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Busy Times on the Marilyn Monroe Beat

In the 1980s, several of the reviewer’s editors deemed Monroe a shopworn subject. They, of course, misunderstood her perennial place in the American imagination.

Baron/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Marilyn Monroe in 1954. Baron/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
CARL ROLLYSON
CARL ROLLYSON

‘Hello, Norma Jeane: The Marilyn Monroe You Didn’t Know’
By Elisa Jordan
Applause, 438 pages

‘Life Among the Cannibals: The Life and Times of Marilyn Monroe 1962-2003’
By David Marshall
I Universe, 472 pages

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CARL ROLLYSON
CARL ROLLYSON

Mr. Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. He has published fourteen biographies and has written about biography for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington, Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Criterion, and other publications.

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