The American Biographical Novel

Before the 1970s, there were only a few biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Frida Kahlo, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, and Sylvia Plath, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham'sThe Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award.The American Biographical Novel 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,The American Biographical Novel 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.

Michael Lackey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author ofThe Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis' Christian Reich (2012) andAfrican 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, and editor ofThe Haverford Discussions: A Black Integrationist Manifesto for Racial Justice(2013) and Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (2014).