Michael Shelden

Michael Shelden (born 1951)^[1] is an American biographer and teacher, notable for his authorized biography of George Orwell, his history of Cyril Connolly ’s Horizon magazine, and his controversial biography of Graham Greene. His most recent book, Mark Twain: Man in White, was published in January 2010.^[2]

Education and career

Born in Oklahoma, Shelden earned his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University in 1979. He then began teaching at nearby Indiana State University, where he was promoted to Professor of English in 1989, and where he remains a full-time member of the faculty.^[3] For ten years he was a fiction critic for the Baltimore Sun, and from 1995 to 2007 he was a Features Writer for the Daily Telegraph of London, where he contributed dozens of articles on notable figures in film, literature, and music, including one of the last interviews with actor Christopher Reeve.^[4] Shelden is married and the father of two daughters.

Literary biography

Shelden’s first book, George Orwell: Ten Animal Farm Letters to His Agent, Leonard Moore (1984), was an edited collection drawn from letters Shelden found at the Lilly Library and was the first to publicize.^[5] In 1989 he published his literary history Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, which covered the decade of the 1940s when Horizon was the most influential literary magazine in the United Kingdom. The book was based on a large collection of Connolly’s personal papers at the University of Tulsa, and on interviews with the magazine’s former editors and assistants, including Stephen Spender.^[6]

Authorized by the George Orwell estate, Shelden’s biography of Orwell was published in 1991 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.^[7] Among other things, the book included the first detailed account of Orwell’s controversial list of people whom he considered politically dishonest and unreliable in British society.^[8]

Shelden’s biography of Graham Greene appeared in a UK edition in 1994 under the title Graham Greene; The Man Within. In 1995 it was published in America, with revisions, as Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. Its “despoiling” portrait of Greene as a driven and devious artist provoked heated debate on both sides of the Atlantic.^[9] In the New York Review of Books there was an especially spirited debate between Shelden and novelist David Lodge on the question of Greene’s anti-Semitism, with Shelden arguing that Greene’s published remarks about Jews are “worse than anything in T.S. Eliot or Evelyn Waugh,” and Lodge countering that although Greene drew “on social and cultural prejudices and stereotypes concerning Jews which were common in English society before World War II . . . to label it as anti-Semitic ridicule is crudely reductive.” ^[10]

Bibliography

• George Orwell: Ten Animal Farm Letters to His Agent, Leonard Moore (1984)
• Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon (UK edition: Hamish Hamilton, 1989) ISBN 978-0571249152 (US edition: HarperCollins, 1989) ISBN 978-0060920012
• Orwell: The Authorized Biography (UK edition: Heinemann, 1991) ISBN 978-1842751732 (US edition: HarperCollins, 1991) ISBN 978-0060921613
• Graham Greene: The Man Within (UK edition: Heinemann, 1994) ISBN 978-0749398484
• Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (US edition: Random House, 1995) ISBN 978-0679428831
• Mark Twain: Man in White, The Grand Adventure of His Final Years (Random House, 2010) ISBN 978-0679448006

References

1. ^ Faber & Faber Page for Michael Shelden. Retrieved on October 31, 2009.
2. ^ Random House Page for Mark Twain: Man in White. Retrieved on October 31, 2009.
3. ^ Faculty & Staff, Indiana State University.
4. ^ Obituary, Christopher Reeve, Daily Telegraph, October 12, 2004. Retrieved on October 31, 2009.
5. ^ "George Orwell: An Exhibition from the Collection of Daniel J. Leab," Brown University, Fall 1997. Retrieved on October 31, 2009.
6. ^ Faber & Faber UK. Retrieved on October 31, 2009.
7. ^ Pulitzer Finalists for 1992.
8. ^ Jacob Weisberg, “Orwell, Listing,” Slate, August 16, 1998. Retrieved October 31, 2009.
9. ^ Lee Siegel, “Books,” Atlantic Magazine, April 1996. Retrieved on October 31, 2009.
10. ^ “Greene & Anti-Semitism, New York Review of Books, September 21, 1995. Retrieved on October 31, 2009.

External links

• Random House Page for Mark Twain: Man in White
• Michael Shelden Author’s Page at Faber
• Michael Shelden Author’s Page at Methuen
• Michael Shelden Faculty Page at Indiana State University
• Michael Shelden Home Page

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Name	Shelden, Michael
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Date of birth	1951
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