A conversation with Bob Batchelor about his work from John Updike to Stan Lee and much more about biography and its place in the world and in our imaginations.

A wide ranging discussion of the choices a biographer makes and how John Matteson put together his group of figures present at the battle of Frederickburg

A wide ranging of discussion of a great character actress, active in both silent and sound film, her relationships with Ronald Colman and Bette Davis, and her career as a writer of novels and memoirs.

What it takes to write a biography of the Mankiewicz brothers and other issues biographers encounter.

A wide ranging discussion of Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s new biography, including reflections on the biographer as villain and how biography can be an act of restitution.

I speak with Richard Bradford about how he became a biographer, the role biography should play in literary study, and why he chose to write about Ernest Hemingway, Patricia Highsmith and others.

All things biographical and how Faulkner, the man and the writer, approached the Civil War.

How does a biographer recreate the past the milieu of a subject’s life. I draw on my own experience in biographies of William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, Rebecca West, Michael Foot, and others.

William Souder explains his attraction to Steinbeck, what it takes to do a biography, the audience you can expect to reach as a biographer, and much much more.

A wide ranging discussion of Larry Wells’s memories of the Faulkner family, of Faulkner biographers, Joseph Blotner and Carvel Collins, and what it takes to research and write biography, which often feels like a Henry James story.