Michael Shelden

Michael Shelden (born 1951) is an American biographer and teacher, notable for his authorized biography of George Orwell, his history of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine, his controversial biography of Graham Greene, and his study of the last years of Mark Twain, Man in White. In March 2013 his Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill was published. In 2016 his biography of Herman Melville, Melville in Love, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins.

Born in Oklahoma, Shelden earned his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University in 1979. He then began teaching at Indiana State University, where he was promoted to Professor of English in 1989, and where he remains a full-time member of the faculty. For ten years he was a fiction critic for the Baltimore Sun, and from 1995 to 2007 he was a Features Writer for the Daily Telegraph of London, where he contributed several articles on notable figures in film, literature, and public affairs, including interviews with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi; American philosopher Richard Rorty; and feminist Betty Friedan. He also did one of the last interviews with actor Christopher Reeve. Shelden is married and the father of two daughters.

Shelden’s first book, George Orwell: Ten Animal Farm Letters to His Agent, Leonard Moore (1984), was an edited collection drawn from letters between Orwell and Moore that Shelden found at the Lilly Library and was the first to publicize. In 1989 he published his literary history Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, which covered the decade of the 1940s when Horizon was the most influential literary magazine in the United Kingdom. The book was based on a large collection of Connolly’s personal papers at the University of Tulsa, and on interviews with the magazine’s former editors and assistants, including Stephen Spender.

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