Diane Middlebrook, Professor Emerita Primary Office:
Office Hours:
Office Phone: At Stanford Since: 1966 Email: dwm@stanford.edu | 
From 1966-2001, Diane Middlebrook was a member of the Stanford English Department, where she taught a range of literature courses, specializing in poetry and poetics. She received her college degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, and her PhD from Yale University. In the 1980s she began writing biography. Her book Anne Sexton, A Biography (1991) was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Its controversial use of psychiatric materials obtained from one of Anne Sexton’s doctors, unexpectedly, popular, spent eight weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. Her biography of a cross-dressing jazz musician (Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, 1998) was a finalist for the Lambda Foundation Literary Award, which honors work in gay and lesbian history. Middlebrook’s latest book is a biography of the brief, stormy, and enormously productive relationship of the English writer Ted Hughes and the American writer Sylvia Plath, titled Her Husband: Hughes & Plath, a Marriage (2003). It was a best seller in the Los Angeles Times and a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in Non-fiction, 2004. In 2006, the French translation of Her Husband (Son Mari, published by Phebus), won the Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Essai), best non-fiction book by a foreigner; previous winners were Colm Toibin and Salman Rushdie. Her current project is a biography of the Roman poet Ovid, to be published by Viking Press in 2008.
Middlebrook lives with her husband Carl Djerassi in San Francisco and London. In 2004, she served as Chair of the Panel on Non-Fiction for the National Book Award in the USA. In London she was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was made Visiting Professor at University College London, 2007-2012. She is also an Honorary Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her website can be found at www.DianeMiddlebrook.com, with a full resume at the link to Author.
Links: Middlebrook Web Site |