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Biography & Memoir

For our print subscribers: Deliveries of mail during the holidays from an overwhelmed US Postal Service have been inordinately slow. Our latest issue—the January 14 issue—was mailed on December 28. We know that some subscribers have still not received their issues and we hope and expect the issues to be delivered to everyone soon. Read the January 14 issue here.

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

Caroline Fraser

The Representative

Ilhan Omar’s ability to survive, even thrive, under chaotic conditions appears to have been a harbinger of a taste for political battle.

November 19, 2020 issue

Maggie Doherty

Bella Abzug’s Fight for a Broader Feminism

On the feisty congresswoman’s posthumous return to the spotlight.

November 5, 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

Mark Mazower

Eric Hobsbawm: Clear, Inclusive, Lasting

Eric Hobsbawm’s works themselves are his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography?

July 23, 2020 issue

Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York City, 2019

Darryl Pinckney

Escaping Blackness

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s ‘Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race’

March 26, 2020 issue

Cathleen Schine

It Had to Be Her

Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both.

January 16, 2020 issue

Edward Snowden; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Jonathan Lethem

Snowden in the Labyrinth

Edward Snowden’s ‘Permanent Record’

October 24, 2019 issue

The Latest

Benjamin Moser

Desperately Not Seeking Susan

“The strong feelings about Sontag were exactly what I dreaded when I was first asked to do the biography. If I’d cared too much about that, I couldn’t have written it.”

January 2, 2021

Jenny Uglow

The Imperial Gardener

How Joseph Banks made the royal garden at Kew the most outstanding botanical collection in the world.

January 14, 2021 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

January 14, 2021 issue

Susan Tallman

Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone

How is it that the artist, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons?

January 14, 2021 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Modernist, Humanist, Compromised Faulkner

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

January 14, 2021 issue

Claire Messud

Alison Lurie (1926–2020)

The late novelist and critic was a brilliant deflator of pretension and a compassionate friend.

January 14, 2021 issue

J. Hoberman

Revenge of the Has-Been

Mank is no documentary but a semifactual yarn that burnishes the legend of the showboat, nasty wit, and habitual roisterer who wrote Citizen Kane.

January 14, 2021 issue