Megan Marshall

Last updated

Megan Marshall (born June 8, 1954) is an American scholar, writer, and biographer.

Contents

Her first biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005) earned her a place as a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Her second biography Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (2013) is a richly detailed account of Margaret Fuller, the 19th-century author, journalist, and women's rights advocate who perished in a shipwreck off New York's Fire Island. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Biography

Marshall was born in Oakland, California. Her mother was a book designer; her father worked in city government. Marshall came East to attend Bennington College as a literature and music major, but she left college without finishing and later enrolled at Harvard College, where she studied with poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Fitzgerald, and Jane Shore. She earned a BA degree in 1977 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Before turning to writing, Marshall worked in the publishing industry and taught. From 1980 to 2007, she was married to author John Sedgwick.

Her first book, published in 1984, was The Cost of Loving: Women and the New Fear of Intimacy, which examines the impact of the feminist movement on its followers.

Marshall is particularly interested in uncovering and exploring the lives of women who have been forgotten by traditional historians and biographers.

Supported by grants and teaching, she worked on the book The Peabody Sisters for nearly 20 years, reading original letters and documents as well as delving into the newspapers and literature of the era. The book focused on the lives of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, and Sophia Hawthorne. Her second biography is Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.

In a conversation in Radcliffe Magazine with author Margot Livesey, Marshall spoke about the connection between the two biographies: "I wrote The Peabody Sisters partly to prove that the New England Transcendentalists included other brilliant women besides Fuller. Then I discovered that during the 20 years I’d spent researching the Peabodys, Fuller had been largely forgotten. No one recognized her name anymore. This was a shock to me, and a loss I wanted to repair."

In addition to her books, Marshall writes occasionally for The New Yorker , Slate , The New York Times Book Review , The London Review of Books , and other publications. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2006–07, and writes book reviews for Radcliffe Magazine.

Since 2007 she has been assistant professor in writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College. [1]

Marshall lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Books

Honors

Marshall, who was named the most promising writer in her Harvard class of 1977 by Harvard Monthly, is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute.

Aside from being a Pulitzer finalist, The Peabody Sisters was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction.

Her biography of Margaret Fuller won the 2014 Pulitzer: http://www.pulitzer.org/files/2014/2014_LongList_PressRelease.pdf

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nathaniel Hawthorne</span> American writer and novelist (1804–1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography</span> American award for distinguished biographies

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiograhphy is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir by an American author or co-authors, published during the preceding calendar year. Thus it is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were awarded that year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara W. Tuchman</span> American historian and author (1912–1989)

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Peabody</span> American educator

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was an American educator who opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States. Long before most educators, Peabody embraced the premise that children's play has intrinsic developmental and educational value.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radcliffe College</span> Former womens college in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and held the popular reputation of having a particularly intellectual, literary, and independent-minded female student body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Fuller</span> American writer and womens activist (1810–1850)

Sarah Margaret Fuller, sometimes referred to as Margaret Fuller Ossoli, was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first American female war correspondent and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sophia Hawthorne</span> American artist (1809–1871)

Sophia Amelia Hawthorne was an American painter and illustrator as well as the wife of author Nathaniel Hawthorne. She also published her journals and various articles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz</span> American educator

Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz was an American educator, naturalist, writer, and the co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. A researcher of natural history, she was an author and illustrator of natural history texts as well as a co-author of natural history texts with her husband, Louis Agassiz, and her stepson Alexander Agassiz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Freeman Clarke</span> American theologian and writer (1810–1888)

James Freeman Clarke was an American minister, theologian and author.

Sophia Willard Dana Ripley (1803–1861), wife of George Ripley, was a 19th-century feminist associated with Transcendentalism and the Brook Farm community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Old Manse</span> Historic house in Massachusetts, United States

The Old Manse is a historic manse in Concord, Massachusetts, United States, notable for its literary associations. It is open to the public as a nonprofit museum owned and operated by the Trustees of Reservations. The house is located on Monument Street, with the Concord River just behind it. The property neighbors the North Bridge, a part of Minute Man National Historical Park.

Walter Harding (1917–1996) was a distinguished professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo and internationally recognized scholar of the life and work of Henry David Thoreau. Harding was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and received his B.S. from Bridgewater State College in 1939, M.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1947 and a Ph. D. from Rutgers University in 1950.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Cheever</span> American author

Susan Cheever is an American author and a prize-winning best-selling writer well known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at The New School in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jones Very</span> American poet and essayist

Jones Very was an American poet, essayist, clergyman, and mystic associated with the American Transcendentalism movement. He was known as a scholar of William Shakespeare, and many of his poems were Shakespearean sonnets. He was well-known and respected among the Transcendentalists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Tyler Peabody Mann</span>

Mary Tyler Mann was a teacher, author, and mother. She was the wife of Horace Mann, American education reformer and politician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biographers International Organization</span>

Biographers International Organization (BIO) is an international, non-profit, 501 (c)(3) organization founded to promote the art and craft of biography, and to further the professional interests of its practitioners. The organization was founded in 2010 by a committee of noted biographers, led by James McGrath Morris, who served as BIO's first Executive Director. The president of BIO as of 2019 is Linda Leavell. The executive director as of 2020 is Michael Gately.

Jane Andrews was an American author and educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Bradford Ripley</span> American educator and scholar (1793–1867)

Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley was an American educator and noted scholar at a time when women were rarely admitted to universities. She acquired most of her knowledge of the classics, philosophy, modern languages, botany, astronomy, and chemistry through independent study. She was reputedly "one of the most learned women of the nineteenth century."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Sturgis Tappan</span> American poet

Caroline Sturgis Tappan, commonly known as Caroline Sturgis, or "Cary" Sturgis, was an American Transcendentalist poet and artist. She is particularly known for her friendships and frequent correspondences with prominent American Transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sturgis published 25 poems in four different volumes of The Dial, a Transcendental periodical. She also wrote and illustrated two books for children, Rainbows for Children (1847) and The Magician’s Show Box, and Other Stories (1856).

Hayden Herrera is an American author and historian. Her book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo was turned into a movie in 2002 and Herrera's biography Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work was named a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

References

  1. "Emerson College". Archived from the original on July 19, 2011.
  2. Stansell, Christine (October 10, 2005). "Review: The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall". New Republic.