Biographical Fiction

Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author of three books, including The American Biographical Novel (2016), and the editor of three volumes, including Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (2014).

• Acknowledgments IntroductionAuthors’ Reflections:1. Leonard Ehrlich: “Author’s Note” from God’s Angry Man (1932)2. Wallace Stegner: Forward from Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel (1950)3. S. Guy Endore: “A Final Word” from King of Paris (1956)4. William Styron: “Nat Turner Revisited” from American Heritage (1992)5. Julia Alvarez: “A Postscript” from In the Time of the Butterflies (1994)6. Barbara Chase-Riboud: “Afterword” from Sally Hemings (1994)7. Malcolm Bradbury: “Preface” from To the Hermitage (2000)8. David Ebershoff: “Introduction” to The Danish Girl (2000)9. Thomas Mallon: “The Historical Novelist’s Burden of Truth” from In Fact (2001)10. Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris: “What is true about this story” from Girl in a Cage (2002)11. Colm Tóibín: “Henry James for Venice” from The Henry James Review (2006)12. M. Allen Cunningham: “Author’s Note” from Lost Son (2007)13. Susan Sellers: “About Vanessa and Virginia” from the Two Ravens Press UK website (2008)14. Brian Hall: “Author’s Note” from Fall of Frost (2008)15. Barbara Mujica: “Going for the Subjective: One Way to Write Biographical Fiction” from a/b:Auto/Biography Studies (2016)16. Joanna Scott: “On Hoaxes, Humbugs, and Fictional Portraiture” from a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2016)The Case of Eliza Lynch17. William E. Barrett: “Foreword” from Woman on Horseback: The Biography of Francisco Lopez and Eliza Lynch (1938)18. Anne Enright: “Acknowledgments” from The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002)19. Lily Tuck: “Author’s Note” from The News from Paraguay (2004)Lectures and Forums:20. Irving Stone: “The Biographical Novel” from Three Views of the Novel (1957)21. C. Vann Woodward, Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren and William Styron: “The Uses of History in Fiction” from The Southern Literary Journal (1968)22. Michael Lackey, Jay Parini, Bruce Duffy and Lance Olsen: “The Uses of History in the Biographical Novel” from Conversations with Jay Parini (2014)Interviews:23. Julia Alvarez: “Fixed Facts and Creative Freedom in the Biographical Novel” from Truthful Fictions (2014)24. Russell Banks: “The Truth Contract in the Biographical Novel” from Truthful Fictions (2014) 25. Bruce Duffy: “In the Fog of the Biographical Novel’s History” from Truthful Fictions (2014) 26. Joyce Carol Oates: “Enhanced Symbolic Interiors in the Biographical Novel” from Truthful Fictions (2014)Essays:27. Georg Lukács: “The Biographical Form and Its ‘Problematics’” from The Historical Novel (1937) 28. Carl Bode: “The Buxom Biographies” from College English (1955)29. Paul Murray Kendall: Excerpt from “Contemporary Biography” from The Art of Biography (1965)30. Ina Schabert: “Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contamination” from Biography (1982)31. Alain Buisine: “Biofictions” from Revue des Sciences Humaines (1991)32. Jay Parini: “Fact or Fiction: Writing Biographies Versus Writing Novels” from Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Writing and Politics (1997)33. Martin Middeke: “Introduction” from Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (1999)34. John Keener: Chapters four and five from Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel (2001)35. Ansgar Nünning: “Fictional Metabiographies and Metaautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metegenres” from Self-Reflexivity in Literature (2005)36. Valentina Vannucci: “The Canon and Biofiction: The Subjects of History and New Literary Worlds” from Altri Canoni/ Canoni Altri: Pluralismo e Studi Letterari (2011)37. Monica Latham: “‘Serv[ing] under two masters’: Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives in Contemporary Biofictions” from a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2012)Bibliography

Biographical Fiction catches the study of biofiction on the upswing. This up-to-the-minute volume, the only one of its kind, features major writers and critics and is sure to be a key point of reference for scholars and students of biographical fiction.