The name and the face of Oprah Winfrey are instantly recognizable to just about every person in the United States. To millions of people around the world, Oprah is the embodiment of American spirit and entrepreneurial success; hers is a rags-to-riches story come to life. While there is a near continual barrage of information in the media about this larger-than-life woman, this biography takes readers past all the hype and hyperbole and presents a candid, balanced portrait of the flesh-and-blood woman herself.
From relative obscurity, even at the time of his death in 1969, Jack Kerouac has risen to icon status with invigorated interest at all levels of scholarship and readership. This biography serves an important purpose in cutting through both the hagiography and the critical backlash that still surrounds the figure most closely identified with the Beat movement. Using the same structure--the events of his life-- that Kerouac himself utilized in writing his roman a clef novels such as On the Road, this biography provides an accessible alternative to current studies that will help readers, particularly students understand the creative legacy left by Kerouac.
More than most writers, Robert Louis Stevenson requires a Literary Life. Fascination with Stevenson's life (the 'Stevenson biography' is almost a minor genre) has tended to eclipse his literary achievement. This study focuses on Stevenson's writing practice within the different geographical, cultural and political contexts that shaped it, from Scotland to the South Seas. Following Stevenson's own views on biography, the book is not structured primarily in terms of chronology, but is more a kind of literary geography than traditional literary history.
Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars—historians, literary critics, and museologists—trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia’s distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected Australians to a global community of thought. It shows how biography, and the study of life stories, can contribute greatly to our understanding of such patterns of connection and explores how transnationalism can test biography’s limits as an intellectual, professional and commercial practice.
This is the first comprehensive biography of Molotov and reflects the range of sources that have become available to historians since the fall of the USSR. It is a commentary on Soviet history. Molotov played his part in revolution, Civil War, Lenin's Russia, Stalin's struggle with the oppositions, collectivization, industrialization, the Terror, the Great Patriotic War, the beginnings of the Cold War, and in the Khrushchev era.
