Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt- A Partnership- Hazel Rowley

Wednesday, January 19, 2011, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is author Hazel Rowley, and our subject is her book Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.   

Hazel Rowley, brought up in England and Australia, lives in New York City. Her new book, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: An Extraordinary Marriage, is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

She moved to Paris for 18 months to write Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultous Lives & Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Harper Collins, New York, in 2005. The book has been translated into over a dozen languages, and has garnered considerable international acclaim — and controversy! It was a Washington Post Best Book for 2005. In Brazil it was a bestseller, and in France the literary magazine Lire named it "the best literary essay of 2006."

Rowley wrote Richard Wright: The Life and Times while she was affiliated with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro American Studies at Harvard. Published by Henry Holt in August 2001, the book had cover reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post and was listed among the 2001 Washington Post Book World Raves. It was re-issued by Chicago University Press in March 2008.                               

Christina Stead: A Biography was published by Heinemann, Australia, in 1993, where it won the 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Published by Henry Holt in the US and Secker & Warburg in the UK, it was named as a New York Times Notable Book. The book was re-issued in 2007 by Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, Australia.

Hazel Rowley's essays have appeared four times in The Best Australian Essays. (See her essay "Mockingbird Country" on Harper Lee). Her essay "Beauvoir, Brazil, and 'Christina T'" was published in Book Forum, in April/May 2007. Back in December 1996, she mourned the dramatic changes in tertiary education in an article published in The Australian, called "Universities are losing on points." She has published articles in Partisan Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Antioch Review, Contemporary Literature, Prose Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Southerly and Westerly, and has reviewed books for The Times Literary Supplement (UK), The London Times Higher Education Supplement, Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Nation, and L.A. Times. Hazel Rowley was awarded her BA (First Class) and PhD from the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

A passionate speaker, she has appeared at numerous book festivals and literary events in the United States, Canada, the UK, France, and Australia. Her recent speaking engagements include the Athenaeum (Boston), the Smithsonian (Washington), the New York Society Library, the Alliance Francaise, Chicago, and the Sydney Writers' Festival. She is currently on a nationwide book tour for Franklin and Eleanor.