After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, (Audiobook)

<p>Megan Marshall's innovative books, including <i>The Peabody Sisters</i> and the Pulitzer Prize-winning <i>Margaret Fuller</i>, are treasured works of American biography. In the richly absorbing essays of <i>After Lives</i>, Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it.</p><p>In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book's brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, "Free for a While," set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson, the author's AP history classmate, gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from prison in the case that put Angela Davis on the FBI's Most Wanted list.</p><p>Here too is the author's passion for the biographical chase, and for the mysteries at its heart. She tells the astonishing story of viewing the disinterred remains of her one-time subject Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, and their daughter Una, the truths of whose early death Marshall works to reveal.</p><p>Throughout these finely wrought essays, Marshall, "[at] the front rank of American biographers" (Dwight Garner, <i>New York Times</i>), makes palpable her driving impulse to "learn what I could from others: how to live, how not to live, what it means to live."</p>

• After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, (Audiobook)
• Author: Tantor
• ISBN: 9798212781756
• Format: Audiobook
• Publication Date: 2026-06-30
• Page Count: 0