Essential reading for anyone interested in writing biography or memoir, with practical advice from successful biographers and creative writing teachers.

Legend views Zelda Fitzgerald as the mythical American Dream Girl of the 1920s, later as the Southern Belle whose brilliant husband Scott remained loyal despite her frequent breakdowns and final madness. The Zelda that Sally Cline reveals was a serious artist: a painter of extraordinary and disturbing vision, a talented dancer and a witty and original writer whose work Scott often used in his own novels but never acknowledged. Hitherto untapped sources, including medical evidence and interviews with Zelda's last psychiatrist, suggest that her insanity may have been less a specific clinical condition than the product of her treatment for schizophrenia and her husband's behaviour towards her. Cline shows how Scott's alcoholism, too, was as destructive of Zelda and their marriage as it was of him. Zelda's vivid and tragic life was lived at the height of the Jazz Age. Her circle included Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Sally Cline evokes that gilttering group and also, perhaps more significantly, the Deep South from which Zelda longed to escape but from which she could never free herself.

A professional guide to the rapidly evolving genre of literary non-fiction written by tutors from the prestigious Arvon Foundation course and with contributions from leading writers.

Zelda Fitzgerald, along with her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, is remembered above all else as a personification of the style and glamour of the roaring twenties - an age of carefree affluence such as the world has not seen since. But along with the wealth and parties came a troubled mind, at a time when a woman exploiting her freedom of expression was likely to attract accusations of insanity. After 1934 Zelda spent most of her life in a mental institution; outliving her husband by few years, she died in a fire as she was awaiting electroconvulsive therapy in a sanatorium. Zelda's story has often been told by detractors, who would cast her as a parasite in the marriage - most famously, Ernest Hemingway accused her of taking pleasure in blunting her husband's genius; when she wrote her autobiographical novel, Fitzgerald himself complained she had used his material. But was this fair, when Fitzgerald's novels were based on their life together? Sally Cline's biography, first published in 2003, makes use of letters, journals, and doctor's records to detail the development of their marriage, and to show the collusion between husband and doctors in a misdirected attempt to 'cure' Zelda's illness. Their prescription - no dancing, no painting, and above all, no writing - left her creative urges with no outlet, and was bound to make matters worse for a woman who thrived on the expression of allure and wealth.

Life Writing: A Writers' & Artists' Companion is an essential guide to writing biography, autobiography and memoir. PART 1 explores the history and forms of life writing and the challenges and potential pitfalls of the genre. PART 2 includes tips by bestselling writers: Diana Athill, Alan Bennett, Alain de Botton, Jill Dawson, Millicent Dillon, Margaret Drabble, Geoff Dyer, Victoria Glendinning, Lyndall Gordon, Peter Hayter, Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Kathryn Hughes, Diane Johnson, Hermione Lee, Andrew Lownie, Janet Malcolm, Alexander Masters, Nancy Milford, Blake Morrison, Andrew Morton, Clare Mulley, Jenni Murray, Nicholas Murray, Kristina Olsson, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Meryle Secrest, Miranda Seymour, Frances Spalding, Hilary Spurling, Boyd Tonkin, Edmund White. PART 3 includes practical advice - from planning, researching and interviewing to writing, pacing and navigating ethical issues.

Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the first American flapper.” Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness. Sally Cline brings us a trenchantly authentic voice through Zelda’s own highly autobiographical writings and hundreds of letters she wrote to friends and family, publishers and others. New medical evidence and interviews with Zelda’s last psychiatrist suggest that her “insanity” may have been less a specific clinical condition than the product of the treatment she endured for schizophrenia and her husband’s devastating alcoholism. In narrating Zelda’s tumultuous life, Cline vividly evokes the circle of Jazz Age friends that included Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, and H. L. Mencken. Her exhaustive research and incisive analysis animate a profoundly moving portrait of Zelda and provide a convincing context to the legacy of her tragedy.

Literary Non-Fiction: A Writers' & Artists' Companion is an essential guide to writing in a wide range of genres, from travel writing to feminist polemic and writing on nature, history, death, friendship and sexuality. Part 1 explores the full range of genres and asks the question: what is literary non-fiction? Part 2 includes tips by such bestselling literary non-fiction writers as: Lisa Appignanesi, Rosemary Bailey, Gillian Beer, Bidisha, Lizzie Collingham, William Dalrymple, Stevie Davies, Colin Grant, Rahila Gupta, Philip Hoare, Siri Hustvedt, Alice Kessler-Harris, Barry Lopez, Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Sara Maitland, Neil McKenna, Caroline Moorehead, Susie Orbach, Jennifer Potter, Susan Sellers, Dava Sobel, Diana Souhami, Dale Spender, Francis Spufford, Daniel Swift, Colin Thubron, Natasha Walter, Sara Wheeler and Simon Winchester. Part 3 offers practical advice - from planning and researching to writing a proposal and finding an agent or a publisher when your work is complete.

Radclyffe Hall was a legend in her own lifetime and her fame has never faded. She was also a lesbian, which became part of that legend. Christened Marguerite, a shy child with golden curls and Victorian muslin dresses, she became - at a time when men wore the trousers - a flamboyant character who smoked small green cigars, cross-dressed in Chinese silk smoking jackets, and called herself John. In 1928, when she was forty-eight, her fifth novel, The Well of Loneliness, was banned for obscenity, despite protests from leading literary and political figures, turning the book into a bestseller and bringing Hall literary fame. First a serious poet and novelist, then a cause celebre, Hall was also a sometime feminist, a member of the Natalie Barney-Djuna Barnes Paris circle, and a Catholic convert who believed in spiritualism. In this, the first major biography of this influential, ultra-flamboyant lesbian novelist, Sally Cline uses new material to explore the connections among Hall's writing, life, and milieu, meticulously analyzing the effects on a writer of her readiness to become a martyr to a cause.

Dashiell Hammett changed the face of crime fiction. In five novels published over five years as well as a string of stories, he transformed the mystery genre into literature and left us with the figure of the hard-boiled detective, from the Continental Op to Sam Spade—immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon—and the more glamorous Thin Man, also made iconic with the aid of Hollywood. A brilliant writer, Hammett was a complex and enigmatic man. After 1934 until his death in 1961, he published no more novels and suffered from a writer’s block that both shamed and maimed him. He is identified with his tough protagonists, but his tuberculosis compromised his masculine identity and alcoholism may have been his answer. A former Pinkerton detective who valued honesty, he was attracted to women who lied outrageously, most notably Lillian Hellman, with whom he conducted a thirty-year affair. A controversial political activist who stood up for civil liberty, he was also a very private man. In this compact new biography, Sally Cline uses fresh research, including interviews with Hammett’s family and Hellman’s heir, to reexamine the life and works of the writer whom Raymond Chandler called “the ace performer.”

The author of Just Desserts: Women and Food issues a startling but compelling call for single women to embrace their freedom and redefine and celebrate a non-genital sexuality. Essential reading for any woman who has ever felt that her body is not her own.