About the Book
A moving and penetrating memoir of a life in biography from the Pulitzer Prize winner and "gifted storyteller" (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker).
Megan Marshall's innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured works of American biography. In the richly absorbing essays of After Lives, Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it.
In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book's brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, "Free for a While," set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson, the author's AP history classmate, gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from prison in the case that put Angela Davis on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Here too is the author's passion for the biographical chase, and for the mysteries at its heart. She tells the astonishing story of viewing the disinterred remains of her one-time subject Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, and their daughter Una, the truths of whose early death Marshall works to reveal.
Throughout these finely wrought essays, Marshall, "[at] the front rank of American biographers" (Dwight Garner, New York Times), makes palpable her driving impulse to "learn what I could from others: how to live, how not to live, what it means to live."
About the Author :
Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as well as Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor of Nonfiction Writing at Emerson College and a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization.
Review :
"An introspective examination of the biographer's craft...intriguing and unexpected, peppered with insights, and full of meaning." - Library Journal
"Megan Marshall's rich and moving essays, both fresh fieldwork and second takes from an illustrious career in biography, ask searching questions of this most fascinating genre. With its tantalizing glimpses of the author at work, After Lives reveals the alchemy of life writing." - Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars
"Imagine Nancy Drew with a Phi Beta Kappa key and you'll glimpse the phenomenon of Megan Marshall, who many cite as the patron saint of biographers....Each of the essays in this miniature memoir explores portals to the past with lessons on pursuing the future, and the most significant lesson is to never stop searching, never stop asking questions, which Marshall does throughout her pages." - Kitty Kelley, Washington Independent Review of Books
"What a marvel this book is!" - Larry Wilson, Pasadena Star News
"In this slim volume of essays, Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, turns inward." - The New Yorker
"Fluent and involving essays...Marshall nimbly extrapolates significant implications from small moments, humble objects, and quiet discoveries as she astutely and gracefully records a "season of introspection," ending with a stirring and promising account of how she found herself "practicing biography again." - Booklist
"Much-lauded biographer Megan Marshall...opens up her own life to readers...Interweaving stories from her own life, Marshall looks back on her work and her endlessly fascinating subjects." - Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
"Six essays that offer intimate reflections on [the author's] life and work...candid, sensitive recollections." - Kirkus Reviews
"Marshall ponders, with fresh urgency, the question...how to survive in this "husk of a world." As it turns out, for the veteran biographer there's only one possible answer: to keep looking at how other people have done it." - Wall Street Journal
"Megan Marshall has written a powerful and haunting book about memory, family, friendship, and history. In these intricately braided essays, Marshall approaches her own life through the lives of others as she revisits her grandfather's experience in World War I, a school friend's tragic death, a stay in Kyoto, and a 19th-century biographical mystery. After Lives is an intimate and illuminating chronicle of the self from one of America's best biographers." - Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
"In her elegant reflections on the biographer's craft, Megan Marshall has in fact given us a memoir--one that enables us to look afresh at books and lives and the way they shape on another." - Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury
"Megan Marshall has done it again. This time, her gentle, probing eye, her compassion and generosity, are turned inward. In moving and subtle prose, she explores her own canyons of grief, the origins of her interest in the lives of others, and vastly, beautifully, in the making of art itself." - Ayana Mathis, author of The Unsettled and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
"An esteemed biographer put her own life in the spotlight." - Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times
