Who Owns the Dead? Biography, Archives, and Ethics

Paper on the complex tensions that can develop between how biographers portray persons after their deaths, and how their surviving relatives and the public wish them to be portrayed. Cites the examples of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and William Alexander Percy. Presented at Southern Sources: A Symposium Celebrating Seventy-Five Years of the Southern Historical Collection, 18-19 March 2005 in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill