Writing It!
The Podcast About Academics & Writing
Displaying 1 Episode of Writing It! with the tag “phd; literature”.
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Episode 50: Heather Clark Part I: When the editor says, “We want a doorstopper!
May 19th, 2025 | 28 mins
archival research, biography, cold war, phd; literature, sylvia plath, trade press
We speak with literary scholar and biographer, Heather Clark, author of Red Comet, which was selected for the New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2021" list and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. It won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2022. We talk about how Clark made the case for the eleventh biography of Sylvia Plath to her agent, and what it was like for her editor to tell her that she actually wanted a doorstopper of a book. Clark tells us about how she treated Plath’s fiction and poetry in the context of telling Plath’s life story, and how Clark organized her research notes. Clark also tells us about the group biography she wrote after Red Comet, and her next biography subject.