A Biographer Going Rogue

Abstract

Mary Dearborn, herself a Mailer biographer, reviews Carl Rollyson’s Confessions of a Serial Biographer (McFarland). Dearborn finds the book a witty, practical account of the biographer’s trade: authorized versus unauthorized lives, fair use in quotation, and the handling of living subjects, illustrated by Rollyson’s battles with Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag. She notes that Rollyson says comparatively little about his 1991 Mailer biography, though he recalls Mailer granting permission to quote at the lowest possible fee. Drawing on her own experience of the Mailer world, Dearborn relishes Rollyson’s tales of “going rogue” and judges him at once likable and uncompromising, while observing that his fully authorized life of Walter Brennan was not among his best.