Biography & Memoir

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

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

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

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

The Latest

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

Anjan Sundaram

No Direction Home

My father chose to pursue a better life for our family through migration, without ever settling and putting down roots. Now, that is my inheritance.

February 23, 2021

Molly Jong-Fast

What the FBI Had on Grandpa

J. Edgar Hoover thought Howard Fast was an un-American menace. To my family, he was just a menace, period. But his file tells a different story.

February 21, 2021

Brandon M. Terry

What Dignity Demands

A new book persuasively places Malcolm X and Martin Luther King at the center of each other’s most dramatic transformations.

March 11, 2021 issue

Colin Thubron

Escape from Fortress Crete

Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general in the mountains of Greece during World War II. Was it worth it?

March 11, 2021 issue

Frederic Wehrey

The Lost Rivers of Owens Valley

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct. And it is a history in which my own family played a part.

February 16, 2021

Jed Perl

Cubism’s Poet

Writer, painter, and a close friend of Picasso, Max Jacob was part of the glory of interwar bohemian Paris.

February 25, 2021 issue

Hermione Lee

The Wanderer

Jan Morris wrote that her constant travels were ‘an outer expression of my inner journey,’ ‘fired by patriotism, inhibited by upbringing, inexhaustibly in love.’

February 25, 2021 issue

Frances Wilson

A Family Romance

While Sybille Bedford’s books were autobiographical, her life was novelistic.

February 25, 2021 issue

Daphne Merkin

‘A Very Lonely Business’

“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?

February 11, 2021 issue