Biography & Memoir

Philip’s Theater

Philip Roth drew and smudged and drew again the line between life and art, and with every book it became harder to distinguish between them.

April 8, 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

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

The Latest

Andrew O’Hagan

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

Elaine Blair

Averted Intimacies

Bette Howland’s work—full of companionable narrators and dry intelligence—is part of a recent wave of reissues that tests the reach of the literary canon.

April 29, 2021 issue

Daniel Mendelsohn

Words and Other Violence

Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

April 29, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

April 29, 2021 issue

James Gleick

Eclipsed by Fame

There’s a scientific story to tell about Stephen Hawking, but most of his later life served to conceal it.

April 29, 2021 issue

Joshua Hammer

A Ghost in the War Machine

Alexander Wolff’s turbulent family history centers on his grandfather, who fled the Nazis, and his father, who fought for them.

April 8, 2021 issue

Brandon M. Terry

The Two Titans of Civil Rights

“Both men ventured remarkably prophetic judgments about the ways that security state machinations and profligate war-making would prove utterly devastating to American life.”

March 6, 2021

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project.

March 25, 2021 issue

Darryl Pinckney

A Gift for the Long Game

Obama’s memoir of his first term is a story of aiming high and settling for what he could get.

March 25, 2021 issue

Anjan Sundaram

From Wars Abroad, to Peace at Home

“As I’ve grown older, I’m more aware of the psychological risks we must take,” says the conflict-zone reporter. “Writing about my father represented such a psychological risk.”

February 27, 2021