While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes hiding out in the backrooms of the great cafes of Paris, Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived essentially on the same street.

The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written - or even read - a biography herself. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist with a recently acquired PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. ' New York Times Book Reviewįinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2020 Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing' Sunday Times She has received fellowships from (among others) the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.A The Times & Sunday Times Literary Nonfiction Book of the Year Her biographies of Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir were also prize finalists. She received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. He gave us word associations that we use in everything from children’s games to serious personality tests he taught us to talk about the complex, the archetype, the introvert and extravert he gave us the phrases ‘New Age’ and ‘the age of Aquarius’, and he gave us the concept of synchronicity that propelled me to write this book.”ĭeirdre Bair has been a literary journalist and university professor of comparative literature. She writes: “I am intrigued by how the individual influences the society in which he or she lived, and Jung was certainly among the most influential.

This is a fascinating portrait of the diverse decades that span Jung’s long life (1875-1961).įor Bair the choice for a biography about Jung was a form of intellectual inquiry.

Bair has evoked the man in all his cynical self-interest, opportunism, moral ambiguity, paradoxical insecurity and charismatic hold on decades of disciples. Deirdre Bair meticulously assembled every scrap of information about Jung she could get her hands on, culminating in a big book which strikes Publishers Weekly as “a balance between damage control and deification” and suggests that in bulk and detail there is little more to say.

Deirdre bair books