How do you write a life across time? In very different ways, Nicholas Boggs and Siri Hustvedt take up that question through two major literary figures: Boggs through newly uncovered archival material in his biography of James Baldwin, Hustvedt through the intimate, hybrid form of memoir and portrait in writing about Paul Auster. One works outward from letters, documents, and historical record; the other from shared life, memory, and the strange doubleness of writing about someone both publicly known and privately loved. A conversation about biography, the archive, the instability of memory, and the challenge of turning a life into narrative.
Date
Jun 21, 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Featuring
Nicholas Boggs
Nicholas Boggs is the New York Times bestselling author of Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in more than three decades, and co-editor of Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. He is the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Yale’s Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most recently, he was the 2024–25 John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, five collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. She is the recipient of many other awards, including the Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize, and the Sigourney Award for expanding psychoanalytic thought. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
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