With revelatory new information, from a leading feminist scholar and biographer, a nuanced and sympathetic biography of Marilyn Monroe to be published on the 50th anniversary of her death.
Like her art, Marilyn Monroe was rooted in paradox: she was a powerful star and a childlike waif; a joyful, irreverent party girl with a deeply spiritual side; a superb friend and a narcissist; a dumb blonde and an intellectual. No previous biographer has recognised - much less attempted to analyse - most of these aspects of her personality. Lois Banner has.
Since Marilyn's premature death in August of 1962, the appetite for information about the star has been insatiable. Biographies of Marilyn abound, and whether these books are sensational or flawed, Marilyn's fans have always come out in bestselling numbers. This time, with Lois Banner's Marilyn the fans won't be disappointed. This is no retread of recycled material. As one of the founders of the field of women's history, Banner reveals Marilyn Monroe in the way that only a top-notch historian and biographer could.
In researching Marilyn, Banner's credentials opened doors. She gained access to Marilyn intimates who hadn't spoken to other biographers, and to private material unseen, ignored, or misinterpreted by her predecessors. With new details about Marilyn's childhood foster homes, her sexual abuse, her multiple marriages, her affairs, and her untimely death at the age of thirty-six, Marilyn is, at last, the nuanced biography Marilyn fans have been waiting for.
Lois Banner is a founder of the field of women's history and cofounder of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the major academic event in the field. She was the first woman president of the American Studies Association, and in 2006 she won the Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of ten books, including her acclaimed American Beauty and, most recently, MM--Personal, which reproduces and discusses items from Marilyn Monroe's personal archive. In addition to her books on Monroe, Banner is a major collector of her artifacts. Banner is a professor of history and gender studies at USC and lives in Southern California.
Marilyn The Passion and the Paradox
Bloomsbury
Author: Lois Banner
Price: $39.99
Question: What drove your motivation for Marilyn The Passion and the Paradox?
Lois Banner: I live in Los Angeles, where Marilyn grew up and had her career; I had written about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict"three feminist leaders"and I wanted to investigate someone who didn't on the surface seem feminist at all. I teach at the University of Southern California, the world's leading university for cinema studies, and there are many film libraries, etc. close at hand. So I thought the research would be easy. It turned out not to be, but by then I wanted to uncover everything I could that wasn't known about Marilyn.
Question: Why was it important for you to recognise and analyse aspects of Marilyn Monroe's personality that hadn't been attempted previously?
Lois Banner: I felt I brought a new perspective to the enterprise. I was one of the founders of the field of women's history in the 1970s, and I realized that no one but Gloria Steinem had looked at Marilyn from a feminist perspective. With a salary for teaching from the university, I can take as much time as I want to write a book.
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