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

Michael Kazin

Ending the Kennedy Romance

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.

May 27, 2021 issue

Rachel Polonsky

Russian Metamorphoses

Teffi’s supernatural tales ask what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories.

May 27, 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

Sarah Blackwood

Children’s Lib!

A new biography of Louise Fitzhugh, creator of Harriet the Spy, recovers her queer, radical life.

May 13, 2021 issue

John Banville

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

May 13, 2021 issue

Ange Mlinko

‘And You Give Yourself Away’

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s obsession with the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chronaill amounts to a search for second sight, a vision to deepen the reality of her own life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Planning an Aryan Paradise

The Nazis had ambitious plans for reshaping Norwegian architecture and infrastructure.

May 13, 2021 issue

Andrew Delbanco

Kubrick’s Human Comedy

Though Stanley Kubrick was often characterized as icy, his life and filmography reveal that his heart was as large as his mind.

May 13, 2021 issue

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