ALEXANDER, Paul 1955-

PERSONAL: Born 1955.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, John Wiley & Sons, 111 River St., Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774.

CAREER: Writer, 1985—. Political journalist, beginning in the 1990s; Hoover Institution fellow and co-host of WABC radio program Batchelor and Alexander.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1985.

Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath, Viking (New York, NY), 1991.

Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean, Viking (New York, NY), 1994.

Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy's Millions, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Salinger: A Biography, Renaissance Books (Los Angeles, CA), 1999.

Man of the People: The Life of John McCain, John Wiley & Sons (Hoboken, NJ), 2003.

(And director) Edge (play), produced Off-Broadway, 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Nation, New York, New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A screenplay adapted from Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath.

SIDELIGHTS: Paul Alexander has written several biographical studies of notable artists and performers, including the first full-length biography of novelist J. D. Salinger. He has also written and directed a play about poet Sylvia Plath. He also became a political journalist during the 1990s and wrote a biography of politician John McCain.

Among Alexander's early works is Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath, which considers the life and work of the confessional poet who killed herself in 1962. Rough Magic focuses on Plath's marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, a relationship that Alexander contends proved unsatisfying, even violent, and he speculates that Hughes might have contributed significantly to Plath's suicide. M. C. Dalton, writing in the Bloomsbury Review, declared that Alexander's book "is startling in the extent to which it attacks Hughes." Dalton added, though, that the biography "does attempt to humanize its subject."

In the one-person play Edge, Alexander dramatizes the last hours of Plath's life, again accentuating her harsh treatment by Hughes, as well as abuse she suffered from her own father. The monologue was written for Angelica Torn, the daughter of actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, who received uniformly strong reviews for her performances. The Plath character talks bitterly about events in her life and shows how she asphyxiated herself with a gas oven. Some critics were dismayed by the play's emphasis on placing blame and its neglect of Plath's writings. In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck observed, "In her works, Plath was able to provide her confessionals with artistry and poetry; here, she comes across as just a whiner." Justin Glanville wrote in the Gwinnett Daily Post that the play had "a voyeuristic feel, making it compelling in a car-wreck kind of way, but unsavory because it seems to wallow in Plath's misery." Lyn Gardner warned in the Guardian Unlimited, "Alexander's Sylvia is a most unreliable narrator…. Unless you know something of her life, you would take every word she says as gospel."

Other reviewers accepted Alexander's approach to Plath's story. CurtainUp's Les Gutman said of the author, "His writing here is clear, informative and a good deal funnier than one might expect…. His skillful weaving of frequently ironic arcs in Ms. Plath's life bespeaks his immersion in his subject." Writing for Variety, Marilyn Stasio commented, "There are no tears, no bathos and no whining from either actress or playwright, just a steely determination to prove Plath 'a strong, resilient woman' who took her own life because she had the reason—and the right—to do so."

Alexander is also the author of Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean. Here he recounts the life of the celebrated young actor whose death in 1955 sparked a cult following. In the volume Alexander suggests that Dean's onscreen projection of vulnerability and sensitivity was largely derived from his undisclosed homosexuality. Molly Haskell, writing in the New York Times Book Review, acknowledged Boulevard of Broken Dreams as "the first biography of Dean to center on the star's sexuality," but she concluded that the volume was more titillating than illuminating. Entertainment Weekly reviewer L. S. Klepp proclaimed the Dean biography "steamy and soggy," while London Times reviewer Jonathan Coe noted that Boulevard of Broken Dreams "is pitched at an intelligent audience and is relatively free of gushing hagiography."

When Alexander penned a biography of reclusive fiction writer J. D. Salinger, who is best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, he succeeded in publishing the first full-length biography of Salinger. An earlier attempt by Ian Hamilton was aborted when Salinger successfully sued to keep his letters from being published. Reviewers felt that the resulting limitations also hurt Alexander's biography. Commenting in Library Journal, Wilda Williams said that the work has a "fuzziness and skimpy feel" but nevertheless offers "an eerie portrait of an increasingly eccentric writer." Alexander shows the elderly Salinger playing hermit as a way to stimulate public interest and exhibiting a strange interest in very young women. According to the Boston Globe's Diane White, these ideas were "based on the slimmest of evidence." Still, she found the book to be "as good a biography of Salinger as we're likely to get for a while…. [Alexander]'s succeeded in placing Salinger in the context of his times, and in finding in the author's life seeds of inspiration for his fiction."

A very public existence is the subject of Alexander's Man of the People: The Life of John McCain. Covering all of the phases of the Republican senator's life—his upbringing, service in the navy, prisoner-of-war experience in Vietnam, congressional career, and run for the presidency—Alexander presents an admiring picture of McCain. According to Karl Helicher in Library Journal, the book is "an informative, politically astute biography," but it is unlikely to provide more insight than the two autobiographies McCain had published. McCain's skill at autobiography was also mentioned by a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who wrote of Alexander's "populist adulation of his subject" and admired Alexander's description of McCain's presidential campaign, calling it "sharp, richly detailed journalism."

Among Alexander's other publications is Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy's Millions, which details the various factions that vied for portions of the estate and property that remained after the demise of the wealthy, unabashedly commercial artist Andy Warhol.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Bloomsbury Review, June, 1992, M. C. Dalton, review of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath, p. 21.

Boston Globe, September 9, 1999, Diane White, "Biography Probes the Mystery of J. D. Salinger," p. E2.

Hollywood Reporter, August 22, 2003, Frank Scheck, review of Edge, p. 40.

Library Journal, August, 1999, Wilda Williams, review of Salinger: A Biography, p. 88; November 15, 2002, Karl Helicher, review of Man of the People: The Life of John McCain, p. 79.

New Yorker, August 11, 2003, Hilton Als, "Mayhem and Madness," p. 77.

New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1991, E. Frank, "A Long Romance with Death," p. 14; August 7, 1994, Molly Haskell, "Outing James Dean," pp. 11-12.

Publishers Weekly, October 14, 2002, review of Man of the People, p. 74.

Times (London, England), August 14, 1994, Jonathan Coe, review of Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean, p. 5.

Variety, August 4, 2003, Marilyn Stasio, review of Edge, p. 29.

Washington Post, June 29, 1999, Wendy Law-Yone, "J. D. Salinger: From Literary Lion to Hermit Crab," p. C5.

online

CurtainUp, http://www.curtainup.com/ (February 12, 2004), Les Gutman, review of Edge.

Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ (January 13, 2004), Lyn Gardner, review of Edge.

Gwinnett Daily Post, http://gwinnettdailyonline.com/GDP/archive/ (February 12, 2004), Justin Glanville, "Edge Revives the Ghost of Sylvia Plath—Again."

nytheatre.com, http://nytheatre.com/nytheatre/ (July 22, 2003), RIK and Julie Congress, review of Edge.*