|
Marion Meade (born January 7, 1934) is an American biographer and novelist. She is best known for her portraits of literary figures and iconic filmmakers.〔''Who's Who of American Women 2008–2009''〕 ==Biography== Born in Pittsburgh, the eldest of three children, Meade grew up in an academic environment. Her father, Surain Singh Sidhu, a Sikh immigrant from Amritsar, India, taught physics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her mother Mary, a Hungarian-American, was a homemaker whose hobbies included writing song lyrics and raising orchids. Meade first became interested in journalism while attending Bethel Township High School where she edited the school paper and worked summers on a local newspaper.〔''Who's Who in America, 2009''〕 Meade studied journalism at Northwestern University, graduating in 1955. The following year she moved to New York, earned a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and found her first reporting job as an assistant to Earl Wilson, the popular Broadway columnist for the ''New York Post''. She subsequently worked for publications in New York and Washington before becoming a freelancer and publishing articles in the ''New York Times'', ''The Nation'', ''The New Republic'' and ''McCall's''. Meade’s first book, ''Bitching,'' published in 1973, stemmed from her involvement in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. Following her participation in feminist consciousness-raising groups, she asked women of various ages how they secretly regarded the men in their lives. The result was a less than favorable review of the opposite sex.〔 Following ''Bitching'', Meade wrote a trilogy of feminist-themed works set in medieval France. ''Eleanor of Aquitaine'' chronicles the life of the powerful 12th-century queen. ''Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard'' retells one of the most famous love stories of European history (a film adaptation of the novel was released in 1988). A second novel, ''Sybille'', concerns the death of literature during the Albigensian Crusade and a 13th-century troubadour grappling with her verse as her homeland collapses. In 1988, Meade published the biography ''Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?'', which remains an authoritative source of the author's life and work.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=A Conversation with Marion Meade )〕 New interest in Parker led to the making of the 1994 film ''Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle'', starring Jennifer Jason Leigh.〔http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0574970/〕 Meade further explored Parker in her 2004 book ''Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties''.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=New Book a Must-Read for Twenties Fans; Bobbed Hair Spotlights 4 Writing Stars )〕 The work covered three other notable female writers of the Jazz Age—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber. Both the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' and ''The Washington Post'' named it among the best books of the year.,〔http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-year-s-finest-BEST-BOOKS-OF-2004-2665303.php〕〔http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30101-2004Dec2.html〕 ''Kirkus Reviews'' called it "largely apocryphal and hardly scholarly, but a lot of fun."〔https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/marion-meade/bobbed-hair-and-bathtub-gin/〕 In 2006 Meade edited Parker’s collected works, ''The Portable Dorothy Parker'',〔 updating the 60-year-old anthology with fresh material and many personal letters. Penguin Books commissioned a jacket from the well known illustrator Seth.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=A Conversation with Seth )〕 Her 1995 HarperCollins book ''Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase'' recorded the journey of Keaton from a Kansas medicine show to vaudeville headliner to cinematic pioneer. Her 2000 biography ''The Unruly Life of Woody Allen'' was, ''The New York Times'' said, "not a vile book" and "not irresponsible" but did adhere to the standard "consensus of opinion on its subject, depicting him as self-involved, misogynist, egotistical, inconsiderate, isolated and stagnant."〔https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/05/reviews/000305.05udovict.html〕 Of her most recent book, ''Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney'', Laura Miller, of Salon.com wrote that Meade's readings of Nathanael West's works were "a bit crude."〔Miller, Laura. (Review of ''Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney'' ) on Salon.com, 21 March 2010.〕 Jonathan Yardley in ''The Washington Post'' considered it a "rather peculiar joint biography" and noted, "Precisely what inspired Marion Meade to write about them (and McKenney ) is a mystery," noting that "West already has been the subject of a rather massive biography by Jay Martin, and the vultures of academe have picked his carcass to pieces. Presumably the device that Meade fastened upon to distinguish her book from the others was to bring McKenney into the story as, in effect, an equal partner. But West remains the dominant figure for the obvious reasons: He accomplished more, he had more famous and interesting friends, he had a longer life." 〔http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031201825.html〕 In ''The New York Times'', Dwight Garner criticized the book's "grating prose" and "half-baked analogies." He also wrote: "The bad news about ''Lonelyhearts'' is that Ms. Meade’s own unsubtle voice will make you wince on almost every page. To hear her tell this story is like listening to someone play Aaron Copland on a kazoo.... The book's tone—I kept waiting for Ms. Meade, like a gum-snapping waitress in a diner, to start calling the reader 'Hon'—isn't improved by her insistence on referring to people by their nicknames. . . . Worse by far are Ms. Meade’s dismal readings of West’s novels. She has no feeling for his work and compares not one but two of his fictions to Monty Python sketches."〔Garner, Dwight. "Married to Their Colorful Histories", ''New York Times'', March 18, 2010.〕 By contrast, Jessa Crispin of National Public radio thought that Meade handled the topic in "a manner befitting her subject, with brevity and humor"〔http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125060098〕 Meade lives in New York City. She has one child, Alison Sprague, and two granddaughters, Ashley Elizabeth Sprague and Katharine Rose Sprague. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Marion Meade」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|