Carol Sklenicka

Carol Sklenicka is an American biographer, literary scholar, and essayist whose most recent book is Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer, a biography of the short-story writer and novelist Alice Adams, described by one reviewer as "perceptive, elegantly written"[1]. Sklenicka is also the author of Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, which remains the only comprehensive biography of short story writer Raymond Carver. The New York Times Book Review listed both books on end-of-year best lists, and called Sklenicka a "lucid, scrupulous writer."

Sklenicka "gives us the first full-length popular biography of brilliant novelist and short story writer Alice Adams. For decades, Adams rendered believably three-dimensional female characters in beautiful, cut-glass prose in venues like The New Yorker," noted a Christian Science Monitor reviewer in naming Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer one of that newspaper's top 10 books for the month.The New Yorker wrote that Sklenicka "celebrates Adams's work and persuasively situates it in an era characterized by drastic cultural changes and by the persistence of old exceptions, conventions, and biases."

Sklenicka grew up in Santa Maria, California, graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California in 1971, and received a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied with Naomi Lebowitz, Stanley Elkin, and Howard Nemerov, in 1986. She taught literature and creative writing at Marquette University and at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. She now devotes herself to writing, environmental activism, and rural living near the Russian River in northern California with poet and novelist R. M. Ryan, author of The Lost Roads Adventure Club, Vaudeville in the Dark, There's a Man with a Gun Over There, and other books.

The publication of her biography of Carver, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Magazine and a notable book by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Seattle Times, followed more than a decade of interviews with Carver's friends, family and writing colleagues. However, Carver's widow, poet Tess Gallagher, chose not to be interviewed by Sklenicka. Some critics, most notably novelist Stephen King, writing in The New York Times Book Review, found that Sklenicka displayed "something like awe for Carver the writer" and was "almost nonjudgmental when it comes to Carver the nasty drunk and ungrateful (not to mention sometimes dangerous) husband," whereas Jason M. Appel, in Ploughshares, said "Carver, as presented by Sklenicka, is a man of profound moral shortcomings." Time found the book "judicious, thorough and sometimes harrowing".

Among the journals to which Sklenicka has contributed are Confrontation, South Atlantic Quarterly, Iowa Woman, and Sou'wester. She is an active member of Biographers International Organization and mentors other biographers through that organization’s coaching program.

External links

• Publishers Weekly review, Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer
• Economic Times Interview with Sklenicka
• Carol Polsgrove on Writers' Lives: A Conversation on Raymond Carver
• Ploughshares Review: Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by Jason M. Appel
• Washington Magazine: "Catching a Story-Catcher" by Candace O'Connor

Bibliography

D. H. Lawrence and the Child. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. New York: Scribner, 2009.

Alice Adams: A Writer's Life. New York: Scribner, 2019.