(A conversation transcript in English/Zapis rozmowy w języku angielskim)
Abstract
Debby Applegate and John Matteson, winners of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in the consecutive years 2007 and 2008, both agree and disagree about the methods, aims, and ethical philosophy of biographical writing. Here, they converse about the negative stereotypes that biographers must overcome; the researching process; the moral nature of humanity; the relative value to the biographer of sympathy and cynicism; and much more.
Applegate, D., & Matteson, J. (2021). An "Irreverent Art"? Two Pulitzer Prize-Winners Talk about Biography: (A conversation transcript in English/Zapis rozmowy w języku angielskim). Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, (43), 87–97. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11686
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Debby Applegate
Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)
Debby Applegate is an American historian and biographer. Applegate attended Amherst College as an undergraduate, where she began a two-decade fascination with famous alumnus Henry Ward Beecher, a 19th-century abolitionist minister who was later the subject of a widely publicized sex scandal. She made Beecher the subject of her dissertation in American Studies at Yale, where she received a Ph.D. After several more years of research, in 2007 Applegate published The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, an account of the life and times of the notorious Manhattan brothel-keeper Polly Adler, was published in November 2021.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
United States
Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)
John Matteson (born March 3, 1961) is an American professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his first book Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. Matteson graduated with an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1983 after completing an 178-page-long senior thesis titled "The Confederate Cotton Embargo, 1861-1862: A Study in States' Rights." He then received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1986, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1999.[4] He served as a law clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Terrence W. Boyle before working as a litigation attorney at Titchell, Maltzman, Mark, Bass, Ohleyer & Mishel in San Francisco and with Maupin, Taylor, Ellis & Adams in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has written articles for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New England Quarterly, Streams of William James, and Leviathan. His second book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller was published in January 2012 and received the 2012 Ann M. Sperber Biography Award as the year's outstanding biography of a journalist or other figure in media. It was also a finalist for the inaugural Plutarch Award, the prize for best biography of the year as chosen by the Biographers International Organization (BIO), and was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. His W. W. Norton & Company annotated edition of Little Women was published in November 2015, featuring many exclusive photographs from Alcott's childhood home, Orchard House, as well as numerous illustrations and stills from the various film adaptations. Matteson's most recent book, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation, was published in February 2021. Matteson appeared in the 2018 documentary Orchard House: Home of Little Women.
Matteson is a former treasurer of the Melville Society and is a member of the Louisa May Alcott Society's advisory board. Matteson is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and has served as the deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11686
English
Język Polski