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Biography scholar Catherine Parke explores the history, theory and practice of biographical writing in this indispensable introduction to the genre. Surveying biographies from classical times to the present, she provides detailed readings of works by James Boswell, Richard Ellman and Gertrude Stein, who collectively represent the many varieties of modern biography. Individual chapters are devoted to peerless writers, Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf. Perfect for AP… More >>

Biography: Writing Lives

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Gregory Peck’s acting career has spanned six decades, during which the ruggedly handsome actor has played everything from a jaunty reporter to an angry Western gunfighter, an honorable lawyer to an obsessed sea captain, a priest to a World War II bomber pilot. To every role, he has lent a depth and intelligence that have made him a permanent American icon. In Gregory Peck: A Biography, Gary Fishgall meticulously recounts Peck’s influential life, revealing the effec… More >>

Gregory Peck : A Biography

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The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genêt. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance…. More >>

Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner

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Thomas Hardy’s professional career was a triumph of self-help. Born the son of a village stonemason and a cook, he made himself the best-known English author of his day. He began with a course of self-education. Leaving school at sixteen, he taught himself Greek, and read Greek and Latin poetry between five and eight every morning, before walking three miles to work in an architect’s office. His private life was less unusual. Like most people, Hardy had problems w… More >>

The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography

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Canadian-born Alice Munro has established herself as one of the world’s finest contemporary short story-writers. Since the publication of her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, she has tantalized a steadily expanding readership with her ability to present, “ordinary life so that it appears luminous, invested with a kind of magic.” In Alice Munro: A Double Life, the first full-length biography of Munro, Ross charts the development of Munro as a wife… More >>

Alice Munro: A Double Life

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This is a biography of Princess Margaret. Her life has been a balancing act; she has spent the greater part of her life torn between meeting the exacting standards of the monarchy and flouting its long-established conventions. She has spent her life surrounded by wealth and all its trappings, but, it appears, despite it all, she has led an unhappy life. She has been described as tragic, a royal maverick, a woman of conflict, and a princess without cause…. More >>

Princess Margaret: A Biography