When Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971, she was only 48 years old, and her career was on the climb. One of the foremost photographers of the 20th century, she had the remarkable ability to call up and capture the idiosyncrasies of just about anyone who submitted to her lens. As Arthur Lubow observes in Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, she “excavated the truth—or a truth” about her subjects.

In this new biography, which is brisk and accessible despite its 700-page length, Lubow tells the story of an artistically brilliant but emotionally fragile figure. During her relatively brief career, Arbus managed to capture with her camera a broad cross-section of humanity, including nudists, cross-dressers and the mentally handicapped. Born in 1923 into an affluent Jewish family (her brother was the poet Howard Nemerov), Arbus grew up in New York City. She received her first camera from her husband, Allan Arbus, with whom she started a successful fashion photography enterprise. Around 1956, she quit the business and began taking the forthright, unstaged portraits that made her famous, shooting in black and white the very young and the very old, mixed-race couples and nuclear families, millionaires, movie stars, bums, and sideshow freaks.

The book’s chronology is cued by her photographic output. In tracking the timeline of Arbus’ life through her art, Lubow brings to bear on the narrative a deep appreciation for her pictures and an impressive technical grasp of photography. An award-winning journalist, he explains the circumstances that shaped Arbus’ most iconic shots and—prompted by newly discovered letters and exclusive interviews—explores the controversy she courted by becoming close to some of her subjects. Bringing Arbus out from behind the lens, Lubow sheds new light on her genius and delivers a definitive portrait of the artist.

When Harry Crews died in 2012, the Southern Gothic tradition that started gathering steam when the “Dixie Limited,” William Faulkner, rolled down the tracks—picking up Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Larry Brown, James Dickey and Barry Hannah along the way—died with him.

Fortunately for readers, when he was a young reporter for the Gainesville Sun, Ted Geltner drew the assignment of interviewing Crews, whose 1973 novel, The Hawk is Dying, was being turned into a film. That initial conversation with the cantankerous novelist and University of Florida English professor eventually blossomed into a symbiotic relationship between the two, with Crews in his later years often calling on Geltner to drive him to pick up his medicine or his beer and Geltner absorbing the stories that he would later turn into a biography of Crews.

Geltner's Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews brings to colorful life the Georgia writer so driven by his craft that he once advised young writers, "If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told."

Crews was born in Bacon County, Georgia, on June 7, 1935, to poor tenant farmers; his father, Ray, died of a heart attack one night while the not-yet 2-year-old Harry was sleeping next to him in the bed. Life hurtled downhill from that moment, for his mother, Myrtice, married Ray's brother, Pascal, who turned violent and abusive when he was drunk. When he was 5, Crews had a bout with childhood polio, which left him with a limp the rest of his life. The following year, playing a game of "pop-the-whip," he was hurled into a vat of scalding water used to scald pigs; he survived only because his head stayed above water, but the damage was done: "[W]hen my shirt was taken off, my back came off with it." In his own autobiography, A Childhood (1978), Crews writes of his early days, "When something went wrong, it almost always brought something else with it. It was a world in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

Very early, though, Crews fell in love with stories. There were only two books in the Crews' house: the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalog. He and his friend, Willalee Bookatee, would spend hours making up stories about the models in the pages of the catalog.

When he was 17, Crews joined the Marines, where he started reading seriously, and when he was discharged, he used the G.I. Bill to matriculate at the University of Florida, where he decided to become a writer. There, he studied with the great Agrarian poet and novelist Andrew Lytle—who had also once taught Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey—with whom Crews would eventually develop an antagonistic relationship.

Geltner, now an associate professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, ranges carefully over these details of Crews' life, providing the outline on which he can arrange the real stories of Harry Crews: his fierce dedication to the craft of writing and his all-consuming fire to tell stories, his incessant womanizing and his bouts of relentless drinking and drug use, his attention to his writing students, and his often painful journey to understand his own suffering through telling the stories of a cast of characters scarred by the haunting, weird, and violent landscape of the South and their families.

Geltner richly chronicles each of Crews' novels, providing details of character and plot, situating them in the context of Crews' life, and sharing the growing critical praise for each one. Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer (1968), published while he was teaching at Broward Community College, opens in the jail cell in Enigma, Georgia, where Willalee Bookatee is being held for the murder and rape of MaryBeth Carter. Yet, as it turns out, it is likely a protégé of the Gospel Singer, "the midget with the largest foot in the world," who has returned to Enigma, and worshipped by the people in the town. It's a tale of unrequited evil set in a world where men masquerade as good, worship each other, elevating some among them to god-like status, and where conscience lies hidden from view. Critics compared Crews to Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams, and declared that his novel testified to "the inescapability of man's actions—or his inaction."

Crews' star continued to rise with the publication of Naked in Garden Hills (1969), This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven (1970), Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), Car (1972), The Hawk is Dying (1973), The Gypsy's Curse (1974), and A Feast of Snakes (1976), which Geltner calls "a powerful and unique descent into the depths of human misery and angst." (212). Following A Feast of Snakes, Crews didn't publish another novel until 1987, All We Need of Hell, followed by three novels—The Knockout Artist (1988), Body (1990) and Scar Lover (1992)—fueled by his deep immersion in boxing and bodybuilding.

For a short period, Crews hung out with Madonna and her then-husband Sean Penn, and Madonna told Crews he was "definitely the coolest guy in the universe." Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth, enamored of Crews' writing and persona, formed a band called Harry Crews, releasing one album—a live album called Naked in Garden Hills—of songs made up of the names of Crews' novels.

Once, when Crews was asked what it took to become a real novelist, he shouted out, "Blood! . . . Bone! . . . Marrow!"

With the power of a spellbinding storyteller, Geltner splendidly captures Crews' blood, bone and marrow by leading us on a journey through all we need of Crews' hell, recognizing that without passing through this hellacious suffering, we can never truly understand him. Geltner's biography compels us to seek out Crews' novels to read, or re-read, and to discover the voices of a South just off the interstates and at the edges of its glittering urban centers.

Just as his 1981 book, Shout!, is considered by many to be the definitive history of the Beatles, so biographer Philip Norman’s Paul McCartney: The Life will be the once-for-all-time record of the lad from Liverpool whose song lyrics and boyish good looks broke hearts and whose career after the Beatles was almost as successful as his time with them.

Drawing on scores of interviews with McCartney’s family, friends and associates, Norman delivers a sprawling, year-by-year chronicle filled with details about McCartney’s personal and professional life that will be familiar to many devoted fans. The book ranges from McCartney’s childhood and the devastating death of his mother—after which, he said, “I learned to put a shell around me”—to his love of rock ’n’ roll and his early days with John and George in The Quarrymen. From a young age, McCartney capitalized on his considerable appeal to the opposite sex. “Ever since kindergarten, he’d been aware of his attractiveness to girls and the infallible effect of turning his brown eyes full on them,” Norman writes.

The author chronicles the Beatles’ apprenticeship in Hamburg, the acrimony that tore the band apart and the beginnings of Wings, as well as McCartney’s relationships with Linda Eastman, Heather Mills and Nancy Shevell.

Along with the biographical narrative, Norman weaves in analysis of McCartney’s music as it evolved. For example, Wings’ 1973 album, Band on the Run, appeared at first to be out of control, but the band, according to Norman, “made a courageous journey through unfriendly territory” to emerge with a record that garnered “reviews as ecstatic as those of his previous albums had been dismissive.” On Ram, McCartney includes an instrumental to please his father, Jim, a former big band musician in declining health when the album appeared in 1971.

The author paints a portrait of a musician driven constantly to reinvent himself and a perfectionist who still deeply loves the process of songwriting. While Norman never shies away from revealing McCartney’s shortcomings (“the inexhaustible geniality Paul showed the world was not always replicated in private,” for example) his enthusiasm for the artist turns this book into a sympathetic look at McCartney’s life and his deep contributions to music.

We can’t get enough of the Tudors. Despite the centuries that have passed, the clan that began with Henry VII and ended with Elizabeth I continues to command legions of loyal subjects, from BBC watchers and biography buffs to fans of historical fiction.

Those whose fealty lies with Elizabeth I (1533–1603) should procure John Guy’s new book anon. The first substantial narrative to deeply explore the latter decades of her reign, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years zooms in on a critical period in Tudor history, providing a fascinating close-up of an aging queen taking her final turn upon the world stage. During this crucial, conclusive epoch in Elizabeth’s 44-year rule, many of her most trusted advisors died, and she faced a protracted war with Spain. She also reckoned uneasily with her own mortality, as her physical charms and health both waned.

In researching the book, Guy had access to a trove of largely unexplored archival material, and his narrative corrects a number of inaccuracies circulated by the queen’s previous chroniclers. The conception of Elizabeth as accessible and merciful—as “Good Queen Bess”—is one such fiction Guy deflates, noting that she lived in splendor while plague and a poor economy crippled her country, a state of affairs that aroused in her subjects resentment rather than adoration. Toward the end, Guy writes, to her people, Elizabeth was “a distant image or just a name.”

In her majesty’s orbit during these years were dashing, impetuous adventurers Walter Raleigh and Robert Devereux, who sought their fortunes at sea and in war. Their romanctic exploits during a time of political instability, when the question of Elizabeth’s successor was unresolved, make the book a bit of a nail-biter. 

Guy, winner of the Whitbread Award for Queen of Scots (2005), has produced a book in which Elizabeth’s royal presence is palpable. Tudorists, take heed: This fresh consideration of the queen—a woman by turns valiant and vulnerable, jealous and generous, unapproachable and compassionate—at the finis of her rule is a rousingly good read.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

John Hay and Samuel Clemens were both rising writers when they met in the late 1860s. Hay, a poet, was one of two private secretaries to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Clemens, under the pen name Mark Twain, was known for his short stories and comic lectures. Both had grown up in small towns on the Mississippi River, and they admired each other’s work. Although never close friends (Hay’s wife disapproved of Clemens), in the late 1890s, the changing role of the U.S. in the world brought them back toward each other, on opposing sides.

In his absorbing The Statesman and the Storyteller, Mark Zwonitzer weaves their personal and public stories together as he explores the different responses of two very public figures to the complicated events of their time. Hay was a Republican in the original party sense: a strong believer in capitalism, wary of a shift of money to the working class and immigrants. Clemens considered himself a small-d democrat who was skeptical about government power and was an advocate for fairness in social, political and commercial matters. What continued to bind them were “unbreakable threads of affection and common experience” based on “a gut understanding of just how hard the other was running from desolate beginnings, and an admiration for how far the other man had traveled.”

During the period covered in the book, Clemens is deeply in debt and undertakes a world lecture tour to help right his financial ship, while Hay serves in the McKinley administration as ambassador to Great Britain. The supporting cast includes Clemens’ beloved wife, Livy, so important to her husband’s career that no manuscript ever left their home “without her signing off on every word and phrasing”; Hay’s best friend, Henry Adams, who knew all the influential political figures of the day; and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a major booster of America’s drive to become an imperial power. 

This book is so well written I did not want it to end. With exhaustive research and superlative descriptive skills, Zwonitzer is able to capture mood and tone, bringing his prolific and often-profiled subjects to life and leading the reader to consistently feel present in the moment. 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Maybe they made the wrong movie.

Or, at least, perhaps there should have been a sequel to Chariots of Fire, the 1981 historical drama that became an international hit and won four Academy Awards. That’s because, as British author Duncan Hamilton writes in For the Glory, Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell’s life was really just beginning when he won a gold medal in the 400 meters at the 1924 Summer Olympics after missing out on the 100-meter event by famously refusing to race on Sunday in accordance with his Christian beliefs.

As Hamilton depicts in this vivid and heartfelt narrative, Liddell went on to make a far more lasting mark in life than his athletic triumphs. A year after his Olympic glory in Paris, he began serving as a teacher and missionary in a remote region of China, where he was born the son of missionary parents. It was a difficult life in an environment already hostile to outsiders, and it became progressively more difficult as war clouds threatened. Ultimately, Liddell and other Westerners were sent to a Japanese work camp, where he died at age 43 from a brain tumor in 1945.

Hamilton’s passion for his subject shows through on every page as he recounts life in the camp, where Liddell worked tirelessly, gave up his meager rations and counseled despondent fellow internees. He also could be cajoled into the occasional footrace, never being beaten until near the end of his life.

Through it all, Liddell held to his beliefs and inspired countless others to follow in his footsteps. Hamilton makes it clear: His race became theirs, and the human race was the better for it.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this engaging and well-researched biography, writer and historian Louisa Thomas rescues a former first lady from near obscurity—Louisa Catherine Johnson, wife of sixth president John Quincy Adams and the only presidential spouse born outside America.

Louisa Johnson met her future husband in London, where she was one of seven children of a patriotic American merchant and an elegant English mother. When John Quincy Adams began turning up for dinner in the fall of 1795, he was entranced by the six Johnson girls, whom he called “pretty and agreeable.” But which one was he actually courting? At a ball to celebrate her 21st birthday, much to her older sister Nancy’s dismay, it became clear that the prominent young American diplomat had chosen Louisa.

She had been educated to be married, and after leaving school at 15, Louisa focused on the ladylike pursuits of dancing, painting and embroidery. Yet John Quincy Adams did not marry a woman who, as she once put it, “only intended to play an echo.” Louisa was more adept than her husband at socializing, and she used those talents as she dutifully followed him to diplomatic postings in distant capitals from Prussia to St. Petersburg (once traveling almost 2,000 miles across Europe in winter with her young son to join her husband in Paris). But she also struggled with her role as first lady, with feelings of being an outsider and with family tragedy: Only one of her four children survived her.

Louisa is a fascinating portrait of a complex woman, her sometimes tumultuous marriage and the extraordinary era in which she lived. “She witnessed a world in transformation, and a country inventing itself,” writes Thomas, “and she played a role in that invention.”

The motives for living the life of a spy, author Howard Blum tells us, are subsumed under the rubric MICE—Money, Ideology, Coercion, Excitement. For the well-educated and well-to-do socialite Betty Pack (1910-1963), the prime motivation was clearly excitement, with just enough ideology thrown in to give her actions a veneer of nobility. Born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, she realized early that her striking good looks and sense of command made her irresistible to men. She invested (rather than lost) her virginity at 14 and enjoyed a series of lovers until she found herself pregnant at 19 and uncertain of who the father was. She then very prudently ensnared and married Arthur Pack, a minor British diplomat who, if nothing else, gave her rank and entry into various government circles where official secrets were kept—and, thanks to her zeal, stolen.

But Pack, animated as she was by “a terrible restlessness,” brought considerably more than sexual magnetism to the job. She was also courageous, quick-witted and doggedly persistent once given an assignment. When it appeared that a night watchman was about to catch her and her accomplice on a safe-cracking mission, she quickly stripped naked, leaving the guard to mumble his apologies for interrupting—after he’d gotten an eyeful, of course. Although she was an American, Pack began spying for the British in the late 1930s against Germany, Italy and Vichy France at outposts in Chile, Spain, Poland and Washington. After America entered World War II, it also became a beneficiary of the intelligence she collected.

Drawing on memoirs, diaries, letters and official documents, Blum takes us into Pack’s mind—both as she assessed her thoughts and motives and as those around her did. The Last Goodnight is a very intimate accounting of a singular personality. Pack was a faithless wife and an indifferent mother, but one could hardly imagine a more attentive lover. After all, every tryst was a report in the making.

The remarkable life story of Blanche Knopf, who co-founded Alfred A. Knopf publishers in 1915, encompasses the history of 20th-century literature. Many of Knopf’s most distinguished authors—including Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir—were brought into the firm by Blanche’s wide-ranging literary interests. Inevitably, however, this is also a story about gender in the workplace: Although Blanche was an equal partner in shaping the company, she owned less of it than did her husband and his father. 

Blanche’s marriage to Alfred Knopf lies at the heart of Laura Claridge’s capacious and engaging biography. Although the Knopfs shared a passionate commitment to literature, they were not well-matched intimately and quickly settled into a “open” marriage. Blanche mainly lived in an apartment in Manhattan, while Alfred preferred to settle in the nearby suburbs. Despite the distance between them, they had two children: their son, Pat, and the publishing company, which is still thriving today.

One especially timely and tragic theme in Blanche’s life concerns her lifelong drive to be thin. Beginning in the 1920s, when fashionable women pursued a skinny flapper’s body, Blanche spent an inordinate amount of time and energy dieting. Living on a menu of cocktails and olives, supplemented by a popular diet pill that damaged her eyes, Blanche seems to have channeled the stresses of the workplace into a lifelong eating disorder. 

Despite her rocky personal life, Blanche’s true passion was finding and signing new authors. She was personally responsible for bringing to Knopf popular hard-boiled detective novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and her immersion in the Harlem Renaissance led her to authors Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen. 

In The Lady with the Borzoi, Claridge triumphantly restores Blanche Knopf’s central place in 20th-century publishing history.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Katie Roiphe’s latest offering details the deaths of five major writers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas and Maurice Sendak. Roiphe took the book’s title, The Violet Hour, from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” because “the phrase evokes the mood of the elusive period I am describing: melancholy, expectant, laden. It captures the beauty and intensity I was finding in these scenes, the rich excitement of dusk.”

Each section of this elegiac book begins with the image of an empty room. “I very conspicuously do not belong in these rooms,” Roiphe writes, yet she recreates them in piercing detail: the hospital room in Sloan-Kettering where Sontag lay dying of cancer; the empty office where Sendak, in happier moments, drew pictures and whistled operas; Updike’s spare and efficient desk. These writers have something in common with all of humanity—they died. And in their crackling, vivid work, Roiphe finds keys that enable her to approach the mystery of death, although not to unlock it.

The chapters are organized around a moment-by-moment narrative of each writer’s final days. We find out, for instance, that Sontag was grateful for a last haircut and that Sendak ate homemade apple crisp. And that Updike’s first wife, Mary, grabbed his feet through the sheets and held them when she saw him the final time. So while a medical story is being laid out, there is also what Barthes calls the punctum, the evocative detail that elevates the reportage to something more like poetry. As these moments accumulate toward their final, inevitable endpoint, Roiphe takes many tangents to explore the writer’s attitude toward death as communicated through his or her work, which, for all these writers, was the central and most transcendent aspect of their lives.

“It’s all on the page,” Updike said. That may be true, and yet by combining the writer’s final moments of life with what they left on the page, Roiphe ultimately offers us something beyond the work: a glimpse of death that is startling and new, intimate and uncomfortable, and deeply, deeply human.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Only a society riven by fear and desperation would have incubated a figure as initially uncredentialed and unimpressive as Adolf Hitler. A school dropout and frequent vagrant, Hitler had no achievements to speak of until he served honorably in the German army during the Great War. He remained in the army after Germany’s defeat and discovered his gift as a public speaker when he was assigned to a propaganda unit set up to encourage nationalism and root out Marxist inclinations among the troops. Eventually, he moved into a leadership position in the German Workers’ Party, a virulently anti-Semitic assemblage that tapped into the social discontent ravaging the fractious and debt-ridden country.

By late 1923, Hitler and his adherents had gained enough critical mass to move against the political establishment, which it did in the infamous “beer hall putsch.” Hitler took command of the overflow crowd at a Munich beer hall and declared that both the Bavarian and national governments were being replaced by a provisional government. It was a heady effort, but the putsch failed. Hitler and his chief conspirators were soon arrested and lodged in Landsberg Prison. Hitler was tried for high treason by a sympathetic judge, convicted and given a five-year sentence.

Providing superb detail and background, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler focuses on the few months he actually served at Landsberg, during which he was treated royally rather than punitively. Freed from the daily demands of party politics, Hitler was able to put his thoughts on nationalism and strong-man governance into a book that would become the first volume of Mein Kampf—and the grand rationale for the murderous Third Reich.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.