Biography Archive

The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale - James Atlas and I were at Harvard at the same time and surely took courses together and sat at the same table in the special library for graduate students and

The Soloist - It starts as a newspaper story right out of a 1930s movie. Newspaper columnist hurries back to the office. On the way, he sees a middle-aged African-American man, in rags, playing

The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones - You don’t care about The Rolling Stones? Read this book anyway. Were you sentient when Kennedy was assassinated? Then you watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and, later, the

The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End - I read somewhere that it is good to greet each day with an acknowledgment that death awaits you --- and then banish the thought and live your day. Some mornings

The Wilder Shores of Love: The Exotic True Life Stories of Isabel Burton, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby and Isabelle Eberhardt - Strong women. It's a big category. Joni Mitchell at the Newport Folk Festival is the first and easiest honoree. The women of Kansas, who ignored deliberately misleading ads to vote,

Tina Brown: “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil” - Before I read The Diana Chronicles, I thought I knew enough about the life and death of the “People’s Princess” to be a runner-up on a quiz show. And so,

Tina Brown: The Diana Chronicles - For most writers starting out on a Diana book in 2005 would mean cutting and pasting from other books. But Tina Brown had been editor of the Tatler. She's interviewed

Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything - Sometimes what you want most from a book is to be able to sit back in a comfortable chair, smokes and drinks and snacks near at hand, and have someone

Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde - Dorothy "Dolly" Wilde was five years old when her uncle Oscar died in 1900 at the age of 46. But if anyone in the Wilde clan inherited his wit ---

Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai - In 1973, Leonard Cohen was 39. Living on Hydra, with Suzanne and their child, he was a cult favorite --- in France, it was said that if a girl had

Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives - Until 2013, there was a separate category for female country singers. Now the award is gender-free. And for the first time, all of the nominees were female. You would not