Carl Rollyson

Carl Rollyson, Professor of Journalism, in his Baruch College office

A University of Toronto Ph.D, Rollyson has published more than forty books ranging in subject matter from biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and Jill Craigie to studies of American culture, genealogy, children’s biography, film, and literary criticism. He has authored more than 500 articles on American and European literature and history. His work has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times and the London Sunday Telegraph and in journals such as American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. For four years (2003-2007) he wrote a weekly column, "On Biography," for The New York Sun and was President of the Rebecca West Society (2003-2007). His play, That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers, has been produced at Theatresource in New York City. Rollyson is currently researching a biography of Amy Lowell (awarded a "We the People" NEH grant). Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, a biography of Dana Andrews is was published by University Press of Mississippi in September 2012. His biography, American Isis: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath, will be published on January 29, 2013. His reviews of biography have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Kansas City Star, The Barnes & Noble Review, and The New Criterion. He is currently advisory editor for the Hollywood Legends series published by the University Press of Mississippi. He welcomes queries from those interested in contributing to the series. His column, "Biographology," appears in bibliobuffet.com. He is an advisory editor of Dollars and Sense, Baruch College's award winning business journalism magazine.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

"Carl Rollyson knows more about biographies than anyone else in the world. His independent mind, his experience, and his voracious reading have equipped him to produce amazing insights into the reading -- and writing -- of biographies.

--Ann Waldron, author of Eudora: A Writer’s Life and Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Literary Renaissance

"Carl Rollyson is to biography what Boswell was to Johnson: indispensable. An excellent biographer himself, Rollyson is also the finest critic of the art as well as a thoroughly delightful guide to the pleasures of reading biography and the perils of writing it."

--Patricia O’Toole, author of The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends and When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House

"With his high-powered and perceptive page-turners on Lillian Hellman, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag, Carl Rollyson has shown himself to be amongst the very first rank of contemporary biographical practitioners.

--Roger Lewis, author of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (book and Emmy and Golden Globe Award Winning HBO movie), The Real Life of Laurence Olivier, and Anthony Burgess

"For anyone mad enough to write a biography, this witty, definitive book [Biography: A User's Guide] is absolutely essential reading. For anyone who merely loves reading biography, it’s a smashing insider’s guide. Mr. Rollyson is informed and passionate and fun about a subject he knows intimately. He’s also unafraid to let his personal opinions show, thank goodness. In short, he’s written a wonderfully entertaining biography about the art of biography."

--John Heilpern, New York Observer

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath

"Carl Rollyson's impeccably researched, compulsively readable life of Sylvia Plath is likely to remain for years to come the definitive biography of this complex, fascinating woman. I could not put the book down." --Donald Spoto, author of The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams and Marilyn Monroe: The Biography.

Garbo, Garland, Monroe, Plath, thrilling divas one and all. Carl Rollyson’s American Isis is a tour de force that reinvents Sylvia Plath for the 21st century. I was sorry to turn the final page.--Marion Meade, author of Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney

“An illuminating work on Plath by an accomplished biographer.  While not underestimating Plath's troubled nature, Rollyson recognizes her as the agent of her own fame: a skilled mythmaker who worked hard to become not only a great poet but also an intellectual celebrity.   Like Marilyn Monroe, who influenced her, she both shaped and reflected her times, becoming a symbol for our age.”-- Lois Banner, Professor of History and Gender Studies, University of Southern California.  Author of Marilyn Monroe: The Passion and the Paradox

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews

“Always understated and all too underrated, Dana Andrews now has a definitive biography of his own.”--David Stenn, author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild

From the gritty small towns of olden Texas to California in the Great Depression to the movie factories of World War II, Hollywood Enigma chronicles the extraordinary struggle of an unlikely dreamer and reveals a unique side of one actor’s journey. The fierce ambitions of Carver Dana Andrews, son of a Baptist preacher, might well have been imagined by Horatio Alger, Jr.— or Samuel Goldwyn— but not the hidden costs behind those achievements. Carl Rollyson compassionately captures the man behind the movie star." --Marion Meade, author of The Unruly Life of Woody Allen and Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase

"The life of actor Dana Andrews (1909-1992)--a brilliant, woefully underrated Hollywood star--is at last given major treatment in this meticulous, haunting biography. Carl Rollyson has had unrestricted 
access to the Andrews family; to journals, letters and private archives; to exclusive interviews; and to studio records. The result is the landmark chronicle of a highly gifted, deeply tortured but 
enormously likable man. Rollyson never flinches: the years of Andrews' struggle with alcoholism and of professional decline are detailed here--but so are the many admirable achievements and the 
heroic triumph over addiction, mostly because of his faithful devotion to his wife and children. With countless others, I have always admired Dana Andrews; now, Carl Rollyson has shown, in this scholarly and immensely readable book, why our admiration is not misplaced." -- Donald Spoto, author of biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn and (most recently), of The Redgraves: A Family Epic

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography

Amy Lowell Anew deserves all the prizes. It is a major work of American cultural history, restoring to readers a poet of great distinction and a public figure of immense importance to American letters and our 20th Century history. Carl Rollyson is a hero of a biographer for his rescue and rethinking the lives of many neglected or misunderstood women. His approach has always been to treat his figures with dignity and respect. Dignity and respect have been sorely lacking in works about Amy Lowell. Recently, lesbian scholars have recreated Lowell as a grand dame diva, a great leap forward. Now Rollyson moves painstakingly through the life and works, not only writing/​righting wrongs but carefully resettling Amy Lowell's poetry into the American canon where it belongs. His study of her role as public speaker and cultural advocate for poetry give us at last Amy Lowell as a Public Intellectual. --Jane Marcus, distinguished professor of English and Women's Studies, CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York

Informed by newly recovered personal accounts of Amy Lowell, Rollyson presents the growth of a poet who embraced and furthered imagism and unabashedly celebrated the body in love. He follows Lowell in her performances on the road and traces her lifelong interest in Asian culture. His abundant experience as a biographer allows Rollyson to offer a keen appreciation of Lowell’s own biography of Keats, to assess the sources of negative biographies and impressions of her, and to support the recent current of feminist recuperation of Lowell’s life and work. --Bonnie Kime Scott, , professor emerita, San Diego State University and the University of Delaware

No husband, no babies, no Victorian prudery, just sublime poetry and a secret erotic life. Amy Lowell was not what we thought she was. --Marion Meade, author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

This is the biography I've been waiting for. Rollyson has exhaustively mined Lowell's archive to create a thoughtful portrait of a complicated, ambitious artist. Here, beyond the legends, the rumors, and the facile aspersions that her larger-than-life persona inspired is a woman I've wanted to meet for a very long time.--Melissa Bradshaw, author of Amy Lowell: Diva Poet

Treated as the butt of jokes by her male modernist contemporaries and by hostile biographers, Amy Lowell has been rescued from decades of homophobia, sexism, and anti-fat prejudice by this brilliant new study. Carl Rollyson turns archival research into exciting storytelling, as he brings Lowell and her passionate relationships with her lovers out of the shadows, while demonstrating why the popularity once enjoyed by her poetry, which infuses domestic situations with eroticism and with a political consciousness, and by her public performances of it, was no fluke.--Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware