Charles J. Shields (born December 2, 1951) is an American biographer of mid-century American novelists and writers.
Raised in a Chicago suburb, Shields attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating with degrees in English (1974) and American history (1979).
In 1997, Shields left his career in education to write independently. Over the course of the next six years, he published 20 histories and biographies for young people. In 2002, E.D. Hirsch (Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, 1988) invited Shields to join his Core Knowledge Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia as senior editor, contributing to a curriculum which, adapted, became the Common Core Standards Initiative that "define the knowledge and skills students should gain throughout their K-12 education in order to graduate high school prepared to succeed in entry-level careers, introductory academic college courses, and workforce training programs." [1] [2] Forty-one states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have voluntarily adopted the Common Core.
Shields's first biography for adults in 2006— Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt) [3] went on to become a New York Times bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate. “This biography will not disappoint those who loved the novel and the feisty, independent, fiercely loyal Scout, in whom Harper Lee put so much of herself,” wrote Garrison Keillor in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. [4] “As readable, convincing, and engrossing as Lee’s literary wonder,” said the Orlando Sentinel. [5] The biography appeared in a revised edition in 2016 as Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee: From Scout to Go Set a Watchman (Holt).
For the National Endowment for the Arts' "Big Read" initiative, Shields spoke to hundreds of audiences about his biography of Harper Lee for community-wide reads of To Kill a Mockingbird. [6] Several versions of his talks are archived on the Internet. [7]
Two years later, Shields followed-up his biography of Lee with a young adult version: I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee (Holt), selected by the Junior Library Guild, and recommended among the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults and Arizona Grand Canyon Young Readers Master List. [8]
In 2009, with fellow biographers Nigel Hamilton, James McGrath Morris, and Pulitzer-prize winner Debby Applegate, Shields co-founded Biographers International Organization (BIO), a non-profit organization founded to promote the art and craft of biography, and to further the professional interests of its practitioners.
In November 2011, Shields published the first biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life (Holt), [9] described by Steve Almond in the Boston Globe as a “disturbing account of the late author, whose ambition and talent transformed him from an obscure science fiction writer to a countercultural icon,” [10] and an "engrossing, definitive biography" by Publishers Weekly in a starred review. [11] It was selected as a New York Times Notable Book, [12] and Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011. [13]
In 2018, the University of Texas Press published Shields’ The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner & the Writing Life. “Shields knows how to tell a good story,” said the Los Angeles Review of Books, “one that will appeal especially to those interested in the ins and outs of the publishing industry and the ups and downs of a writer’s life (spoiler alert: there are many).” [14]
Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind a Raisin in the Sun was published by Holt in January 2022. [15]
Shields is married and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the father of Andrew (1983-2012), and Lauren Shields, author of The Beauty Suit: How My Year of Religious Modesty Made Me a Better Feminist (Beacon Press, 2018). [16]
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Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist who wrote the 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird that won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, has been confirmed to be an earlier draft of Mockingbird but was published in July 2015 as a sequel.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
Horace Gregory was a prize-winning American poet, translator of classic poetry, literary critic and college professor. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1965.
Bernard Vonnegut was an American atmospheric scientist credited with discovering that silver iodide could be used effectively in cloud seeding to produce snow and rain. He was the older brother of American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1962 American coming-of-age legal drama crime film directed by Robert Mulligan. The screenplay by Horton Foote is based on Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name. The film stars Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Mary Badham as Scout. It marked the film debut of Robert Duvall, William Windom and Alice Ghostley.
Atticus Finch is a fictional character and the protagonist of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird. A preliminary version of the character also appears in the novel Go Set a Watchman, written in the mid-1950s but not published until 2015. Atticus is a lawyer and resident of the fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, and the father of Jeremy "Jem" Finch and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. He represents the African-American man Tom Robinson in his trial where he is charged with rape of Mayella Ewell. Lee based the character on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, an Alabama lawyer, who, like Atticus, represented black defendants in a highly publicized criminal trial. Book magazine's list of The 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900 names Finch as the seventh best fictional character of 20th-century literature. In 2003, the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch, as portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, as the greatest hero of all American cinema. In the 2018 Broadway stage play adapted by Aaron Sorkin, Finch has been portrayed by various actors including Jeff Daniels, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear, Rhys Ifans, and Richard Thomas.
Amasa Coleman Lee was an American newspaper editor, politician, and lawyer.
Ginger Strand is an American author of nonfiction and fiction. Her 2005 debut novel Flight was adapted from several of her short stories. Her published books of non-fiction include Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies in May 2008, Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate in 2012, and The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic in 2015. She has published articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times,Pacific Standard,Tin House, and The Believer, among others. She was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in nonfiction.
A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes. The story tells of a black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances with an insurance payout following the death of the father, and deals with matters of housing discrimination, racism, and assimilation. The New York Drama Critics' Circle named it the best play of 1959, and in recent years publications such as The Independent and Time Out have listed it among the best plays ever written.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in her Own Words, is a play about the life of American writer Lorraine Hansberry, adapted from her own writings. Hansberry was best known for her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the first show on Broadway written by an African-American woman. After her death in 1965, Hansberry's ex-husband and friend, songwriter and poet Robert Nemiroff, collated her unpublished writings and adapted them into a stage play that first ran from 1968 to 1969 off Broadway. It was then converted into an equally successful autobiography with the same title.
David Attie was a prominent American photographer, widely published in magazines and books from the late 1950s until his passing in the 1980s. He was one of the last great proteges of legendary photography teacher and art director Alexey Brodovitch. Attie worked in a wide range of styles, illustrating everything from novels to magazine and album covers to subway posters, and taking now-iconic portraits of Truman Capote, Bobby Fischer, Lorraine Hansberry, and many others. He also created the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly, the main character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, when he illustrated the Capote novella's first appearance in Esquire Magazine. He was best known in his lifetime for his signature photo montages—an approach he called "multiple-image photography": highly inventive, pre-Photoshop collages that he made by combining negatives in the darkroom. His work has received new attention with a pair of posthumous books: the well-reviewed 2015 publication of his Capote collaboration "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie," and the 2021 collection of his behind-the-scenes photographs from the very first season of Sesame Street, "The Unseen Photos of Street Gang." He has been the subject of several solo exhibits in recent years, including a two-year retrospective at the Brooklyn Historical Society. One recent critic wrote that even decades later, "his explorations of photomontage remain durably inspired, innovative, and visually dynamic."
Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee that was published in 2015 by HarperCollins (US) and Heinemann (UK). Written before her only other published novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Go Set a Watchman was initially promoted as a sequel by its publishers. It is now accepted that it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with many passages in that book being used again.
Therese von Hohoff Torrey was an American literary editor with the publishing firm J. B. Lippincott & Co. Strong-willed and forceful, she worked closely with author Harper Lee over the course of two years to give final shape to her classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird. After the commercial and literary success of the novel, she shielded Harper Lee from the intense pressure to write another one. She retired from a senior editorial position at the firm in 1973 and died the following year.
Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a 2018 play based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Harper Lee, adapted for the stage by Aaron Sorkin. It opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre on December 13, 2018. The play opened in London's West End at the Gielgud Theatre in March 2022. The show follows the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer in 1930s Alabama, as he defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape. Varying from the book, the play has Atticus as the protagonist, not his daughter Scout, allowing his character to change throughout the show. During development the show was involved in two legal disputes, the first with the Lee estate over the faithfulness of the play to the original book, and the second was due to exclusivity to the rights with productions using the script by Christopher Sergel. During opening week, the production garnered more than $1.5 million in box office sales and reviews by publications such as the New York Times, LA Times and AMNY were positive but not without criticism.
The Monroe Journal is a weekly newspaper from Monroeville, Alabama serving the city and surrounding area.
Casey Cep is an American author and journalist. Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and other publications. Cep's debut non-fiction book, published by Knopf, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019), tells the story of how Harper Lee worked on, but ultimately failed to publish, an account of a murder trial that happened in Alabama in 1977.
Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart is a 2017 American documentary film by Tracy Heather Strain, Randall MacLowry and Chiz Schultz on the life and work of writer Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry is best known as the playwright of A Raisin in the Sun, a story that partially mirrored experiences of her family in confronting racial segregation. It premiered in 1959, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway.
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