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Leslie Brody

Biography

Leslie Brody

Leslie Brody is a biographer, playwright and professor of creative writing. She adapted HARRIET THE SPY for the stage in 1988 and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a PEN America award for creative nonfiction. She has been an on-staff book columnist for Elle magazine. She lives in Redlands, California.

Leslie Brody

Books by Leslie Brody

Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy
by Leslie Brody - Biography, Nonfiction

HARRIET THE SPY's beloved antiheroine is erratic, unsentimental and endearing --- very much like the woman who created her, Louise Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh was raised in segregated Memphis, but she soon escaped her cloistered world and headed for New York, where her expanded milieu stretched from the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village to the art world of postwar Europe, and her circle of friends included members of the avant-garde like Maurice Sendak and Lorraine Hansberry. As a children's author and a lesbian, Fitzhugh was often pressured to disguise her true nature. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE tells the story of her hidden life and of the creation of her masterpiece, which remains long after her death as a testament to the complicated relationship between truth, secrecy and individualism.