I mean in spite of the fact that a lot of good biographies, letters and memoirs read like fiction. I don't remember the authors of some of these, and am too lazy to look them up.
The All-Colour Book of Henry VIII, by ?
All the Golden Lads, by Daphne duMaurier (about the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth I)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X with Alex Haley
The Autobiography of Mark Twain
Balzac, by Stefan Zweig
A biography of Emily Dickinson, by ?
A biography of Felix Mendelssohn, by ?
The Brontes, by Juliet Barker
A Damned Serious Business, by Rex Harrison
Darwin, by James Moore and somebody else
Dickens, by Peter Ackroyd
A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman
Down the Garden Path, by Beverley Nichols
Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, by Amy Kelly
The Elephant To Hollywood, by Michael Caine
Elizabeth the Great, by Elizabeth Jenkins
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing
Gerard Manley Hopkins, by G.F. Lahey, S.J.
Imperium, by Robert Harris
John Adams, by David McCullough
King Charles II, by Antonia Fraser
The Kings and Queens of England, by ?
Letters From the Earth, by Mark Twain
The Life and Times of Chaucer, by John Gardner
Loitering With Intent, by Peter O'Toole
A Lovely Light: A biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay by ?
M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, by ?
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
The Mysterious William Shakespeare, by Charlton Ogburn [Jr.]
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen, by Jane Aiken Hodge
Out of Africa, and Shadows on the Grass, by Isak Dinesen
Puccini, by Howard Greenfield
Religion in Shoes [Biog. of Brother Bryan of Birmingham], by Hunter B. Blakely
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris
Robert Frost, [a biography] by ?
Rudyard Kipling, by Lord Birkenhead (F. Smith)
Samuel Johnson, by John Wain
Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally
Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts
Sir Thomas More, by Richard Marius
The Six Wives of Henry VIII, by Antonia Fraser
Stephen Crane, by ?
Tallulah, by Tallulah Bankhead
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography, by Fawn M. Brodie
Thomas Wolfe, by Elizabeth Nowell
Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana
Virginia Woolf, by Quentin Bell (or Clive Bell)
W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes, by Robert Lewis Taylor
We Shook the Family Tree, by Hildegarde Dolson
We Took To the Woods, by Louise Dickinson Rich
The Weaker Vessel, by Antonia Fraser
*
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Nonfiction malgre lui
Tallulah Bankhead before the Hollywood makeup artists (and cocaine, booze, etc.) changed her image. This may have been the black wig she was wearing when a monkey who was part of the stage play snatched off her wig and jumped down into the audience waving the hair in the air. What did T. do? She turned a cartwheel.
"Daddy, that's the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life."
[Daphne duMaurier to Gerald duMaurier, seeing Tallulah at a play]
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6 comments:
I haven't read many on this list. I need to read more of them. Some of the ones I've read and enjoyed:
The Elephant to Hollywood
Imperium
John Adams
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (great)
Schindler's List
We Shook the Family Tree
I started "A Distant Mirror," but could not get into it at all. "A World Lit Only By Fire" was much more readable and interesting, but over time I've started to doubt if anything by William Manchester can be taken at face value. I loved "The Last Lion" (by Manchester, about Churchill), but I also enjoyed "Goodbye Darkness," which I later found out was embellished a bit.
I started "Two Years Before the Mast," and I predict that I will finish it someday. But I was reading a bad electronic copy. I need to find a good used copy.
Some of my favorite biographies:
With Malice Toward None - Stephen Oates, about Lincoln
The Indispensable Man - James Flexner, about Washington. Another book that makes me cry even after a dozen readings. A fundamentally decent human being and a legendary hero.
The Life of Andrew Jackson - Robert Remini. A man of legandary abilities, with only average humanity. Probably the 1st or 2nd most interesting President (the other being the good Roosevelt).
Nixon (three volumes) - Stephen Ambrose. A small man with great abilities.
US Grant and the American Military Tradition - Bruce Catton. This book was written for young adults. Catton's 2-volume biography is also excellent, but this one gets to the hard of Grant better than almost any biography I've ever read. A good man.
The Path to Power & Means of Ascent - Robert Caro, about Lyndon Johnson
If we can include Imperium, I suppose we could include "Fortune Made His Sword" in this list.
William Wallace (?). A psychopath, by the standards of our time.
My Grandfather's Son - Clarence Thomas
Beethoven: The Universal Composer, Edmund Morris
I don't read many literary bios - most writers lead very boring lives.
Yes, Catton's "Grant and the American Military Tradition" is one of the best biographies. And Morris's Beethoven was one of the best and most amazing books of any kind I've read.
I've got a "new" (Amazon cheapie hardback) of Two Years Before the Mast, you can borrow. The Path to Power is also good.
Is William Wallace "Braveheart?" If so, the actor who portrayed him was a good match.
The W.C. Fields biog that I read was later "revealed" to be mostly anecdotal, but it was entertaining.
I'd like to read the Washington biography if you've still got it.
I just put the Washington biography by the door, for the next time I visit. And I will borrow your copy of Two Years.
Yes, Wallace is Braveheart. He was equally willing to attach four English soldiers head-on, and to stab an English civilian in the back. He really, really enjoyed killing Englishmen, and was very good at it.
If you read The Brontes, or Balzac, or Dickens by Peter Ackroyd, I bet you wouldn't think they were boring. Balzac was short. ugly, slovenly, filthy--the dirty kind--, broke most of the time, and drunken, and the girls all over Europe adored him. He wrote at least one good book that has endured, "Pere Goriot." I haven't read any of the others.
Wow! She was pretty. I don't remember her looking like this at all.
I half remember a funny story about Tallulah and A. Hitchock during the making of "Lifeboat." I found a version of the the story online. Here it is:
During the filming, the actors had to climb a ladder to get to the lifeboat set. Tallulah never wore underwear and delighted in shocking her fellow actors by climbing the ladder ahead of them. A woman reporter visiting the set was outraged by Tallulah's behavior and complained to studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, who sent a man to talk to Hitchcock about the situation. Hitchcock, who was always amused by Tallulah's antics, refused to interfere and told the man that it wasn't his department. The man asked, "Well, whose department is it?" Hitchcock mused for a moment and then said, "Makeup, or perhaps hairdressing."
The closer she got to fame, the uglier she got. There's a picture of her and her sister Eugenia, probably in the book Tallulah, before she went to New York. It was a shock to me to see how pretty she was. Her daddy sent her $50 a week when she was in New York, which he thought was plenty to live on at that time. She paid $25 a week for her apartment and $25 for a maid.
Mrs. Thomason, the old English teacher at Leeds, taught grammar school in Walker County when she was young. She used to tell us tales about Tallulah and her childhood antics. They probably should have drowned the girl when she was a pup.
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