Böcker av Scott Donaldson

';A biography of great immediacy.... There are many sections of great poignancy, many funny things, many of electric intimacy and candor... there is spellbinding power, never more so than in describing Cheever's death, pages that are both terrible and deeply moving; one is losing an old, beloved friend.' James Salter, Los Angeles Times Book Review ';John Cheever: A Biography is clearly an indispensable book. Donaldson moves gracefully from the personal to the literary.... Solidly researched and entirely readable, admiring of the writer and knowing about the man. Stuffed with fascinating anecdotes. It's a gut-wrenching story. Donaldson tells it straight, without embellishment, and our attention never strays.' Dan Cryer, Newsday ';A coup of investigative reporting.' Publishers Weekly ';Both erudite and earthly. What emerges is a rich tapestry that gives the reader extraordinary insight into the workings of a master storyteller's mind.' Jean Graham, New York Daily News ';John Cheever: A Biography by Scott Donaldson is as readable and ';unputdownable' as any thriller.' T. Coraghessan Boyle ';A revelation. What a triumph.' Frederick Exley ';Donaldson has set a high standard that other biographers will find difficult to equal.' John Blades, Chicago Tribune

Archibald MacLeish was the winner of the 1993 Ambassador Book Award for biography.

“Donaldson’s skill is really a rare and fine art everyone who is interested in twentieth-century fiction or in the art of biography or in the mysterious relationship between the temperament of an artist and the work he produces should have By Force of Will within arm’s reach. In its way it is a masterpiece.” —Walter Sullivan, The Sewanee Review “Not the least of its virtues is the way in which it allows its reader to play along with a masterly scholarly detective.” —San Francisco Examiner

In The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage others to destroy correspondence, write their own autobiographies, and appoint family or friends to protect their reputations as official biographers. Thomas Hardy went so far as to compose his own life story to be published after his death, while falsely assigning authorship to his widow. After a brief background sketch of the history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson recounts his experiences in writing biographies of a broad range of twentieth-century American writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Winfield Townley Scott, and Charlie Fenton. Donaldson provides readers with a highly readable insiders' introduction to literary biography. He suggests how to conduct interviews, and what not to do during the process. He offers sound advice about how closely biographers should identify with their subjects. He examines the ethical obligations of the biographer, who must aim for the truth without unduly or unnecessarily causing discomfort or worse to survivors. He shows us why and how misinformation comes into existence and tends to persist over time. He describes ';the mythical ideal biographer,' an imaginary creature of universal intelligence and myriad talents beyond the reach of any single human being. And he suggests how its very impossibility makes the goal of writing a biography that captures the personality of an author a challenge well worth pursuing.

Scott Donaldson is one of the nation’s leading literary biographers. Among his many books are By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway; Archibald MacLeish: An American Life, winner of the Ambassador Book Award for Biography; and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship.

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Death of a Rebel tells the story of Charles Andrews Fenton (1919-1960), a charismaticteacher, scholar, and writer who took his own life by jumping from the top of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. At the time he was apparently at the peak of his career. He had written excellent books on Hemingway and Stephen Vincent Benet, had three other books in press, and was working on a new version of his novel about World War II (a 1945 account won the Doubleday Twentieth Century Fox award). He had earned Guggenheim and ACLS grants. Students flocked to his courses. He was widely regarded as the most popular professor at Duke.Charlie Fenton's story is a compelling one, and takes on further meaning in the context of the times. An individualist during the notoriously conformist 1950s, he swam against the current, defying authority and openly inviting controversy. This jaunty refusal to accept received wisdom made him an appealing figure to many of his students and colleagues. But it was a dangerous stance that did not sit well with his superiors, and it cost him when his fortunes took a turn for the worse in the spring and summer of 1960.Love and war had a lot to do with his suicide as well. Charlie Fenton, who had come down to Duke from Yale two years earlier with a promotion to full professor, fell in love with one of his graduate students. His wife, outraged, left and took their son Andy with her. The scandal left him alone and a social pariah around campus. Then he suffered one of his bouts of depression. Usually these periods were triggered by trauma, most of it derived from his service as a tail gunner with the RAF bomber command in the summer and fall of 1942. In the past he'd always been able to shake free of his despondency. This time he was overcome by psychological pain deriving from loss: of wife and family, of public admiration, of companionship, and worst of all, of self-regard. The book recounts Fenton's last days in vivid detail. In writing it, Donaldson had the assistance of family members, of his devoted students, and even at a painful distance of the woman he fell in love with fifty years ago. They all share an abiding sense of what might have been, and a deep regret that he could not go on to inspire the uncounted students who would never get to know and admire and learn from him.