Marilyn

50 years ago this week, the world awoke to the death of Marilyn Monroe. At her death she was already one of the most well known Americans of the twentieth century. In death she would become even more famous. Steeped in mythology and contradiction, she would become a symbol of her times; the lens of her own dysfunction giving her a unique ken on post-war America. Now historian Lois Banner, in her new biography Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox, that Maureen Dowd talked about this past Sunday, gives us a deep and complicated woman, whose life would reflect many aspect of our society back upon us. My conversation with Lois Banner: