Great Regulars: Perhaps the trauma of 9/11 drove writers

and readers to reexamine great lives and events, to reevaluate the truth. That may be why this was a decade of revisionist biography, offering mind-changing bios of everyone from Cleopatra to Mickey Mantle to William Shakespeare (as in Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World). In much the same truth-at-any-price fashion, it was an era of memorable memoirs, such as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking or the rock-and-roll memoirs of Patti Smith and Keith Richards. Perhaps the trauma of 9/11 drove writers and readers to reexamine great lives and events, to reevaluate the truth. That may be why this was a decade of revisionist biography, offering mind-changing bios of everyone from Cleopatra to Mickey Mantle to William Shakespeare (as in Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World).

from John Timpane: The Philadelphia Inquirer: After 9/11 in the arts: More reality, but also more fantasy
then John Timpane: The Philadelphia Inquirer: In plays, a variety of links to 9/11

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