Middlebrook, Diane Wood 1939-

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Middlebrook, Diane Wood 1939-

PERSONAL:

Born April 16, 1939, in Pocatello, ID; daughter of Thomas Isaac (a pharmacist) and Helen (a nurse) Wood; married Michael D. Shough, June, 1960 (annulled, 1963), married Jonathan Middlebrook, June 15, 1963 (annulled, 1972), married Carl Djerassi, June 21, 1985; children: (first marriage) Leah Wood. Education: University of Washington, Seattle, B.A., 1961; Yale University, M.A., 1962, Ph.D., 1968.

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA, and London, England. Office—1101 Green St., Apt. 1501, San Francisco, CA 94109-2012. Agent—Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Olympic College, Bremerton, WA, instructor in English, 1961-62; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, assistant professor, 1966-73, associate professor, 1974-83, professor of English, 1983-2001, Howard H. & Jessie T. Watkins University Professor, 1985-90, professor emerita, 2002—, director of Center for Research on Women, 1977-79, associate dean of undergraduate studies, 1980-82; full-time writer, 2002—. Kelsey Street Press, advisory board, 1994—; Chawyck-Healey LION (Literature Online), editorial board, 1997-99, Christ's Research Institute, advisory board, 2004—; developer of Stanford Book Salon (online book group), 2002—; member of panel on biography for Pulitzer Prize, 1995, and chair of nonfiction panel for National Book Award, 2004.

MEMBER:

International Association of University Professors of English, Modern Language Association of America, Authors Guild, PEN (England), Royal Society of Literature (fellow, 2004), Wallace Stevens Society, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Athenaeum Club (London, England), Commonwealth Club of California, Humanities West (San Francisco; member of advisory board, 1997—), California Classical Association, Biographers Club (London, England), Djerassi Resident Arts Program (trustee, 1980-96; chair of the board, 1994), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Woodrow Wilson fellowship, 1961; Albert S. Cook Memorial Prize for Poetry, Yale University, 1962; Academy of American Poets Prize, Yale University, 1965; Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Stanford University, 1977; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1982-83; Radcliffe College fellowship, 1982-83; Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, Stanford University, 1987; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1988-89; Rockefeller Study Center fellowship, 1990; National Book Award finalist, 1991, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, 1992, and Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal, 1992, all for Anne Sexton: A Biography; Lambda Foundation Literary Award finalist, 1999, for Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton; Litt.D., Kenyon College, 1999, University of Massachusetts—Darmouth, 2005; appointed honorary member of Christ's College, Cambridge, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1974.

Worlds into Words: Understanding Modern Poems, Stanford Alumni Association (Stanford, CA), 1978.

Gin Considered as a Demon (poems), Elysian Press (New York, NY), 1983.

(Editor) Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century (essays), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1985.

(Editor) Anne Sexton, Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1988.

Anne Sexton: A Biography, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1991.

Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

Author of introduction to The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998. Contributor to books, including Critical Essays on Anne Sexton, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1989, Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fishkin, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994, and The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, edited by Jo Gill, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2006. Contributor of poems, articles, and book reviews to periodicals, including Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, New York Times, Parnassus, Saturday Review, Southern Review, Times Literary Supplement, and Washington Post Book World.

SIDELIGHTS:

Diane Wood Middlebrook, a former English professor at Stanford University, is the author of a number of critically acclaimed biographies, including Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton and Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage. Middlebrook, an award-winning poet while a student at Yale University, made her publishing debut in 1974 with Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. Her 1991 work, Anne Sexton:A Biography, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who committed suicide in 1974, was a member of the often controversial Confessional poets, a group of writers who rose to prominence during the 1950s and early 1960s. "As one might expect, the biography of a poet who wrote intimately of illicit loves, masturbation, menstruation, drug addiction, incest and suicidal desires is an unveiled account of her personal life," noted Grace Schulman in the Nation. "Middlebrook spares us nothing. She looks hard at the depressed homemaker and mother from suburban Boston who, after a try on her life and a ‘rebirth at 29,’ wrote poetry to stave off the desire to die." According to New York Times Book Review contributor Katha Pollitt, "Middlebrook has written a wonderful book: just, balanced, insightful, complex in its sympathies and in its judgment of Sexton both as a person and as a writer. While she spares no detail of Sexton's pathology, her book is not, in any sense, what Joyce Carol Oates has called ‘a pathography.’ It is, rather, a deeply moving account of how one young woman—badly educated, marooned in the Boston suburbs and hampered at every turn by mental illness—managed to become, for a while, a poet of distinctive and original gifts."

In Suits Me Middlebrook looks at the life of Dorothy Tipton, a gender-bending jazz musician who successfully passed as a man for decades, playing under the name Billy Tipton. Incredibly, Tipton also married or lived with five women and raised several adopted sons; her true identity was discovered only after her death in 1989. According to Catharine R. Stimpson, writing in the Women's Review of Books, "Suits Me interweaves two narratives, that of Billy the musician and that of Billy the transvestite." The critic added, "Middlebrook meticulously and vividly traces Billy's career as one of the economically marginal, vagabond musicians who drove from small job to small job throughout the vast spaces of the American Midwest, Southwest, Mountain States and West Coast." Middlebrook's biography "is far from the exploitative tone its tabloid-ready ingredients might suggest," remarked Joe E. Jeffreys in the Lambda Book Report. "A solidly researched and well written book, Suits Me captures both its subject and the greater world around her while the biography thankfully provides insightful multi-faceted answers to its many and frequently prickly questions."

Middlebrook examines the literary and romantic relationship of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in Her Husband. Though some Plath biographers have criticized Hughes, believing that he failed to curb Plath's self-destructive tendencies that eventually led to her suicide, "Middlebrook treads a measured path in her interpretation of the marriage, stressing the ways in which it fostered poetic creativity in both partners," noted a contributor in the Economist. As Middlebrook told Library Journal interviewer Rachel Collins, Plath and Hughes "were still turning into artists when they met, … and their partnership was a success because of their ability to promote in each other such eloquence." Her Husband received strong reviews; in the words of Booklist contributor Donna Seaman, Middlebrook "presents the most balanced, most literary and interpretatively astute, and best-written analysis yet of the saga of" the two poets. "Fluidly written and developed with psychological acuity, the work is a sympathetically balanced assessment of two lives that flamed brightly with the incandescent fire of creative genius," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Advocate, June 9, 1998, Robert Plunket, review of Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, p. 73.

Booklist, May 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Suits Me, p. 1481; October 15, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, p. 375.

Contemporary Literature, fall, 1992, Angela Reich, review of Anne Sexton: A Biography, p. 556.

Contemporary Review, February, 2005, Richard Whittington-Egan, "Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—a Marriage Examined," p. 556.

Economist, March 6, 1999, "Musical Crossovers," review of Suits Me, p. 80; November 29, 2003, "Writings on a Marriage," p. 81.

Entertainment Weekly, July 10, 1998, David Hajdu, "Piano Man?," p. 66; October 17, 2003, Mark Harris, review of Her Husband, p. 87

Financial Times, January 23, 1999, Joan Smith, "Gender-bending Played to the Hilt," p. 6.

Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, October, 2006, Richard P. Sugg and Beverly Shinn, "Ted Hughes's Archetypal Marriage with Sylvia Plath," p. 63.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2003, review of Her Husband, p. 1060.

Lambda Book Report, September, 1998, Joe E. Jeffreys, review of Suits Me, p. 19.

Library Journal, April 15, 1998, Lisa N. Johnston, review of Suits Me, p. 38; September 1, 2003, Rachel Collins, "Literary Chemistry," p. 38, and review of Her Husband, p. 167.

Nation, September 23, 1991, Grace Schulman, review of Anne Sexton, p. 342.

National Review, April 13, 1992, Selden Rodman, review of Anne Sexton, p. 57.

New Leader, February 10, 1992, Phoebe Pettingell, review of Anne Sexton, p. 17.

Newsweek, October 20, 2003, Mark Miller, "Rethinking a Marriage from Hell," p. 57.

New York Times, June 2, 1998, Dinitia Smith, "One False Note in a Musician's Life."

New York Times Book Review, August 18, 1991, Katha Pollitt, "The Death Is Not the Life," review of Anne Sexton; June 28, 1998, Holly Brubach, "Swing Time."

Ploughshares, fall, 1992, James Carroll, review of Anne Sexton.

Publishers Weekly, July 5, 1991, review of Anne Sexton, p. 50; March 30, 1998, review of Suits Me, p. 54; August 11, 2003, review of Her Husband, p. 266.

Time, December 1, 2003, Lev Grossman, "In the Orbit of Genius," review of Her Husband, p. 112.

Women's Review of Books, September, 1998, Catharine R. Stimpson, review of Suits Me, p. 1.