Biography & Autobiography - Historical

Michael Reynolds was the supreme biographer of Ernest Hemingway. HBO's film concentrates on Hemingway's years with his third wife, the adventurous journalist Martha Gellhorn. This book brings together Reynolds's Hemingway: The 1930s and Hemingway: The Final Years.Author: Michael ReynoldsISBN-10: 0393343200ISBN-13: 9780393343205Publisher: W. W. Norton...

Mary S. Lovell brilliantly recounts the triumphant political and military campaigns, domestic tragedies, happy marriages, and disastrous unions throughout generations of Churchills.The first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) was a soldier of such genius that a lavish palace, Blenheim, was built to honor his triumphs....

Richard L. Harris includes in this updated edition of Death of a Revolutionary new revelations about Che's revolutionary legacy and discusses the renewed interest in his revolutionary ideas stimulated by the election of leftist governments throughout Latin America. In response to this growing resurgence...

In this bold, revisionist biography, distinguished historian John Patrick Diggins shows that Ronald Reagan, in his distrust of big government, his pursuit of libertarian ideals, and his negotiations with Gorbachev, was a far more active and sophisticated president than we previously knew. Affirming the...

Drawing on new primary sources, this biography is the first to detail the influence of British history, literature, and culture--in particular, the ideas of Winston Churchill--on America's thirty-fifth president. For the first time we trace the friendships and forces that led to the White...

The seminal biography of one of America's towering, enigmatic figures. From his boyhood in Ohio to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the crucial years of Reconstruction, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography traces the entire arc of Grant's life (1822-1885). "A...

In May 1995, a seven-year-old Tibetan boy and his family were taken from their home by Chinese security forces. They have not been seen since. The boy's devotees believe him to be the eleventh incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second most important incarnation...

Michael Reynolds discovered the truth about Hemingway's activities during the war years, which included running a counterintelligence operation in Havana. The postwar period was the most productive of Hemingway's writing life, when he authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea and...

Their marriage was both improbable and inevitable. Isabel Arundell was a schoolgirl, the scion of England's most distinguished Catholic family. When she first saw him while walking at a seaside resort, Richard Burton had already made his mark as a linguist (he was fluent...

Ralph Bunche was instrumental -- sometimes at great personal risk -- in finding peaceful solutions to incendiary conflicts around the world, while at the same time he was never far from the realities of racial prejudice. Bunche rose from modest circumstances to become the...

Jean H. Baker tells the compelling story of four generations of an American family and its most celebrated member, the high-minded, eloquent, and perennial also-ran icon of liberal politics, Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900-1965). The Stevensons is also a book about the relationship of...

In the tumultuous years before the Civil War, a young white woman from a Quaker background came to embody commitment to the cause of antislavery and equal rights for black people. Abby Kelley became the abolitionist movement's chief money-raiser and organizer and its most...

Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman republic, their lives still haunt us as examples of how the hunger for personal power can overwhelm collective politics, how the...

When Charles became involved in war with Puritan Scotland, popular hatred of Henrietta's Catholicism roused Parliament to fury. As the opposition party embraced new values of liberty and republicanism--the blueprint for the American War of Independence and the French Revolution--Charles's fears for his wife's...

Brooklyn-born Jennie Jerome married into the British aristocracy in 1874, after a three-day romance. She became Lady Randolph Churchill, wife of a maverick politician and mother of the most famous British statesman of the century. Jennie Churchill was not merely the most talked about...

The Norton edition of Ulrich Wilcken's distinguished biography has made available for almost three decades a classic study enhanced with a modern scholars notes, bibliography, and introduction to Alexander studies. Alexander the Great as an empire-conqueror continues to capture the imagination, but the spread...

For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband's encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary as she...

Based on hours of unprecedented interviews with members of the Bush family, The Bushes tells the inside story of the unique dynasty at the heart of American power. As well as laying out the secretive family's inner workings, this intimate and fascinating group portrait...

From the bestselling author of Stalin and The Last Tsar comes The Rasputin File, a remarkable biography of the mystical monk and bizarre philanderer whose role in the demise of the Romanovs and the start of the revolution can only now be fully known....

A swashbuckling Texan, a teller of tall tales, a womanizer, and a renegade, Fred Cuny spent his life in countries rent by war, famine, and natural disasters, saving many thousands of lives through his innovative and sometimes controversial methods of relief work. Cuny earned...

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America....

Jan Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer--and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University--her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at...

Not since Bruce Catton has there been such an absorbing and exciting biography of Ulysses S. Grant. "Grant is a mystery to me," said William Tecumseh Sherman, "and I believe he is a mystery to himself." Geoffrey Perret's account offers new insights into Grant...

"Jefferson aspired beyond the ambition of a nationality, and embraced in his view the whole future of man."--Henry Adams Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) left a vast literary legacy in the form of journal entries, notes, addresses, and seventy thousand letters. This extraordinary volume represents many...

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford's outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry...

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that...

This definitive biography of one of the world's greatest comedians unflinchingly yet affectionately uncovers the man behind the cigar. Here is the amazing career of the man the world recognized as Groucho: the improbable disasters of the vaudeville years; the Marx Brothers, an act...

"A valuable service . . . serious, entertaining, provocative and distinctive." --Cleveland Plain Dealer In the fifty years since his suicide amid the ruins of Berlin, Adolf Hitler has been the subject of more biographies than any comparable figure of our time--and at the...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - "Colonel Roosevelt is compelling reading, and [Edmund] Morris is a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level. . . . A moving, beautifully rendered account."--Fred Kaplan, The Washington Post...

Legend has tended to preserve Henry James as The Master that Joseph Conrad called him, a rather long-winded Olympian given to great utterances on the art of fiction and the writing of profound psychological studies. The real-life figure revealed in these letters is more...

The autobiography of Cuba's finest poet, whose condemnation by the Castro regime became a cause celebre. Intellectuals alienated from the Castro government who have told their stories tend to sound spiteful and illiberal, like Cabrera Infante; Padilla takes pains to do better. His style...

In 1952, soon after her arrival in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop asked her new Brazilian friends which of their country's books she should read. They recommended Minha Vida de Menina - a diary kept by a young girl who lived in a mining town at...

On August 4, 1940, an unassuming American journalist named Varian Fry made his way to Marseilles, France, carrying in his pockets the names of approximately two hundred artists and intellectuals - all enemies of the new Nazi regime. As a volunteer for the Emergency...

The dramatic story of a founding father, his illegitimate son, and the tragedy of their conflict during the American Revolution--from the acclaimed author of The Lincolns. Ben Franklin is the most lovable of America's founding fathers. His wit, his charm, his inventiveness--even his grandfatherly...

The startling truth behind one of the most notorious dynasties in history is revealed in a remarkable new account by the acclaimed author of The Tudors and A World Undone. Sweeping aside the gossip, slander, and distortion that have shrouded the Borgias for centuries,...

In a life of extraordinary drama, Jane Boleyn was catapulted from relative obscurity to the inner circle of King Henry VIII. As powerful men and women around her became victims of Henry's ruthless and absolute power-including her own husband and her sister-in-law, Queen Anne...

In GRACE & POWER: THE PRIVATE WORLD OF THE KENNEDY WHITE HOUSE, New York Times bestselling author Sally Bedell Smith takes us inside the Kennedy White House with unparalleled access and insight. Having interviewed scores of Kennedy intimates, including many who have never spoken...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The perfect companion to the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria - A gripping account of Queen Victoria's rise and early years in power from CNN's official royal historian "Kate Williams has perfected the art of historical biography. Her pacy writing...

They were known as the Ascendancy, the dashing aristocratic elite that controlled Irish politics and society at the end of the eighteenth century--and at their pinnacle stood Caroline and Robert King, Lord and Lady Kingsborough of Mitchelstown Castle. Heirs to ancient estates and a...

"A fast-paced look at white personalities in Africa, a few well-knowns from the past and a few collected by the author in recent years . . . Denis Boyles knows the territory well."--The New York Times Book Review In a series of ebullient and...

"A major contribution." Washington PostThe authoritative single-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most significant figure in American history. He was a complex and compelling man: a fervent advocate of democracy who enjoyed the life of a southern aristocrat and owned slaves, a revolutionary...

In September 1776, two men from Connecticut each embarked on a dangerous mission. One of the men, a soldier disguised as a schoolmaster, made his way to British-controlled Manhattan and began furtively making notes and sketches to bring back to the beleaguered Continental Army...

Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer, a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a...

Who made modern Britain? This book, drawn from the award-winning Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, tells the story of our recent past through the lives of those who shaped national life. Following on from the Oxford DNB's first supplement volume-noteworthy people who died between...

G. K. Chesterton is remembered as a brilliant creator of nonsense and satirical verse, author of the Father Brown stories and the innovative novel, The Man who was Thursday, and yet today he is not counted among the major English novelists and poets. However,...

This fascinating exploration of Leonardo da Vinci's life and work identifies what it was that made him so unique, and explains the phenomenon of the world's most celebrated artistic genius who, 500 years on, still grips and inspires us. Martin Kemp offers us exceptional...

BRING YOUR DNB INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY This new book, drawn from the award-winning Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, brings together the life stories of more than 800 men and women who have shaped all aspects of the British past and who died between...

Duncan Wu's portrait of William Hazlitt - covering Hazlitt's entire life - reveals one of the greatest journalists in the language, and the principal spokesman of the Romantic age, interacting with every major writer and many other movers and shakers of the era.Author: Duncan...

Drawing from Benjamin Franklin's published and unpublished papers, including letters, notes, and marginalia, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire examines how the early modern liberalism of Franklin's youthful intellectual life helped foster his vision of independence from Britain that became his hallmark achievement....

Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an Irishman who in June 1922 was assassinated on his doorstep in London by Irish republicans, was one of the most controversial British soldiers of the modern age. Before 1914 he did much to secure the Anglo-French alliance and...