American Biographical Novel

Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author of The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich (2012) and African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith, which won the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title in 2008, and editor of The Haverford Discussions: A Black Integrationist Manifesto for Racial Justice (2013) and Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (2014).

• Chapter One: The Rise and Legitimization of the American Biographical NovelChapter Two: The Fictional Truth of the Biographical Novel: The Case of Ludwig WittgensteinChapter Three: Surrealism, Historical Representation, and the Biographical NovelChapter Four: Zora Neale Hurston and the Art of Political Critique in the Biblical Biographical Novel Chapter Five: Dual Temporal Truths in the Biographical novelChapter Six: The Biographical Novel: A Misappropriated Life or a Truthful Fiction?BibliographyIndex

Well worth reading for its careful scholarship and its insights into both a literary genre and a select group of novels that are often overlooked. ... Lackey's analysis is especially illuminating in two areas: the extent to which biographical novels reveal the complexities of German fascism and of America's racial history. ... I attribute the soundness of these interpretations to Lackey's remarkable command of scholarship: not just of literary criticism, but of German intellectual history and the many cultural debates about race in America. More effectively than any recent scholar I can remember, Lackey shows how audiences were seduced by Hitler's Mein Kampf (a fact which always amazes anyone who has read the book in the aftermath of World War II). ... The American Biographical Novel deserves praise for its close, scholarly, and thoughtful readings of its key texts.