All Program Dates
February 4, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
February 18, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
March 4, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
March 18, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
April 1, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Registration
Tuition/Admission for this course $275. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, November 14, for Rosenbach members on Friday, November 21, and for the general public on Wednesday, November 26.
Description
Readings from British Biography: A Reader will include selections from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, James Anthony Froude’s Life of Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, as well as works dealing with modern literary figures. Course discussion will focus on what makes a biography comparable in some ways to the novel and in others to works of history and literary criticism.
No literary biography of our time is more highly regarded than Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce. This course will pose the question, “Why is that so?” Zachary Leader’s recent biography of Ellmann explores how the biographer’s own personality and background suffused his masterpiece.
Required reading:
Carl Rollyson, British Biography: A Reader
Selections from Richard Ellmann, James Joyce revised edition
Selections from Zachary Leader, Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker
Recommended reading:
Carl Rollyson, A Higher Form of Cannibalism?: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (includes a chapter on Ellmann’s James Joyce, available as an audiobook from amazon.com)
Instructor
Carl Rollyson, Professor Emeritus at Baruch College, The City University of New York, is the author of The Life of William Faulkner, William Faulkner Day by Day, Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner, and the forthcoming Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism. He has led courses on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light in August at the Rosenbach. He has also published numerous biographies of literary figures such as Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, Amy Lowell, Rebecca West, and Norman Mailer. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and The Washington Post. His reviews of biographies appear twice a week in The New York Sun.