have accepted. Mohandas Gandhi landed in South Africa as an untested, unknown twenty-three- year-old law clerk brought over from Bombay, where his effort to launch a legal career had been stalled for more than a year. His stay in the country was expected to be temporary, a year at most. Instead, a full twenty-one years elapsed before he made his final departure on July 14, 1914. By then, he was forty-four, a seasoned politician and negotiator, recently leader of a mass movement, author of a doctrine for such struggles, a pithy and prolific political pamphleteer, and more-a self-taught evangelist on matters spiritual, nutritional, even medical. That's to say, he was well on his way to becoming the Gandhi India would come to revere and, sporadically, follow."

More on the Powell's Books website.

Read More......

Gandhi-- A Tough Nut to Crack

Joseph Lelyveld, who visits the Writers Institute this coming Tuesday, April 3rd, talks about his new biography of Gandhi this week in a video interview on the New York Times blog "India Ink."

Gandhi was “a tough nut to crack,” Mr. Lelyveld said.

“I thought the book might be controversial because here is a foreigner lecturing Indians on what Gandhi might have meant for India, and telling them that India had disappointed the father of the nation,” he said.

Read more on the New York Times "India Ink" blog and watch the video clip.

Read More......

Man and Woman: "Two Halves of One Thought"

Margaret Fuller articulates her view of man and woman in her 1845 feminist manifesto, Woman in the 19th Century.

"By Man I mean both man and woman; these are the two halves of one thought. I lay no especial stress on the welfare of either. I believe that the development of the one cannot be effected without that of the other. My highest wish is that this truth should be distinctly and rationally apprehended, and the condition of life and freedom recognized as the same for the daughter and the sons of time; twin exponents of a divine thought." More.

John Matteson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his double biography, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (2007), will present his new biography, The Lives of Margaret Fuller (2012) today at UAlbany and the State Museum.

Read More......

Beginning with the End-- Biographer John Matteson

Joanna Scutts of the Washington Post writes about John Matteson's choice, as a biographer, to begin his new book with Fuller's death. Matteson visits UAlbany and the NYS Museum tomorrow.

"Matteson begins his story of Fuller’s 'lives' at the premature end. Along with her 1-year-old son and his Italian father, she was killed in a shipwreck off Fire Island, N.Y., during a freak hurricane in July 1850. She was 40 years old. By beginning with Fuller’s death — as he puts it, “Think first of endings” — Matteson purposely overshadows the book with a sense of loss. It works to subtly emphasize Fuller’s own most passionate and important theme, that human potential wasted by social injustice is no less a tragedy than death. Lost in the wreck was the manuscript of a book that might have transformed her legacy: her eyewitness account of the failed revolution in Rome in 1848-49." More.

Picture: Memorial marker for Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her husband, and their son. Located at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read More......

In Celebration of "Difficult Women"

Pulitzer-winning biographer John Matteson comes tomorrow to discuss Margaret Fuller, one of the great "difficult women" of the 19th century.

"Arrogant, condescending and vain, Fuller was (as she knew altogether too well) the best-educated American woman of her time. In The Lives of Margaret Fuller, John Matteson tells us that Ralph Waldo Emerson thought she exhibited 'an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others'; Nathaniel Hawthorne found her, as Matteson puts it, 'exquisitely irritating'; and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed her acidly. Habituated to deference from others, she was unaccustomed to dealing with people on an equal footing, and she bristled when she did not receive the respect she thought was her due."

Read more in Mary Beth Norton's review of Matteson's new book in the New York Times.

Read More......

A Devilish and Dutiful Daughter

John Matteson, who visits Thursday, contributes a review of the PBS film, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (2009) in the journal, Humanities.

Matteson received the Pulitzer for his dual biography, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (2008), about the father-daughter relationship between Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, and Bronson Alcott.

Clips of the film aired at the Writers Institute in October 2010 with a discussion by Nancy Porter, the film's director, and Harriet Reisen, the author of the biography upon which the film is based.

Read More......

'Suffering Into Self-Knowledge' at Harvard Law School

"[I]f one has a character flaw, Harvard Law will expose it. The long hours, the quantity and difficulty of the work, and the pressure to excel are a recipe for frayed nerves, shortened tempers and durable frustrations. I maintained very respectable grades for a semester but lagged thereafter. To my considerable pain, my argumentative agility and my competitive fire — qualities I thought I possessed in abundance — were not strong enough to place me at the top."

John Matteson, professor of legal writing at John Jay College and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer talks about "suffering into self-knowledge" at Harvard Law School in the New York Times. Matteson visits Thursday, March 22nd.

Read more.

Read More......

Gandhi Book and A Firestorm of Controversy

Joseph Lelyveld, former editor of the New York Times, visits April 3rd to present the paperback edition of his new biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. The book caused a firestorm of controversy in India last year, and was banned in Gandhi's home state of Gujarat.

NPR's Bilal Qureshi discussed the controversy in March 2011:

"Sir Ben Kingsley in a universally acclaimed bio-epic? Definitely not this time around."

"Joseph Lelyveld's new biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India hasn't even hit bookstores in India, but it has already unleashed a firestorm of controversy."

"The state of Gujarat, where the icon of the Indian Independence movement was born, has already banned the book. There are some Indian leaders now calling for a national boycott of Great Soul, the latest work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who once covered India for The New York Times." More.

Read More......

Margaret Fuller: Too Fierce to Fit In

"Fuller was the recipient of her father Timothy's ambition. A brooding thinker who was disappointed that his first child was female, Timothy gave his daughter an incredibly rigorous education that left her with nightmares and robbed her of her childhood. And though she was lauded as a prodigy, she was keenly aware as she matured that her father rued his role in developing her mind. She suffered from spinal curvature and migraines and was plain-featured, nearsighted, an unmarried mother at age 38, in love with an Italian man a decade younger and regularly criticized in private and public for her inability to be deferential in the slightest degree. Fuller was, quite simply, too fierce to fit in."

So writes Laura Skandera Trombley in a review of John Matteson's The Lives of Margaret Fuller. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer visits on 3/22.

Read More......

Brilliant? Yes. Crazy? Yes.

Masha Gessen, who visits from Moscow on 3/8, answers questions on the Amazon website about her 2009 biography of Grigori Perelman, the eccentric Russian genius who solved the Poincare Conjecture, perhaps the most important mathematical achievement of the last century.

Q: So he is as crazy as they say?

A: I think crazy generally means that a person has an internally consistent view of the world that is entirely different from the view most people consider normal. I think this is true of Perelman. The interesting thing, of course, was to figure out what this internally consistent view of the world was.

Q: And did you manage to figure it out?

A: I think so. I concluded that this view, and the rigidity with which he holds to it, is actually directly related to the reason he was able to solve the hardest mathematical problem ever solved. He has a mind that is capable of taking in more information, and embracing more-complex systems, than any mind that has come before. His mind is like a universal math compactor. He grasps hugely complex problems and reduces them to their solvable essence. The problem is, he expects the world of humans to be similarly subject to reduction. He expects the world to function in accordance with a set of strictly laid out rules, and he absolutely cannot take in anything that does not conform to those rules. The world of humans is unruly, though, so Perelman has had to cut off successive chunks of it until all that was left was the apartment he shares with his mother.

Read More......

Margaret Fuller Has Her Own Facebook Page

Feminist firebrand Margaret Fuller, who drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, in 1850, has her own Facebook fan page.

John Matteson, who visits the Institute 3/22, has been featured prominently on the page in recent weeks with the publication of his new biography, The Lives of Margaret Fuller.

Also featured are quotes from Fuller's correspondence and her newspaper columns in the New York Daily Tribune, such as this 1845 assessment of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (known locally for his evocation of the Normanskill valley in his poem, "Hiawatha"):

"We must confess a coolness toward Mr. Longfellow, in consequence of the exaggerated praises that have been bestowed upon him. When we see a person of moderate powers receive honors which should be reserved for the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and taking from him the crown which should be reserved for grander brows..."

Read More......