Boswell, Meet Johnson
In Honor of Biographer's Day, a Reading List from Greenlight
Tomorrow, May 16th, is celebrated annually on the anniversary of the 1763 meeting in a London bookshop between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, which launched one of the most famous author-subject relationships and produced the biographies Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Life of Samuel Johnson. What better day, then, to celebrate the finest in biographical literature, courtesy the wonderful booksellers of Greenlight.
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, John Fire Lame Deer
Autobiography as soul-vision by a Lakota Sioux medicine man. Lame Deer seeks so we may find—his history and language wrap themselves around us like an old star blanket while we shiver beneath it and try to understand the world a little better. –Jarrod
Heroines, Kate Zambreno
Part literary scholarship, part memoir, Kate Zambreno’s Heroines explores the forgotten or oft-misremembered diaries, letters, and memoirs of literary wives, lovers, and artists from the modernist age. While freeing Jane Bowles, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and co. from the silence placed upon their work by their male contemporaries, Zambreno, perhaps to her surprise, must face this same silencing when she starts an impassioned blog on the subject. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve recommended this book. It’s feminist, it’s necessary, and delightfully loud. –Grace
Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown
You already know the crew team wins gold in the 1936 Olympics and it doesn’t matter. As you read, you’re afraid they won’t pull it off; you’re afraid Joe Rantz won’t make the team or have enough money for school. You also learn about the Great Depression in the northwest, how crew boats are made, and the bitter rivalry between the Ivy League and west coast schools. –Jess
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
A book for all the excitement in your heart. Maggie Nelson talks motherhood and how we choose to name our experience of relationships. She brings together philosophers and artists and friends only to pose the question, Are words enough? And leaves you with the thought, I am so happy to be alive. –Jess
Passing Strange, Martha Sandweiss
Clarence King was a celebrated geologist and published author who hobnobbed with some of the most important figures at the turn of the 20th century. Unbeknownst to his pals, King also lived a double life as James Todd, a Pullman porter with a black family in Queens. Clarence King was white. James Todd was black, or at least passed as black. Martha Sandweiss’s enthralling biography about one man’s two lives is twice as unbelievable. –Geo
Isak Dinesen, Judith Thurman
This is one of the greatest pairings of subject and biographer imaginable. Dinesen’s own memoir, Out of Africa, is blindingly beautiful and strange, but after the events of that book her life in politics and fiction remained fascinating. Thurman’s discursive style is perfectly matched with Dinesen’s writerly eccentricity; I’ll always remember that at the end of Dinesen’s life she was subsisting on nothing but oysters and champagne. –Jessica
West with the Night, Beryl Markham
Beryl Markham out-Dinesens Dinesen and out-Hemingways Hemingway. A pilot, an adventurer, and a damn good observer and writer, her account of post-colonial life in Africa is almost too good to be true (but it is, it is). As the Times wrote in its 1942 review, it’s “the sort of book that makes you think human beings can do anything.” –Jessica
An American Childhood, Annie Dillard
Before she became an essayist and nature writer, Annie Dillard was a kid in Pittsburgh in the all-American 1950s. This is the rare book that makes that era seem somehow authentic but not creepy, and Dillard’s family is as specific and quirky as your own. –Jessica
