Meryle Secrest

Meryle Secrest (* as June Meryle Doman in Bath, England) is an American author and journalist who is best known for her biographies of artists and musicians.

Life

Meryle Doman was born in England and grew up there. Her father Albert Edward Doman was a toolmaker, her mother Olive Edith Doman, nee Love, was a factory worker. 1948 the family emigrated together with Meryle to Canada. Meryle Doman began in 1949 as an editor with responsibility for women of Hamilton News, Hamilton (Ontario) to work. In 1950, she joined the newspaper, and worked until 1951 as a correspondent for the Bristol Evening Post from Bristol. 1953 she married his first wife, the journalist David Waight Secrest and took its name. They left Canada and settled in the United States. Meryle Secrest in 1957 took an American citizen.

After several journalistic intermediate stations Secrest began in 1961 to work for the Washington Post, first as a writer of features, then from 1969 as a reporter for the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, and from 1972 as an editor and art critic. In 1975 she gave up her permanent position at the post office, and works from now on as a freelance journalist for the Post, the New York Times and other publications. In 1981 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 2002 to 2004 Secrest was a professor of English at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Secrest lives in Washington, D.C.

In her work for the Washington Post, she specialized in fast forward to conducting in-depth interviews with artists and writers, as with Leonard Bernstein and Anaïs Nin. As an author of a series of biographies of famous people from the art and music world, she continued this work, including biographies of art historian and art collector Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark and Joseph Duveen, the musician and composer Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim, the artist Salvador Dalí and Romaine Brooks, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Her biography of the art collector Berenson was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and 1981 for the American Book Award. In 2006 she was among one of ten recipients of this year awarded the National Humanities Medal.

In their biographies themselves Secrest focuses on the psychological motives of the persons described, and seek inner turning points and conflicts. About the work of artists and musicians themselves their biographies contain little content, what the cultural historian Louis Menand in the New Yorker both as meaningful restriction as well as weakness describes: Secrest, the equally about surrealist painter, symbolist painters, art dealers, art historian, musical composers classical conductors and architects writes, may be these areas hardly an expert on all of them. On the other hand, their access entails the risk just to satisfy the curiosity of their readers about the weaknesses of great artists without really contributing to the understanding of their work.

Works

• Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks. Doubleday, Garden City (NY ) 1974, ISBN 0-385-03469-5.
• Being Bernard Berenson. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1979, ISBN 0-03-018411-8.
• Kenneth Clark: A Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1984, ISBN 0 - 297-78398 -X.
• Salvador Dalí. Dutton, New York, 1986, ISBN 0-525-24459- X.
• Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. Knopf, New York 1992, ISBN 0-394-56436-7.
• Leonard Bernstein: A Life. Knopf, New York 1994, ISBN 0-679-40731-6.
• Stephen Sondheim: A Life. Knopf, New York 1998, ISBN 0-679-44817-9
• Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers. Knopf, New York 2001, ISBN 0-375-40164-4.
• Duveen: A Life in Art Knopf, New York 2004, ISBN 0-375-41042-2.
• Shoot the Widow: Adventurers of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject. Knopf, New York 2007, ISBN 0-307-26483-1. ( Autobiography of Secrest and reflections on the writing of biographies in general. )