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Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that t…
In A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton, 2016), freelance journalist Steve Kemper details the adventurous, …
"Women's history, if they had any, consisted in their being beautiful enough to become events in male lives," the feminist academic Carolyn R. Heilbru…
What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person's fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg's…
"There still exists little organized sense of what a woman's biography or autobiography should look like," Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 class…
On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to …
As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one enc…
As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),"The most extraordinary fashion designer of …
Biography is, both etymologically and in its conventional forms, the writing of a life. But what is the role of place within that? And how do the stor…
One of the fundamental functions of biography is the preservation of stories. But it also acts to resurrect the stories that may have fallen from view…
There was once a notion that black people had no meaningful history. It's a notion Dorothy Porter Wesley spent her entire career debunking. Through he…
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around education…
If group biography is one of the exciting new trends in life-writing (and some say it is), Karen Abbott- the historian, not to be confused with the no…
"Why write the biography of a nobody?" That is the question with which Melanie C. Hawthorne begins Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Lif…
Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in…
Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio is a book with a big mission: to write inventively abo…
In America, biographies of Presidents and First Ladies are a staple of the genre, but the relationship that exists between the two receives surprising…
Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person…
It's almost a cliché by now to say that we need stories of strong women, but that doesn't lessen the fact that we do. And biography is a field unique…
There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It's a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degre…
In the field of children's programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame …
John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke wr…
It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly p…
One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel.…