Terry Teachout, drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the author of acclaimed biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H. L. Mencken, is working simultaneously on three creative projects—each in a different medium. In this series of public presentations, he’ll show how a biography, an opera libretto, and a play move from conception to completion.

 

Event 1--Writing a Biography

 

Teachout started writing his sixth book, Black Beauty: A Life of Duke Ellington, in the spring of 2010. The finished manuscript is due in 2013. What happens between now and then? In this exclusive progress report on the writing of Black Beauty, Teachout takes you inside his workshop and tells the inside story of how he is sculpting the public and private lives of a great artist into a large-scale narrative biography.