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

Audrey Wollen

Not to Be

A Matter of Death and Life presents the closing scenes of a long marriage as both an informal diary and an instructive text.

November 4, 2021 issue

Assaf Sharon

‘This Obstinate Little Man’

Tom Segev’s biography of David Ben-Gurion depicts a man who intended to become a Zionist Lenin but ended up “an Israeli King Lear.”

November 4, 2021 issue

Frances Wilson

The Double Bookkeeper

A new biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new edition of her journals give us a personal history of twentieth-century sexual control, of lives lived not in the closet but in the cellar.

November 4, 2021 issue

Marisa Mazria Katz

Calling Grandma

“Rouhi yamama, you know you are my favorite.” These endearments, even when they sloshed in her mouth like the ice cubes in her drink, always made my troubles melt away.

October 2, 2021

Ben Lerner

The Storyteller

W.G. Sebald’s books suggest that we are powerless to remember adequately and powerless to forget.

October 21, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Hollywood’s Master Builder

The African-American architect Paul R. Williams channeled the glamorous but breezy spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood in designs that allowed his clients and the public to imagine themselves in fantasies akin to those spun out by the great movie studios.

October 21, 2021 issue

Gregory Hays

A Mind in Pain

For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate.

October 21, 2021 issue

Ursula Lindsey

In the Fire

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi fearlessly told unpleasant truths about discrimination against women in Arab countries.

October 21, 2021 issue

Clare Bucknell

Wits’ End

Pat Rogers’s new book is salutary because it gives us a modern sense of Alexander Pope, a figure usually portrayed as ultra-traditional.

October 21, 2021 issue

Ruth Franklin

‘The Lucky Ones’

Several groundbreaking new books chronicle the fate of the quarter-million or so Polish Jews who evaded Hitler only to wind up in the hands of Stalin.

October 21, 2021 issue