Monday, April 23, 2018, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

The Sheth Lecture:  Creativity in Later Life

"Field Notes of a Biographer"

If the original, the primary art is the art of living, then the telling of a life, biography, matters.  What are the merits and demerits of this venerable genre?  How does biography affect those who write it?  If biography's role is neither adulation nor condemnation, what does it offer the reader?

Each of us has been given the chance to compose a life.  Can biography help us understand what it is to be human and live with the limits and seize the opportunities of the human condition?

My field notes, smudged and crumpled, tell the story.

Dana Greene, is Dean Emerita of Emory Oxford College, editor of four volumes, and author of biographies of Evelyn Underhill, Maisie Ward, and Denise Levertov.  Her latest biography on a British poet, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in September.