Bloomsbury American Biographical Novel, The

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of 'truth' it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history. Review This is an important book on the rise of the biographical novel from Georg Lukács's disparagement of the genre in the 1930s to its current prominence as a versatile form capable of depicting the past in the present and critiquing the political. Michael Lackey shows how it has flourished in recent decades in tandem with changing assumptions about history and narrative. Linking the genre's development with the cataclysms of twentieth-century history, he illustrates its significance as a way of reflecting upon subjects significant to us all. --Gavin Cologne-Brookes, Professor of American Literature, Bath Spa University, UKThis is a valuable contribution to the analysis of the shift from the historical novel to the biographical novel. It makes us see more clearly how postmodernism discovered the contamination of history and fiction. Literature here complements history, proffering a nuanced view of the diversity of the world we live in. --Michael Mack, Reader in English Studies, Durham University, UK About the Author Michael Lackey is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author of The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis Christian Reich (2012), and African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith, which won the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title in 2008. He is also the editor of The Haverford Discussions: A Black Integrationist Manifesto for Racial Justice (2013).