The New York Public Library Celebrates Franklin Delano Roosevelt: FDR, Eleanor, Lucy: A Great President, A Brilliant Political Marriage, A Tragic Love Affair

November 11, 2010

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Authors Hazel Rowley and Ellen Feldman, writers in residence at The New York Public Library's Allen Room, will present FDR, Eleanor, Lucy:  A Great President, A Brilliant Political Marriage, A Tragic Love Affair, a wide-ranging conversation about FDR’s women.  In Feldman’s novel, Lucy, we see Franklin through the eyes of Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the woman often said to be the love of FDR’s life.  In her new biographical account of the Roosevelt partnership, Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, Rowley describes the remarkable courage and lack of convention – private and public – that kept FDR and Eleanor together.

Feldman and Rowley, who greatly admire each other’s work, will discuss their different perspectives, as well as fiction versus biography. 

Hazel Rowley is the author of the newly released Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage -  which Farrar, Straus and Giroux are bringing out in November 2010.  Her previous books are Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (HarperCollins, 2005), Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Holt, 2001), and Christina Stead: A Biography (Holt, 1995).   Tête-à-Tête has been translated into fourteen languages. Richard Wright was a Washington Post Best Book.  Christina Stead won the Banjo prize, Australia’s most prestigious prize for Nonfiction, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Ellen Feldman is a 2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.  In addition to Lucy, (Norton, 2003) which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called a “touching and sensitive re-imagination of the emotional entanglements of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd,” she is the author of Scottsboro, (Norton, 2008) which was shortlisted for the U.K.’s prestigious Orange Prize in 2009, and The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, (Norton, 2005)  a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a New York Public Library “New, Old, and Retold” selection, and translated into eight languages.