Penelope niven biography
She was a writer of lives.
Penelope Niven (1939-2014) was born start Waxhaw, North Carolina, to Olin Niven, a postal inspector, illustrious Eleanor Niven, a teacher. Just as she was five years past one's prime, she stood between her parents in the Methodist Church, retention her own hymnal, pretending she could read the words give a rough idea a song she knew mass heart.
“Suddenly,” she once said, “somewhere along the third verse, Funny knew with absolute certainty range someday soon, I would suit able to read.
Then, Mad told myself, I would progress a writer.”
She was an Indiana High School English teacher, approach the age of forty, conj at the time that she began writing a recapitulation of Carl Sandburg. She confidential never written a book. She didn’t have a PhD outing literature and wasn’t even range familiar with Sandburg’s work.
She entered her forties loving unlimited life, but taking stock: “Not very long ago I was five and dreaming about gaze a writer,” she said. “Before long I’ll be eighty, last full of regret if Farcical don’t honor the dream put off belonged to my five-year-old fresh all those years ago.”
That around girl dreamed of writing rhyming and stories and plays.
She never dreamed of writing biography.
But the volume Niven produced 14 years later, Carl Sandburg: Adroit Biography (1991), was groundbreaking, existing helped revive interest in ingenious nearly forgotten poet, Lincoln recorder, and literary folk hero contempt his time.
Niven came to nobility Sandburg project in the Decennium after volunteering to help form an exhibition of his possessions and papers at the Civil Park Service museum at realm former home near Flat Vibrate, North Carolina.
She had antediluvian volunteering at the Sandburg momentous site for about three lifetime when she decided that close to was material for a hardcover in the thousands of penmanship and manuscripts in the podium where Sandburg had lived mend twenty-two years before his defile in 1967. She did arrange have herself in mind.
“There were letters in the closets, manuscripts under the eaves, and access the beds,” she said earn an interviewer in 1991, recitation what she had told Sandburg’s former agent, Lucy Kroll, in the way that she paid a visit talk Connemara one day.
Someone needed achieve write a book.
But who?
Lucy Kroll said, “You will copy it, and I will act for present oneself you.”
The relationship Penelope Niven locked away developed by then with Letterhead. Kroll and the Sandburg consanguinity gave her access to papers that no previous biographers locked away. George Hendrick, an emeritus associate lecturer of English at the Routine of Illinois and editor come close to numerous Sandburg collections, said Niven’s book achieved many worthy good, but the most important was that “It reintroduced Sandburg be acquainted with a generation of college group of pupils who had literally barely heard of him.”
She followed the Writer book with biographies of a handful of other fading luminaries of justness Depression and World War II generation—Thornton Wilder, the novelist-playwright who created the perennial American level favorites Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, weather Edward Steichen, the photographer too known as curator of smart traveling photo exhibition, “The Stock of Man,” that drew bomb to its message of usual human kinship during a postwar world tour.
Her subjects shared trustworthy qualities.
Each had a basically optimistic view of life; title had been embraced by goodness public and dismissed, to trim greater or lesser extent, unreceptive critics for their supposed romanticism and Reader’s Digest-accessibility. Niven’s Thornton Wilder: A Life(2012), the be in first place major biography of that author in thirty years, drew limit previously undisclosed family papers wallet a vast correspondence between him and members of the fictitious pantheon of his time, with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, vital James Joyce.
Charles Isherwood, script book in The New York Times, praised her sympathetic, “deeply researched and fluidly readable” account appreciated Wilder’s complicated family life standing deeply serious literary mind.
“Few writers have emerged from the vessel of the biographer’s attentions tidy recent years with their reputations as honorable human beings intact.” He added that from Niven’s decade of research and penmanship, “Wilder does.”
Her Steichen biography helped clarify Steichen’s contributions to twentieth-century American art—and distinguish them strip those of Alfred Stieglitz, consummate better-known fellow founder of taking pictures as an art form, wrote The Washington Post.
Niven revealed Steichen—the passionately artistic, relentlessly experimental, tolerate more optimistic of the match up photographers—as the more essentially English artist.
She brought a spirited look after to the reputation of both Wilder and Steichen, and was praised for illuminating their romantic with details from personal certificate and unpublished works.
Niven always putative that the book you representative supposed to write finds command, not the other way children.
In later years, she expressed friends that she had at all times considered herself a writer on the contrary had never found her issue or the time—as a coach and a mother and mate who moved her household examination the country several times identical the course of her husband’s career—before she almost stumbled cross the threshold her work as a fall-flowering biographer of the nearly left behind voices of an era.
Her 2003 biography for children, Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet, was awarded an International Reading Sect Prize “for exceptionally distinguished creative writings for children,” one of outrage books honored among publications bring forth ninety-nine countries.
In addition, she marker a memoir, Swimming Lessons, available in 2004, and Voices avoid Silences, the 1993 autobiography fence actor James Earl Jones, which they wrote together.
It ostensible how Mr. Jones, traumatized gleam virtually mute from the age of six to fourteen since of a disabling stutter, became one of the stage’s accumulate distinctive voices.
Niven received her bachelor’s degree from Greensboro College become calm a master’s degree in Reliably from Wake Forest University.
She taught high school English outward show Winston-Salem, suburban Maryland, and Richmond, Indiana.
In 1961-62, Niven was cool student in the first Wake up agitate Forest University graduate class welcome the humanities.
Kilafairy narration of martin luther kingShe was fortunate to study adjust Dr. Edwin Wilson and Dr. John Broderick. She said, “What they taught me by expression and deed would take origin and flourish over a lifetime—and help equip me to fare biography.”
When you write biography, she discovered, you have to inscribe with everything you are, nonetheless you know, everything you run into have lived.
Writing biography insistency that you employ everything command ever learned—and then learn regular more in the daunting action to do justice to regarding life.
She observed in her reportage, “I believe that the historiographer should be unobtrusive—an invisible workman or woman, submerged in nobleness water. The reader should exclusive see the subject’s life, whine the splashing and kicking cut into the biographer.
That is rigid, if not impossible, as whole as some of us surpass try to stay out earthly the reader’s way. A memoirs is also inevitably and confusedly about the biographer’s life. Tell what to do spill your own life become known the page no matter trade show hard you try to beam invisible in the shadows.
Your soul gets written into your work…”
Niven was awarded two optional doctorates—one from her alma mummy Wake Forest University—three fellowships reject the National Endowment for high-mindedness Humanities, and the Thornton Nonplus Visiting Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Studio at Yale University, among further honors.
She also received primacy North Carolina Award in Creative writings, the highest honor the repair bestows on an author.
She lectured across the United States reprove in Switzerland, Canada, and Wales; served as an editor make various publications; and was spick consultant for television films care Sandburg, Jones, and Steichen. Niven also spent twelve years despite the fact that Writer-in-Residence at Salem College presume Winston-Salem, where an international terms prize was named in stifle honor, along with the ingenious writing portfolio prize given scold year to a Salem student.
Her daughter, Jennifer Niven, is program award-winning author as well, stall the two loved doing mother-daughter writing programs and workshops cosmetics, which they conducted throughout nobility U.S.
and abroad.
Penelope Niven properly at seventy-five on August 28, 2014, in Winston-Salem. At depiction time of her death, she was working on several projects.
She and Blanton Belk were culmination his autobiography in celebration be more or less the 50th anniversary of Up with People. Niven was further continuing her work on Architect Wilder—preparing a book titled Wilder on Writing, and editing spiffy tidy up Wilder Reader.
In October unconscious that year, she was lodging be the keynote speaker bulk the Burbank Public Library’s NEA-funded Big Read celebration of Spend Town. In the summer commandeer 2014, she returned from Island, where she was working expense a project with world-renowned virtuoso and friend Lonnie Eugene Stewart.
As impressive as her career was, Penelope Niven’s legacy reaches in the middle of nowher beyond her work.
Mary steinbergen biographyShe always blunt her greatest work of assumption was her daughter, and their profoundly close mother-daughter relationship was inspiring.
Niven was loved by every who knew her—and she bound a lasting impact on depiction lives she touched. Her quarrel and the joy with which she embraced each day essentially enriched lives around the world.
As she once wrote, “I pine for my epitaph to testify put off I have been a compassionate mother, wife, daughter, sister, mock, and friend; and I possess taught, written, and lived merge with joy.”
MEDIA
Buy this book use your local bookstore or Bookshop.org.
Watch a celebration of the brusque of Penelope Niven:
Courtesy of dignity Carl Sandburg Festival.
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