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About Oline Eaton
NBN Episodes hosted by Oline:
July 1, 2016
The Dead Ladies Project
Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that t…
June 13, 2016
A Splendid Savage
In A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton, 2016), freelance journalist Steve Kemper details the adventurous, …
May 20, 2016
Enter Helen
"Women's history, if they had any, consisted in their being beautiful enough to become events in male lives," the feminist academic Carolyn R. Heilbru…
May 4, 2016
Raoul Wallenberg
What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person's fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg's…
April 19, 2016
Spinster
"There still exists little organized sense of what a woman's biography or autobiography should look like," Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 class…
December 18, 2015
Violette Noziere
On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to …
July 25, 2015
Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli
As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one enc…
June 2, 2015
Elsa Schiaparelli
As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),"The most extraordinary fashion designer of …
March 10, 2015
Rebel Souls
Biography is, both etymologically and in its conventional forms, the writing of a life. But what is the role of place within that? And how do the stor…
February 18, 2015
La Belle Creole
One of the fundamental functions of biography is the preservation of stories. But it also acts to resurrect the stories that may have fallen from view…
October 15, 2014
Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University
There was once a notion that black people had no meaningful history. It's a notion Dorothy Porter Wesley spent her entire career debunking. Through he…
October 2, 2014
A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around education…
September 8, 2014
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy
If group biography is one of the exciting new trends in life-writing (and some say it is), Karen Abbott- the historian, not to be confused with the no…
August 10, 2014
Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist
"Why write the biography of a nobody?" That is the question with which Melanie C. Hawthorne begins Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Lif…
May 20, 2014
What Jackie Taught Us
Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in…
April 27, 2014
Gabriele d'Annunzio
Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio is a book with a big mission: to write inventively abo…
March 5, 2014
Pat and Dick
In America, biographies of Presidents and First Ladies are a staple of the genre, but the relationship that exists between the two receives surprising…
February 13, 2014
Napalm
Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person…
January 31, 2014
The Spy Who Loved
It's almost a cliché by now to say that we need stories of strong women, but that doesn't lessen the fact that we do. And biography is a field unique…
January 10, 2014
Fanny and Stella
There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It's a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degre…
December 6, 2013
Jim Henson
In the field of children's programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame …
November 22, 2013
JFK's Last Hundred Days
John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke wr…
October 18, 2013
Pain, Parties, Work
It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly p…
September 19, 2013
Careless People
One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel.…