Carl Rollyson: 20 books

Martha Gellhorn died in February 1998, just shy of her 90th birthday. Well before her death, she had become a legend. She reported on wars from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s, and her travel books are considered classics. Her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, affairs with legendary lovers like...

Thurgood Marshall was one of the original forces behind the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP), one of the organizations that helped to advance the rights of African Americans in the 20th century. His pursuit of civil rights reached a high point when, as a lawyer,...

This first biography of Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is now fully revised and updated, providing an even more intimate portrayal of the influential writer's life and career. The authors base this revision on Sontag's newly released private correspondence--including emails--and the letters and memoirs...

Emily Dickinson exemplified the virtue of self-discipline. She wrote poetry largely for her own pleasure and to exercise and increase her creative talents. Very few of her poems were published during her own lifetime, yet we know that she wrote consistently--perhaps every day--over several decades....

Some critics rank biographers just above serial murderers. The author of this book, a self-described member of the Samuel Johnson school, doesn’t share this view. An account of a life, he believes, should adhere to the truth as the biographer sees it, not to the sentiments of others. This memoir...

The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary seventy-one year writing career. The general introductory studies of West are outdated and do not take into account her posthumous publications, or her large literary archive of unpublished letters...