Francine du Plessix Gray on Revising Historical Figures<br />The Graduate Center, CUNY - The Graduate Center, CUNY<br />In her long and varied writing career, novelist Francine du Plessix Gray <br />has been a fascinating cultural figure. She was born in Warsaw, spent <br />her childhood in Paris, and grew up in New York. Regarded as a writer's<br /> writer notable for her distinguished personal history and freewheeling<br /> candor, she is a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and the author of more than a dozen volumes of fiction and nonfiction, including her latest historical novel, The Queen's Lover; biographies of the Marquis de Sade and Simone Weil; and the memoir Them,<br /> about her mother (Tatiana Yakoleva, onetime lover and muse of the <br />Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky) and her step-father (Alexander <br />Liberman, legendary editorial director of Conde Nast).<br /><br />Extraordinary Lives explores great minds that have shaped our cultural <br />landscape. In this series, Graduate Center President Bill Kelly has <br />one-on-one conversations with a diverse group of vital contemporary <br />thinkers, artists, and visionaries who have indelibly impacted the <br />fields in which they work. Previous participants have included Patti <br />Smith, Ira Glass, Chuck Close, and Danny Meyer.
