Mr. Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. He has published fourteen biographies and has written about biography for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington, Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Criterion, and other publications.
Faulkner recognized what W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon wrote about as an everyday reality for themselves and people of color as they protested the color line that equated being Black with inferiority.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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J. Marion Sims experimented on slave women because there was nothing that could not be done to them, nothing to prohibit turning their lives into a hell akin to what H.G. Wells imagined in ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau.’
By CARL ROLLYSON
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Ilyon Woo’s tale of the Crafts’ daring decampment has the vigor of a thriller. This biography deserves many of the accolades that it has enjoyed, but it could have been even more powerful.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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Certain scholars doubted an ex-slave could have written ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative,’ a novel that channeled Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’ and evinced familiarity with the genres of gothic and sentimental fiction.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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While looking for a history of Black people in Britain, the author was told by a saleswoman in a bookshop: ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945’ — and so, the need for a book such as this.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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‘Mapping the Darkness’ is a haunting portrayal of human misery but also of the determined triumphs of researchers who didn’t give a damn about the skepticism of colleagues.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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Before the two critics got together, television did not show clips of current films. The producers of ‘Siskel & Ebert’ actually had to get permission from Hollywood studios to edit clips to be used on the small screen.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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In biographies, Selznick is often portrayed as officious, overbearing, and sometimes a hindrance to the actors and actresses he signed to contracts. Milan Hain is at pains to argue against the image of this producer as ogre.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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Scott Martelle focuses on the main political players at ‘the Dawn of a New America,’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, as he recounts in new ways the familiar story of a nation mired in the Depression.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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That Cynthia Kierner provides a palpable sense of the world Jane Welborn Spurgin inhabited in early America is a triumph, restoring to history a woman otherwise overlooked.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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Bede believed in a discoverable world, as did Einstein. Divine revelation did not mean, in Bede’s case, simply receiving wisdom but, instead, required human beings to search the visible signs of God’s creation.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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Mary Beard offers a most helpful roadmap of the empire’s main players, while Ferdinand Mount avers that the possibility that any society may succumb to Caesarism is, well, very real.
By CARL ROLLYSON
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