Literary Biography

For readers of Room and The Glass Castle, an astonishing memoir of one woman's rise above an unimaginable childhood. Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor -- raising her in isolation, tyrannizing her childhood and...

This program includes archival recordings of Ernest Hemingway Hemingway's deeply reflective account of his destructive Paris affair and how it affected the legendary life he rebuilt after, as told to his best friend, the writer A.E. Hotchner. In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend...

Before he won stunning acclaim as one of today's most gifted southern writers, Larry Brown was a firefighter with the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. On Fire, his powerful and unflinching account of this experience, catapults listeners into the daily trauma all firefighters face, from the blistering heat of burning homes to the crunch of broken glass at crash scenes.

A collection of the journals, fiction, and letters of the late Esther Grace Earl, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 16. Essays by family and friends will help to tell Esther’s story along with an introduction by award-winning author John Green who dedicated his #1 bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars to her.

Ein neuer Blick auf Leben und Werk des letzten Universalgenies. Das Goethe-Hörbuch für unsere Zeit: Rüdiger Safranski führt uns Goethe in neuem Licht vor und macht uns zu Zeitgenossen dieses Genies und Menschen, dessen Lebensspanne das verspielte Rokoko, die klassisch-romantische Zeit und die Nüchternheit des Eisenbahnzeitalters umgreift. Mit seinem Namen hat man später eine ganze Epoche bezeichnet: die Goethezeit.

Everyone who knew him told stories about Lawrence, and Lawrence told stories about everyone he knew. He also told stories about himself, again and again: a pioneer of autofiction, no writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature. In Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson tells a new story about the author, focusing on his decade of superhuman writing and travel between 1915, when The Rainbow was suppressed following an obscenity trial, and 1925, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Die Freundschaftsgeschichte DER beiden deutschen Geistesgrößen. Jeder der beiden sagte vom anderen, er sei ihm der wichtigste Mensch gewesen. Sie waren grundverschieden, doch Gegensätze ziehen sich an. Intuition und Gefühl bei Goethe, scharfer Intellekt und zäher Wille bei Schiller; der eine setzt auf Natur, der andere auf Freiheit. Ihre Freundschaft mit allen Konflikten und Spannungen hat beide zu Höchstleistungen angespornt: Schiller schreibt seine klassischen Dramen und bringt sie mit Goethes Hilfe auf die Bühne.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's favorite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom.

Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination―the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry, a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. Emily Van Duyne―a superfan and scholar―radically reimagines the last years of Plath’s life, confronts her suicide and the construction of her legacy.

All children mythologize their birth... So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's beloved collection of stories, long famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale. The enigmatic Winter has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she summons a biographer to tell the truth about her extraordinary life: Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth remains an ever-present pain.

This program is read by Noah Galvin, who starred in The Good Doctor, Dear Evan Hansen, The Real O'Neals, and Booksmart. "A Star is Bored is an absolute knockout. Riotously funny and wickedly tender." — Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones and the Six People...

Salt of the Earth is the true story of a courageous woman who survived a hellish twentieth century nightmare. Mob violence, injustice, kidnapping, murder and suicide were the black holes in the awful astronomy of Elaine Gere’s life. Somehow, she had to summon the courage to endure: to honor her beloved dead and to rebuild the shattered lives of the sons who depended on her strength.

In the fall of 1948 Hemingway and his fourth wife traveled for the first time to Venice, which Hemingway called "a goddam wonderful city." He was a year shy of his 50th birthday and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. At a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Di Robilant - whose great-uncle moved in Hemingway's revolving circle of bon vivants, aristocrats, and artists - re-creates with sparkling clarity this surprising, years-long relationship.

As an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, Cory Leadbeater was presented with an opportunity to work for a well-known writer whose identity was kept confidential. Since the tumultuous days of childhood, Cory had sought refuge from the rougher parts of life in the pages of books. Suddenly, he found himself the personal assistant to a titan of literature: Joan Didion. In the nine years that followed, Cory shared Joan’s rarefied world, transformed not only by her blazing intellect but by her generous friendship and mentorship.

In The Climb up to Hell, acclaimed journalist and Edgar award winning author Jack Olsen delivers a gripping account of one of the most dangerous mountain climbs in history, a perilous 1957 assault on the Eiger’s infamous North Face in the Swiss Alps, where courage, tragedy, and endurance collide.

William Faulkner: a titan of American literature. You probably already know all about his life and work, right? No? Don’t sweat it! In five minutes, we’ll bring you up to speed on this national treasure. First we’ll fill you in on a few key facts about his career, and then we’ll hit five important aspects of his writing that are guaranteed to impress friends, family, and potential dates.

When Woody Rawls read The Call of the Wild, a classic novel about a stolen mistreated dog and a kindly man, his life was forever changed. Maybe it was because he loved his own dog, or maybe it was because the story reached deep into his heart and stayed there. From then on, Woody was determined to learn to write and become a teller of tales. Woody didn't care that he couldn’t afford pen and paper. He would use a stick in the sand if he had to. Woody trusted his heart and used his imagination to create his stories, which he shared with Rowdy, his trusty hound.

Andy Griffith (1926-2012) is one of North Carolina's most beloved exports, capturing America's heart as Sheriff Andy Taylor. Evan Dalton Smith was born in the North Carolina Piedmont over four decades after Andy, just an hour south of Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy. Both were small-town boys who grew up in similar places, where the counties were dry and the churches plentiful. But for both, there was darkness, crushed hopes, and tragedy, hidden just below the surface.

How was it that the novelist who created some of the most memorable and modern female characters in literature had such troubled relationships with real women? In this highly innovative book, acclaimed biographer Paula Byrne re-examines novelist Thomas Hardy’s life through the eyes of the women who made him—mother, sisters, girlfriends, wives, muses. The story veers from shocking scenes such as his obsession with the sight of a woman hanged, to poignant vignettes of unfulfilled passion, to fascinating details of working women’s lives in the nineteenth century.

In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me".