Mr. Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of…
The best graphic biographies provide dramatic scenes and pithy captions that can evoke a life better than whole paragraphs and pages of narrative biographies.
One of the most moving episodes of Jerome Charyn’s book is a moment when the conventions of biography and of the novel collide.
Peter Conn has a back story for every Thomas Sully portrait, sharpening our awareness of just why Sully chose to depict his subjects in certain lights, positions, and gestures.
Milo Manara fuses the color and sensationalism of Caravaggio’s paintings with the gaudy and vibrant tones of comic books, showing that the highs and lows of the artist’s life are the palette of his intense sensibility.
That a poet has now brought together all elements of the writer’s life in a book that celebrates both the delicacy and the determination of Plath’s brief life is cause for considerable reflection and elation.
It took Cavafy decades to become Cavafy. He began as a sociable, romantically inclined fellow with a rhyming dictionary — rather like the young Sylvia Plath.
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