After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart

(Hardback)

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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 grandfathers experience in World War I, a school friends tragic death, astayin Kyoto, and a 19th-century biographical mystery.After Livesis an intimate and illuminating chronicle of the self from one of Americas best biographers. Heather Clark, author ofRed 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 Megan Marshalls 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 Livesreveals the alchemy of life writing. Francesca Wade, author ofSquare Haunting:Five Writers in London Between the Wars Grave and profound, clear-eyed and informative, these essays invite us into the biographers workshop and into the mind of one of the genres most accomplished practitioners. Anthony Walton, author of The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation

Author Bio

Megan Marshallis the author of the Pulitzer PrizewinningMargaret Fuller: A New American Life as well as Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast andThe 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.