Biography & Memoir

In the Act of Living

Hermione Lee, in her new biography of Tom Stoppard, has given shape to his quest for meaning, consciousness, history, and goodness.

April 29, 2021 issue

Margaret Eby

The Gourmand’s Way

Along with his celebration of American vernacular cooking, James Beard brought playfulness into the kitchen. But an ethical opportunism is part of his legacy and the culture he helped create.

June 10, 2021 issue

Alan Hollinghurst

A Snob’s Progress

A new edition of Henry “Chips” Channon’s diaries gives fascinating glimpses of homosocial desire in a hectic narrative of aristocratic and political life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Brenda Wineapple

A Posthumous Life

The great-grandson of a president and the grandson of another, Henry Adams struggled to break free of a personal history intimately tied to that of the country.

April 8, 2021 issue

Brandon M. Terry

Malcolm’s Ministry

Malcolm X’s dramatic life, and his insistence that the most disadvantaged play a part in their own emancipation, exert a strong pull on his many biographers.

February 25, 2021 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Awful But Joyful

In her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen asks us neither to condemn nor to forgive—only to look.

March 25, 2021 issue

Greil Marcus

The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

December 3, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

The Latest

Anahid Nersessian

The Escape Artist

Richard Zenith takes a panoramic approach to Fernando Pessoa’s biography, setting the writer’s orderly, insular way of life against the riotous backdrop of the early twentieth century.

October 7, 2021 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Dickens’s Multitudes

Two new books examine the novelist who produced some of the greatest multivoiced fiction in all of English literature.

October 7, 2021 issue

Robyn Creswell

On the Road

The Book of Travels, Hanna Diyab’s memoir of his Mediterranean adventures, is a mixture of clear-eyed observation and wide-eyed innocence.

October 7, 2021 issue

Caroline Fraser

Where Sheep May Safely Graze

A cri de coeur against our current state of abject agricultural illiteracy, James Rebanks’s new book may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

October 7, 2021 issue

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Mogul of Mystery

Robert Maxwell’s improbable transformation from yeshiva boy to British media baron and outrageous swindler.

October 7, 2021 issue

Stephen Kinzer

Ortega in His Labyrinth

Nicaragua’s president has created an insular dynastic tyranny that eerily resembles the one against which he fought decades ago.

September 23, 2021 issue

Adam Kirsch

Turbulent Music, Turbulent Life

Lewis Lockwood’s survey of the history of Beethoven biography shows that our understanding of the music has always been profoundly shaped by the stories we tell about the man.

September 23, 2021 issue

James Romm

A Journey into Homer’s World

The classicist Milman Parry’s quest for the sources of Homeric epic led him in the 1930s to the Yugoslavian bards who sang in coffeehouses and bars much as he imagined Homer did.

September 23, 2021 issue

John Banville

An Affair to Remember

Julia Parry has mined a trove of inherited letters to write her marvelous, gently elegiac book about the love affair between Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House.

September 23, 2021 issue