Granta 41: Biography

Featured in this collection mostly of memoirs and portaits is an excerpt from an unpublished Saul Bellow novel from the 1950s, Memoir of a Bootlegger's Son , set in Jewish Montreal, where the language was "a French-Russian-Hebrew-British Yiddish." Bellow's biographer James Atlas offers an illuminating essay on the Nobel laureate's early career in Chicago and New York. Most other selections successfully avoid standard essay forms. Gabriel Garcia Marquez recalls Frau Frida, a Colombian he met in Vienna whose profession was prophecy. Blake Morrison movingly assesses the life of his dissembling father in a series of episodes. Louise Erdrich, surveying the 1892 rolls of a North Dakota Indian reservation, meditates on a time when "women wore show more names that told us who they were." Luc Sante, rooting among New York police photo archives, annotates murder scenes from the years 1914-1918. Particularly thoughtful is Lorna Sage's memoir of novelist Angela Carter, who survived an anorexic youth and a desperate marriage to find herself in Japan and create work that was "unclassifiable in terms of British fiction." show less

One of the better issues of Granta I've read, the pieces here range from true biography to memoir, as well as how biographers get access to personal letters and material to be able to piece together the stories of people's lives.

The highlighted piece is a fragment of a novel Saul Bellow started about his own family but abandoned. It's accompanied by his biographer's accounting of Bellow's life up until he became a successful writer. In other articles by Louise Erdrich and Luc Sante, we see how the lives of people outside the limelight, such as Native Americans and immigrants, are a bit harder to document.

good edition on biography. lorna sage wrote on angela carter. i read sage's memoir a year ago.