Jeffrey Meyers


Jeffrey Meyers is an American biographer, literary, art and film critic. He currently lives in Berkeley, California.

Biography

Jeffrey Meyers was born in New York City in 1939 and grew up in New York. He was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at UCLA, for the Far East Division of the University of Maryland in Japan, and Tufts University, and then spent time writing in London and Málaga, Spain before teaching at the University of Colorado from 1975 to 1992. He has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Kent and Massachusetts, Jemison Professor at the University of Alabama and . He has won three Colorado Research Awards and two Faculty Fellowships as well as Huntington Library, Fulbright, ACLS and Guggenheim grants. Since 1992 he's been a professional writer in Berkeley, California. In 1983 Meyers became one of 12 Americans who are Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2005 received an Award in Literature "to honor exceptional achievement" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As of 2018, Meyers has published 54 books and 980 articles on art, film, and modern American, English and European literature. His wide range of interests include bibliography, editing, literary criticism and biography. He is a specialist in archival research and published the FBI file on Ernest Hemingway, love letters by Hemingway, and literary manuscripts by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Roy Campbell. Meyers has had 33 works translated into 14 languages, and is sometimes referenced as a "serial biographer" due to his prolific biographic output.
His manuscripts are in the University of Tulsa, University of Texas at Austin, Huntington Library in Los Angeles, Harvard University, University of Virginia and John F. Kennedy libraries. He has lectured at 70 universities. He has been interviewed many times; has appeared in documentary films about Edgar Allan Poe Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn, and BBC-TV programs on Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence. He has spoken on television about his literary discoveries on CBS Morning News and about Orwell on C-Span's Booknotes. In 2012 he gave the Seymour Lectures in Biography at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.

Life and career

Personal life

Jeffrey Meyers married Valerie Froggatt in 1965. Their daughter Rachel was born in 1972 from whom he has two grandchildren.
Besides writing, Meyers' interests include: collecting books; tennis; seeking silence, avoiding boredom.
He currently resides in Berkeley, California.

Education

Biography

and Anthony Burgess praised Meyers' Hemingway: A Biography. Tom Stoppard chose it as the "Best Book of the Year" in 1986. In America, the poet James Dickey noted: "Meyers has given us an extremely valuable deepening of what is quite likely to prove Hemingway's greatest work, his life." The National Book Award winner J. F. Powers said: "This is simply the best book there is on Hemingway, thorough, perceptive, no holds barred, highly entertaining, so good and right on the famous writer and also on the famous performer who acted from the All-American hope that what goes up may not come down, but did, in this case, tragically." George Painter, the distinguished biographer of Marcel Proust, wrote: "I believe that Professor Meyers' Hemingway is one of the great biographies of our half-century, a masterwork in which true scholarship and creative art are so united as to become indistinguishable, and worthy to belong with Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Marchand's Byron or Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey. Ellmann's passing has been universally mourned; but one can at least feel that the world now has a new major biographer."

Selected bibliography on Jeffrey Meyers