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Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Jeffrey Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is writing a biography of Samuel Johnson. He grew up in New York, was an undergraduate at Michigan and earned his doctorate at Berkeley. He taught in Japan, at UCLA and Tufts, and was a writer in London and Málaga before teaching at the University of Colorado from 1975 to 1992. He has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Kent and Massachusetts, Jemison Professor at the University of Alabama and Visiting Scholar at Berkeley. He has won three Colorado research awards and two Faculty Fellowships as well as Huntington Library, Fulbright, ACLS and Guggenheim grants. He is one of twelve Americans who are Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature. Since 1992, he has been a professional writer in Berkeley, California. Professor Meyers, one of the most respected scholars in his field, has published 40 books and 500 articles on modern American, English and European literature. His wide range of interests include bibliography, editing, literary criticism, art history, film and biography. He is a specialist in archival research and has discovered the FBI file on Hemingway and important literary manuscripts by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Roy Campbell. A distinguished biographer, he is the author of several works on T.E. Lawrence and George Orwell; lives of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Poe, Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, George Orwell and Inherited Risk, a father-and-son life of Errol and Sean Flynn. He has also published Fiction and the Colonial Experience, Painting and the Novel, A Fever at the Core: The Idealist is Politics Married to Genius, Homosexuality and Literature, D.H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy, Disease and the Novel, Graham Greene: A Revaluation, Hemingway: Life into Art and Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers. He has edited two collections of original essays on biography, and is now writing a life of Somerset Maugham. Professor Meyers' works have been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, Polish, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean. His manuscripts are in the Tulsa, Texas, Huntington, Harvard, Virginia and J.F. Kennedy libraries. He has lectured at seventy universities including Harvard Medical School in America, Canada, England, France, Holland, Spain, Burma and New Zealand as well as at the Library of Congress, the Tate Gallery, Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Society of Literature. He has been interviewed scores of times for newspapers, radio and television; has appeared in documentary films about Katherine Mansfield and Gary Cooper, and BBC-TV programs on Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. He has spoken about his literary discoveries on CBS-TV morning news and about Orwell on C-Span's "Booknotes." In England, Meyers' life of Hemingway was praised by the novelists Anthony Powell and Anthony Burgess, and the playwright Tom Stoppard chose it as the "Best Book of the Year" in 1986. In America, the poet James Dickey noted: "Meyers has given us an extremely valuable deepening of what is quite likely to prove Hemingway's greatest work, his life." The National Book Award winner J. F. Powers said: "This is simply the best book there is on Hemingway, thorough, perceptive, no holds barred, highly entertaining, so good and right on the famous writer and also on the famous performer who acted from the All-American hope that what goes up may not come down, but did, in this case, tragically." And George Painter, the highly respected biographer of Marcel Proust, wrote: "I believe that Professor Meyers' Hemingway is one of the great biographies of our half-century, a masterwork in which true scholarship and creative art are so united as to become indistinguishable, and worthy to belong with Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Marchand's Byron or Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey. Ellmann's passing has been universally mourned; but one can at least feel that the world now has a new major biographer."

Articles

The play's the thing (Features) , September 2009, 22
On Olivia Manning's The Great Fortune.

Crucial points: A reply (Letters) , June 2009, 90
A response from Jeffrey Meyers.

Sensual Music (Books) , January 2009, 65
On Dancing in the Garden: A Bittersweet Love Affair with France and Words by the Water by William Jay Smith

Monstrous passions (Books) , November 2007, 84
On Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

In their youth (Books) , April 2007, 88
On Adam Sisman's The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Tortured forms (Books) , December 2006, 75
On Larry Silvers's Hieronymus Bosch and Anne Baldassari's Picasso: Life with Dora Maar, Love and War, 1935-1945.

C'est moi! (Books) , June 2006, 93
On Artists' Self-Portraits by Omar Calabrese, translated by Marguerite Shore

Shade's shadow (Reconsiderations) , May 2006, 31
On Dr. Johnson and Pale Fire.

Autumnal heart (Books) , February 2006, 74
On Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand: The Life & Death of Isaac Babel.

Monet in Zola & Proust (Features) , December 2005, 41
How did Zola and Proust depict Monet?

Gangreene (Books) , March 2005, 71
A review of The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Three: 1955-1991, by Norman Sherry.

Morisot & Manet (Features) , January 2005, 26
On the intimate and influential relationship between Berthe Morisot & Edouard Manet.

The dream made real (Features) , December 2003, 43
On Degas’s scupture.

Orwell on writing (Features) , October 2003, 27

The good German (Books) , March 2003, 68
A review of Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art: a Biography, by Hermann Kurzke.

Lionel Trilling & the crisis at Columbia (Features) , January 2003, 23
Drawing from an unpublished, May 1968, interview with Trilling.

Johnson, Boswell & the biographer's quest (Features) , November 2002, 35

Thomas Hardy & the warriors (Features) , September 2002, 34

The seventh seal (Books) , March 2002, 72
A review of Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, by Elaine Feinstein.

Be brave (Books) , February 2002, 68
A review of Iris Murdoch: a life, by Peter Conradi.

Shorter notice (Books) , September 2001, 120
Jeffrey Meyers on Dangerous Muse: The Life Of Lady Caroline Blackwood, by Nancy Schoenberger.

Trail of blood (Books) , June 2001, 82
A review of The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

A deadly game (Books) , May 2001, 75
A review of The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost, by Patrick Marnham.

Chicago Dostoyevsky (Books) , February 2001, 64
A review of Bellow, by James Atlas.

James Dean of fascism (Books) , November 2000, 69
A review of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, by Alice Kaplan.

What the monsters know (Books) , May 2000, 69
A consideration of James Dickey upon the publication of Crux: The Letters of James Dickey & James Dickey: The World as a Lie by Henry Hart

Fallen Angel (Books) , March 2000, 62
Review of Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare.

Iris Murdoch: a memoir (Features) , November 1999, 22

Nubile savage (Books) , September 1999, 68
Review of True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Repeating the old lies (Notebook) , April 1999, 77
On conflicting accounts of the Spanish Civil War




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