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by Amy Scribner

The 50th anniversary season of Saturday Night Live is the perfect time to release this definitive biography of the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels. In Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison uses meticulous research and pleasurably crisp writing to tell the life story of a man who has shaped pop culture for a half-century.

So many biographies are weighed down by ponderous recollections of a subject’s early years. Morrison wisely spends only a few chapters on Michaels’ childhood. She includes important contextual details, like how Michaels’ father died when Michaels was a teenager and how his mom was tough and distant. But Morrison knows what we want to hear about: SNL!

And boy, do we. Morrison has unparalleled access to the workings of SNL, from cast auditions to the writing room, costumes and makeup, and the sometimes sublime, sometimes sweaty minutes of live airtime. She conducted hundreds of interviews, including with many of the show’s stalwarts, like Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Bill Hader and Chris Rock, to name just a few. (If only we could hear stories from late cast members like Gilda Radner, John Belushi and Phil Hartman . . .) Most importantly, she interviewed Michaels extensively.

Lorne offers a fascinating blow-by-blow of the sometimes harrowing months leading up to SNL’s 1975 premiere. Belushi played hard to get, but ultimately wanted to be on the show more than anyone. Chevy Chase was initially hired as a writer, but with his preppy good looks, he quickly became the first anchor of Weekend Update, signing on each week with, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.”

Morrison does not shy away from the less endearing aspects of Michaels’ persona. A known name-dropper, he casually mentions “dinner with Paul” (leaving one to wonder, Simon or McCartney—he’s dear friends with both). He’s also notoriously conflict-averse, leaving firing and other tough managerial decisions to others on his staff.

It’s been observed that everyone says Saturday Night Live was best during the years they were in high school. Yet Morrison gets to the heart of why the show has survived all these years despite such naysayers: Lorne Michaels understands comedy—and comedians—more than perhaps anyone in Hollywood. “One of Michaels’s rules is ‘Do it in sunshine,’ which means, don’t forget that comedy is an entertainment,” Morrison writes. “Colors should be bright, costumes flattering. He likes hard laughs, he says, because ‘I search for anything that makes me feel free.’ ”

In her dishy, comprehensive biography of Lorne Michaels, Susan Morrison gets to the heart of why SNL has survived for 50 years and counting.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Biography

Love and Need

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

For many readers, Robert Frost looms large as the American poet who captured the rhythms of New England life and the patterns of nature in poems like “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Celebrated for capturing ordinary speech in his poetry, Frost incorporated influences such as Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley in his verse, as well as philosophical influences regarding the spirit and the self from Ralph Waldo Emerson to William James. In his moving and insightful Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, literary critic Adam Plunkett performs elegant close readings of Frost’s poems as a way of mapping the poet’s development, his struggles with self-doubt and his relationships with his family and friends.

Born in San Francisco, Frost moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1884, following his father’s death. Always curious about the natural world—he kept hens in his yard in San Francisco—he composed one of his first poems, “My Butterfly,” when he was 20. As Plunkett observes, at the time Frost had been reading Francis Thompson’s 182-line poem “Hound of Heaven” as well as Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” “My Butterfly” writes Plunkett, “reads like a spell that conjures the experience of grace as the poem describes its having passed.” Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913), which he wrote following the death of his mother and his son, resembles Tennyson’s elegy “In Memoriam” and, Plunkett argues, forms Frost’s spiritual autobiography.

Plunkett’s brilliant readings of Frost’s best-known poems offer refreshing, alternative interpretations. For example, rather than being a sentimental reflection on hopes lost or chances not selected, “The Road Not Taken” is a poem about friendship, “the kind that can witness your deepest uncertainties and remember you as you were, long after you have forgotten yourself.” The struggle between the spiritual and the natural animates all of Frost’s poems, and a “measured sense of transcendence touched all things in the best of his poetry like intimations of gold in nature’s first green.”

Plunkett’s refined prose and his astute readings of Frost’s poems in Love and Need offer a candid portrait of the poet’s enduring creative genius.

Adam Plunkett’s elegantly written Love and Need offers a candid portrait of Robert Frost’s enduring creative genius.

Biography, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Biography

Daughter of Daring

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

Hollywood film historian Mallory O’Meara specializes in recovering the lost feminist history of filmmaking. O’Meara’s celebrated 2019 biography of Milicent Patrick, original designer of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, uncovered the true story of how Patrick’s achievements in cinema were co-opted by male coworkers. In Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stuntwoman, O’Meara tells the thrilling story of Hollywood’s first and best stuntwoman.

In the early years of Hollywood, Helen Gibson starred in hundreds of silent serial pictures, eponymously known as The Hazards of Helen. Gibson jumped onto trains and out of planes, and took rodeo tricks to an entirely new level of daring and general badassery. Unlike today’s stuntworkers, Gibson wore no safety devices and had no mentors; all she possessed was a love for adventure and a drive to be something other than a domestic drone. What’s even more remarkable about Helen Gibson’s story is that she wasn’t unique. The 1910s in Hollywood were something of a golden age for women writers, directors, producers and actors.

O’Meara’s great achievement in Daughter of Daring lies in capturing this brief chapter in Hollywood history, before the studio system and censorship board asserted control over the film industry and marginalized the achievements of women like Gibson, Helen Gardner, Lois Weber and Marion E. Wong (director of the first all Chinese American made film in 1916). Establishing the parallels between the suffrage movement, the “New Woman” era and the Wild West cowboy shows that gave Gibson her start as a stuntwoman, O’Meara provides a well-researched guide to a heady cultural moment for women in film.

The experiences of these artists continue to reverberate today: Women and filmmakers of color still struggle for a seat at the Hollywood table, and the #MeToo movement of the 21st century uncovered scandals and abuse that echo what O’Meara’s subjects endured in the 1920s. O’Meara is not only invested in film history but also in its future. Entertaining and educational, Daughter of Daring will attract and inspire readers of all ages.

Mallory O’Meara’s Daughter of Daring chronicles Hollywood’s first stuntwoman and celebrates the brief, vibrant golden age for women in film.

American History, Biography, History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History Biography American History

A Man on Fire

Review by Roger Bishop

by Roger Bishop

In 1881, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his diary that in the unlikely event someone would write his biography, “the key to my life is easily to be found in this, that what I longed for from childhood was not to be eminent in this or that way, but to lead a whole life, develop all my powers, and do well in whatever came in my way to do.” As Douglas R. Egerton shows in his magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the colonel, abolitionist, minister, legislator and writer did just that.

Egerton writes that “Higginson’s lifelong refusal to tether himself to a single issue has today kept him from fame by association with one. Scholars, whether of antislavery or literary or gender studies, tend to tell only part of Higginson’s story.” A noted Civil War historian, Egerton guides us expertly through the issues and personalities in Higginson’s various causes. He raised funds for evangelist-abolitionist John Brown’s fateful raid on the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As a Civil War army colonel, he led the first Black Union regiment and wrote about that experience in his classic Army Life in a Black Regiment. A prominent man of letters, Higginson corresponded with Emily Dickinson about her poetry, and his own essays and poems appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. A noted public speaker, Higginson supported women’s suffrage and advocated for women’s participation in governance.

Egerton also sensitively captures the private life of this very public man, highlighting Higginson’s relationships with his mother; his first wife, Mary, who died in 1877; and his second wife, Minnie, and their daughters. Higginson had a basic optimism that drove his extraordinary activism. Despite the struggles for the reforms he fought for, he said in 1871 “that this is a remarkably good world, and there are remarkably good people in it.” This bright outlook rings through A Man on Fire, especially in Higginson’s writings, which Egerton cites throughout. In his memoirs, Higginson wrote, “It has been my privilege to live in the best society all my life—namely that of abolitionists and fugitives.”

When Higginson’s 1898 memoir, Cheerful Yesterdays, was published, his friend Samuel Clemens observed, “He was always doing the fine and beautiful and brave disagreeable things that others shrank from and were afraid of—and his was a happy life.”

Douglas R. Egerton’s magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire charts the extraordinary life of multitalented abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

American History, Biography, Black History, Food & Drink, History, Literature, Music, Nonfiction, Women's History

Nonfiction Women's History Music Literature History Food & Drink Black History Biography American History

The 12 best biographies of 2024

List by Editors

STARRED REVIEW

December 11, 2024

The 12 best biographies of 2024

Throughout 2024, biographies consistently stole the show. From renowned authors to heads of state, game-changing activists and cultural icons, these 12 illuminating profiles delighted and inspired us.

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Ira Gershwin

By Michael Owen

Michael Owen’s thoughtful, engaging biography illuminates the life and work of Ira Gershwin.

The Icon and the Idealist

By Stephanie Gorton

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.

Survival Is a Promise

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literar and feminist icon.

Night Flyer

By Tiya Miles

With the exquisite Night Flyer, Tiya Miles looks at Harriet Tubman from an entirely new perspective: her spirituality.

Loving Sylvia Plath

By Emily Van Duyne

Unearthed letters from Sylvia Plath may have shocked the world in 2017, but Loving Sylvia Plath shows we’ve long had all the evidence we needed to condemn her abuser, poet Ted Hughes.

Ascent to Power

By David L. Roll

Ascent to Power is a carefully crafted biography that superbly captures the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

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Ira Gershwin has long been regarded as one of the major lyricists of the Great American Songbook. Many of his contributions to Broadway shows, movies and recordings from the 1920s to the 1950s remain popular today. Three of his songs were nominated for Academy Awards but did not win. Today, those songs “The Man that Got Away,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and “Long Ago (and Far Away),” are standards. Among the artists who have released all-Gershwin recordings in recent years are Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, Diana Krall, Brian Wilson and Michael Feinstein.

The celebrated and much beloved George Gershwin, best known for his “Rhapsody in Blue” and the “folk opera” Porgy and Bess, was Ira’s younger brother and frequent collaborator. George developed a brain tumor and died at age 38. This devastating turn of events not only was a profound personal loss for Ira but also made him the custodian of George’s estate. While continuing to pursue his own career with other composers, he had to contend with long-disputed legal and financial aspects of this inheritance.

In Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words, the first full-length biography of its subject, Michael Owen beautifully captures the life and times of the Gershwin brothers as they crafted musicals for Broadway, including Of Thee I Sing, for which Ira received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama 1932 for his lyrical contribution; George missed out on the award, for there was not a prize for music at this point. Owen writes that Ira “was honored to be recognized but was equally perturbed by the ignorance of the committee that discounted the inventiveness of the music, which allowed his words to come to life.”

So too does Owen’s engaging and insightful portrait illuminate Ira’s life. Ira Gershwin is meticulously researched, thoughtfully drawing from a wide range of sources to take us behind the scenes of the highs and lows of writing for stage and screen. Through Ira’s musings, personal letters, production notes and business correspondence, as well as interviews with those who knew him, we see how this low-key, erudite and keen observer of life and language became not only an outstanding wordsmith, but also the chief archivist of his and George’s musical achievements.

There are numerous theatrical and academic projects inspired by and named for the Gershwins. The best known is the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for American Popular Song. The award, established in 2007, recognizes the important place popular song has in our country. Among the recipients are Paul Simon, Carole King, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and Garth Brooks. And, of course, the Gershwin songs continue to be heard and enjoyed.

Michael Owen’s thoughtful, engaging biography illuminates the life and work of Ira Gershwin.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Biography

Didion and Babitz

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her introduction to Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik lays out her plan: “What this book attempts to do: See Joan Didion plainly; see Eve Babitz plainly. Except Joan Didion can’t be seen plainly,” only “through a glass darkly. Eve Babitz is that glass.”

Babitz, born in 1943, was a child of Hollywood. Her father was a violinist for movie studios, her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. At 20, she made waves for posing nude with Marcel Duchamp as the two played chess. Though she wanted to be an artist and design album covers, she’s remembered for her memoir and short stories recounting the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll scene of early-1970s Los Angeles. But Babitz’s drug-fueled lifestyle got in her way, and her writing was largely forgotten until Anolik got to know her in 2012. Anolik’s profile for Vanity Fair and a 2019 biography, Hollywood’s Eve, sparked a resurgence of interest in Babitz’s writing.

After Babitz died in 2021, Anolik stayed in touch with Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, who invited Anolik to examine the writer’s collection of letters. Anolik found one of particular interest: an unsent 1972 letter from Babitz to her friend Joan Didion. By turns earnest and angry, it sets up Babitz and Didion not as merely friends but as writerly rivals; Babitz chides Didion for dismissing Virginia Woolf and, Babitz claims, wanting to write like a man. The revelation led Anolik to begin another book about Babitz, this time including Didion.

The resulting book draws on copious interviews with Babitz’s and Didion’s networks, and the archives of Didion, Babitz and a host of others. Didion and Babitz situates the two in the 1970s LA scene that both wrote about, following them to the end of their lives—they died within days of one another. It’s a lively recounting of freewheeling partier Babitz and ambitious “cool customer” Didion. Despite the title, the narrative is notably tilted towards Babitz, more grounded in her work and life than in Didion’s. Still, the book captures a period and a vibe, and the celebrity gossip alone will entertain any ’70s-curious reader. Like Babitz herself, Didion and Babitz is an engaging narrative that Didion fans may quibble with, but that situates the two writers as the prime chroniclers of 1970s LA.

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.

Biography, Music, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Music Biography

We All Shine On

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

“Full disclosure. I was never a Beatles superfan,” Elliot Mintz confesses early in his memoir, We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me. Nonetheless, in 1970, the 26-year-old radio host suddenly became one of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s closest friends.

The son of a Polish immigrant, Mintz grew up in New York City and, despite having a strong New York accent and severe stutter, decided to become a radio broadcaster. He overcame the stutter, lost the accent and, by age 21, was a radio talk show host in Los Angeles. One fateful day, he hosted Ono to discuss her newly released album, Fly. Not 24 hours after the interview, Ono called Mintz at home to thank him. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s very difficult being me.” They chatted for about 45 minutes, and Ono continued to call nearly every day. Before long, Lennon joined her.

Mintz installed a third telephone line at home, his “John and Yoko hotline,” as well as a red light on his bedroom ceiling that flashed whenever it rang. He traveled and spent holidays with the pair, and his life became consumed with their whims and needs. “I believed, in a sense, that I was married to John and Yoko,” he writes.

Like any celebrity memoir worth its salt, We All Shine On makes readers feel as if they’ve spent time with the book’s subjects. A candid storyteller, Mintz reveals intimacies about the artists’ lives without being salacious. Readers will delight in strange facts (their apartment in the Dakota contained an Egyptian mummy), compelling insights (“John was functionally a child when it came to taking care of himself”) and amusing observations (“The mere mention of Bob Dylan’s name . . . could uncork a volcano of roiling resentments and pent-up jealousies—not to mention one of John’s startlingly accurate impersonations.”). There are spats and hurt feelings, as well as the memorable time that Lennon and Ono invited themselves to tag along to Mintz’s radio interview with Salvador Dali, which they ended up ruining with their frequent, unsolicited comments.

Mintz’s ending, which leads up to Lennon’s horrific murder, is especially poignant. The couple were leading fulfilling, creative lives when suddenly their charmed world ceased to exist. Mintz, who ultimately became the spokesperson for Lennon’s estate, describes sitting outside Ono’s bedroom door after the murder, waiting for her to respond. Regardless of whether you’re a superfan or an ordinary admirer of the music of Lennon, Ono and the Beatles, you’ll likely find the captivating story of this unusual friendship unduly hard to put down.

Elliot Mintz recounts his one-of-a-kind friendship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in an intimate memoir that is unduly hard to put down.

Biography, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Biography

Ingenious

Review by Roger Bishop

by Roger Bishop

Benjamin Franklin was among the most influential of the Founding Fathers. He signed all four major founding documents, and his diplomacy brought about our fledgling nation’s alliance with France and the peace treaty with Britain that ended the Revolutionary War. A true Renaissance man, Franklin was also a publisher, printer, businessman, community leader, inventor, widely read author and much more. And although his scientific work is sometimes described by historians as a hobby, Franklin was in fact a visionary scientist. Richard Munson’s splendid Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist convincingly argues that Franklin may not have been as effectual as a politician “if not for his fame as a leading scientist, which opened doors for him in the worlds of diplomacy and nation-building,” Munson writes. “Science, rather than being a sideline, is the through line that integrates Franklin’s diverse interests.”

Franklin’s “core and consistent attribute,” according to Munson, was curiosity. While only upper class men in Europe had the financial resources, equipment and time to pursue scientific projects, in the Colonies, inquisitive amateurs like Franklin approached the same concerns. As Franklin became a man of means, he purchased sophisticated instruments and assembled a team to work with him. Skilled in communications, he shared his experimentation with a network of fellow scientists around the world.

Franklin is best known for his experiments with electricity, and Munson covers the subject in considerable detail. Robert Millikan, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, said that Franklin’s research was “probably the most fundamental thing ever done in the field of electricity.” But the broad range of Franklin’s interests included the interaction of oil and water, weather patterns, demographic studies, circulation of blood, ant behavior, smallpox, salt mines, whirlwinds and waterspouts, the absorption of heat by different colors, the threat of lead poisoning, purification of air by vegetation and the management of silkworms. Franklin’s well-written accounts of his experiments were accessible to readers of all kinds. He received many honors in Europe and the U.S. for his scientific work. As a founder of the American Philosophical Society, he supported the scholarly pursuit of what he called “useful knowledge.”

Munson’s absorbing narrative biography guides us expertly through Franklin’s extraordinary life. Page after page, Ingenious shows how one person with little formal education made an impact that still has relevance today. For readers of history, biography and science (or simply those in search of an outstanding book about Franklin that is not too long), Ingenious is an excellent choice.

Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

Biography, Medicine, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Medicine Biography

The Story of a Heart

Review by Jessica Wakeman

by Jessica Wakeman

On a TV drama, performing a heart transplant is frantic. Nurses race the patient down the halls; the surgeons snap at each other. Maybe the patient’s heart stops before they are brought back to life.

That narrative couldn’t be further from the truth. As told in The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle that Saved a Child’s Life, the process of heart transplantation can require stagnant months or years as patients and their families wait for donor organs; this is especially the case when the patients are children. One in five children in Great Britain and America might die while waiting on the transplant list, reports author and a palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke.

Clarke braids a rigorous scientific and, at times, troubled cultural history of transplant medicine with the often harrowing story of two children: 9-year-olds Keira Ball and Max Johnson. The Story of a Heart starts with a terrible car crash that Keira survived with injuries so severe that the following day, all activity in her brain ceased. But while nearly every other major organ in her body was grievously injured, her heart, miraculously, beat vigorously.

Meanwhile, a mild viral infection caused Max to have dilated cardiomyopathy—a severely enlarged heart—and his prognosis was grim. A once active child, Max spent a year in bed, his parents aware that at any moment, a cardiac arrest could cut his life short. The day after Keira’s accident, her family removed her from life support. They placed her on a pediatric organ donor list, knowing it’s what the kind, loving little girl would have wanted. And then Keira’s heart gave Max a second chance at life. Clarke shows the psychological calculus that the recipients of transplants make, writing of Max’s parents, “They were equally aware that the only thing that could give Max what he needed to live was the death, appallingly, of someone else’s child.”

Clarke’s reportage of minor characters, like a junior doctor who happened to be driving on the same highway when Keira’s family had their car accident, also personalize the story. And not surprisingly, the narrative about Keira and Max’s families, and the team of professionals caring for them all, is very touching. Clarke never strips Keira of her humanity; the story of her heart, and her life, continues to help others in this informative, important book.

Rachel Clarke’s powerful The Story of a Heart braids the true story of a pediatric organ transplant with a rigorous history of transplant science.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Biography

Survival Is a Promise

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

How does one write a biography of a hurricane? And how could any biography capture the life and essence of Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet and community builder? In Alexis Pauline Gumbs, herself a queer Black feminist poet and community activist, Lorde has found the perfect interlocutor. Gumbs’ writing is multilayered, poetic and beautiful, making this book more than a biography. It’s a meeting of two minds.

Gumbs foregrounds Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde in Lorde’s affinity with the natural world. She expounds upon the science of trees, whales, honeybees, particle physics, tectonic plates and more, and then poetically connects these sections to Lorde’s life. But this structure is more than metaphor: Gumbs shows how the poet created literal guides for survival. For example, the destructive force of hurricanes is a recurring theme throughout Lorde’s work. It serves to illuminate her passionate experiences with love and desire, and her rage at racist violence. But it also nods to her Afro Caribbean roots: As a baby, her father survived a deadly hurricane in Barbados. Lorde herself survived the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in Grenada, where she lived toward the end of her life.

Those less familiar with the school of Audre Lorde may know of her work through prose sound bites like “your silence will not protect you” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In this biography, Gumbs shifts focus from Lorde’s feminist essays to her poetry, relying on verses to frame Lorde’s life, from her experience as a “speech-delayed” child in midcentury Harlem to her emergence as a central node in second-wave feminism. The importance of speech and the power of reading shapes Lorde’s experience from the beginning, and her debates about Black and white feminisms and lesbian identity in the 1970s and ’80s continue to inform intersectional and queer feminisms today.

Calling her subject “The Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother Audre Lorde,” Gumbs does not pretend to be an impartial observer, and the biography is all the better for it. Lorde’s body of work continues to nourish generations of poets and activists, particularly Black and queer feminists. While readers from these communities have joyous reason to celebrate the publication of this book, Survival Is a Promise bears an important and hopeful message for us all: Survival is a communal act of care.

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literary and feminist icon.

Biography, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Biography

The Genius of Judy

Review by Kelly Blewett

by Kelly Blewett

More than a fan letter to Judy Blume or a hit-by-hit summary of her career, The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us defends a critically engaged thesis: Blume meant so much to so many because she took the ideas of second-wave feminism and recast them as compulsively readable narratives. Blume was, biographer Rachelle Bergstein writes, “the Second Wave’s secret weapon.”

By writing about everything from menstruation (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) to masturbation (Deenie) to teens who have sex without regret (Forever), Blume took growing up seriously, and took the girls’ pleasure seriously, too. She came of age as a writer and woman during the height of the Second Wave and the sexual revolution. Bergstein traces the interlocking of the women’s movement with Blume’s oeuvre, putting her books in conversation with seminal feminist texts like Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Feminine Mystique. Blume’s biography fits right in: Bored and frustrated by her duties as a housewife and mother, writing gave Blume “the zap of something familiar from her girlhood: something electric and joyful. A distant, yet sacred, creative force welled up inside her.”

As a result of Bergstein’s biography, any fan of Judy Blume will gain fresh context on how her body of work amplified and reflected feminist thinking at the time. For instance, thinking about Wifey as Blume’s version of Erica Jong’s feminist classic The Fear of Flying prompted me to reread Wifey—and to enjoy it more. Bergstein excels at this kind of analysis. Her chatty, entertaining summaries of Blume’s books provide important context without getting lost in the weeds.

Blume gathers her laurels today not only for writing honestly about women’s and girls’ experiences, but also for her resistance to book banning. (According to Bergstein, Blume was the most banned author in the 1980s; her books have been fingered in the most recent bans as well.) Those concerned by the current wave of book banning will find Blume’s advocacy for authors and libraries both heartening and instructive. While readers might wish that Blume had participated in The Genius of Judy directly by offering an interview or access to private archives, Bergstein’s groundbreaking book is analytical, smart and accessible, ultimately demonstrating how Blume’s work has contributed to ongoing cultural shifts across multiple generations of women.

More than just a fan letter to Judy Blume, The Genius of Judy shows how the groundbreaking author’s work has impacted multiple generations of women.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Biography

Loving Sylvia Plath

Review by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

It is well known that much of Sylvia Plath’s work comes to us altered by her husband, Ted Hughes. Everything published after her death bears his heavy-handed revision and redaction, from her most famous book of poems, Ariel, to her journals. The extent of Hughes’ influence, however, stretches beyond his management of her literary estate to even the basic facts we’re willing to believe about his relationship with Plath.

In 2017, newly surfaced letters from Plath to her longtime psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, made headlines. Plath wrote that Hughes’ physical violence had caused her to miscarry, and that Hughes had told her he wished she was dead. The Guardian called the letters “shocking,” and added an addendum from Hughes’ widow, Carol Hughes, that the “suggest[ion]” of abuse was “absurd . . . to anyone who knew Ted well.” Yet though the letters were new to the public, there were long-published existing accounts of Hughes’ abuse of Plath.

Stockton University professor and Fulbright recipient Emily Van Duyne wrote as much in an op-ed for Literary Hub that went viral, “Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word?” Loving Sylvia Plath is Van Duyne’s longer answer to that question, a deeply researched analysis of how the popular myth of Plath’s life, one that depicts her as an unreliable narrator and subordinates her poetry to her depression and her suicide, was constructed by Hughes and maintained by critics from the time of her death in 1963 to the present. The book examines how evidence of Hughes’ emotional and physical abuse has been repeatedly minimized, erased and outright dismissed by critics and scholars alike.

Van Duyne’s scope includes the cultural context in which Hughes’ narrative has thrived, bringing in philosophy of intimate partner violence, as well as reflecting on her own personal experiences with an abusive ex. A chapter is devoted to Assia Wevill, a translator of poet Yehuda Amichai and the woman Hughes left Plath for. Hughes didn’t just control Wevill’s story; he completely suppressed it after her death by suicide. Van Duyne also follows the writers who first endeavored to tell Plath’s story, particularly Harriet Rosenstein, who held on to Plath’s letters for almost half a century before trying to sell them in 2017.

Loving Sylvia Plath concludes with a note of caution about distorting Plath’s memory in a different way through the temptation to “restore” her from Hughes’ interference. That warning’s well-taken—for all the scholarship about her, we can’t expect to know Plath. But we can know her work, which is extraordinary. And, where it remains unaltered, we can take her at her word.

Unearthed letters from Sylvia Plath may have shocked the world in 2017, but Loving Sylvia Plath shows we’ve long had all the evidence we needed to condemn her abuser, poet Ted Hughes.

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