Haverford Professor Authors New Woody Guthrie Bio
In October of 2020, Penguin Randomhouse released Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life. The book’s author is Gustavus Stadler, who’s “day job” is that of an English professor at Haverford College.
From Penguinrandomhouse.com Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life is a fresh and contemporary analysis of the overlapping influences of sexuality, politics, and disability on the art and mind of an American folk icon.
Part biography, part cultural history of the Left, Woody Guthrie offers a stunning revelation about America’s quintessential folk legend, who serves as a guiding light for leftist movements today.
Stadler, on his Haverford.edu page wrote, “My main focus at present is a book about Woody Guthrie, an archival project examining his later years, his writings on sex, his chronic illness (Huntington’s Disease), and his emergent sense of a politics of the body, titled Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life; examining copious archival materials including journals, letters, visual art, unrecorded songs, and unfinished manuscripts, I present Guthrie as a figure through which to retell the history of the transition between the Old Left and New.
Discussing Stadler’s book and Guthrie, in the LA Review of books, Robert Cashin Ryan wrote, “What keeps the book from being merely another entry in a timeworn biographical tradition is that it is an expansive and strikingly unique portrait of a man, not of an immortal legend. An Intimate Life privileges the messiness of character and circumstance, tying together the many Guthries collected under the proper name and placing them in the context of broader social and institutional movements. And here we find the most rewarding and unanticipated delights of the biography: at various stages, one could be forgiven for forgetting that Woody Guthrie was a musician at all.”
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