TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - A best-selling biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt will give a talk on Wednesday, Feb. 6 at 7:30 p.m. in the Ferguson Theater on The University of Alabama campus, as part of UA’s continuing Bankhead Lecture Series. Admission is free, and the public is invited.

The talk, by Dr. Blanche Wiesen Cook, distinguished professor of history and women’s studies at the John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is entitled “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Challenge of Biography.”

Cook’s most recent book, bestseller “Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two,” was published by Viking Penguin in July 1999; the Penguin paperback was published in June 2000. She is now writing “Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Three.”

In Cook’s latest biography, Roosevelt is portrayed as the most important woman in American political history: an activist, a person of great independence of spirit, a teacher, writer and crusader for social justice and human rights worldwide.

In 1992, Cook’s “Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography” was published, and it remained on the The New York Times bestseller list for three months and received many awards, including the 1992 Biography Prize from The Los Angeles Times, and the Lambda Literary Award.

Cook writes frequent reviews and columns for many newspapers and periodi­cals and appears frequently on such television programs as The Today Show, Good Morning America, C-Span's Booknotes, and MacNeil/Lehrer, where she participated in the joint PBS-NBC coverage of the 1992 Democratic National Convention. In 1996, Cook was chosen as Scholar of the Year by the New York State Council on the Humanities.

In 1982, the Bankhead family established the Bankhead Endowment Fund to further the interests of historical research and scholarly activity within the history department in UA’s College of Arts and Sciences. In recent years, the family expanded the original commission to bring visiting lecturers to campus and to further promote the teaching and study of history.