- Alchemy of Race and Rights
- Patricia J. Williams
- Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class.
- Hardcover 1991 / Paperback 1992
- Alice James
- Jean Strouse
- Alice James was the sister of William and Henry, the only daughter in a family of brilliant and not a little eccentric men, and representative of the intellectually repressed nineteenth-century woman whose grief finds an outlet in neurotic illness. Her life is a singular portrait embedded in a family history that dazzled her age and still interests ours.
- Paperback 1999
- Biographical Writings
- Giannozzo Manetti
- Edited and translated by Stefano U. Baldassarri
- Edited and translated by Rolf Bagemihl
- The Renaissance recovery of ancient biographical writers such as Plutarch, Suetonius, and Jerome led to a wave of imitations by Renaissance authors from Petrarch to Machiavelli. The orator, diplomat, and statesman Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459), an expert in Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, was among the leading humanist biographers of the Renaissance. This collection brings together his famous biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which helped establish the canon of Italian literature, as well as his parallel lives of Socratesand Seneca, which remained the standard biographical sources for those philosophers throughout the early modern period.
- Hardcover 2003
- Cardano's Cosmos
- Anthony Grafton
- Girolamo Cardano was an Italian doctor, natural philosopher, and mathematician who became a best-selling author in Renaissance Europe. He was also a leading astrologer of his day, whose predictions won him access to some of the most powerful people in sixteenth-century Europe. In Cardano's Cosmos, Anthony Grafton invites readers to follow this astrologer's extraordinary career and explore the art and discipline of astrology in the hands of a brilliant practitioner.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- Cardozo
- Andrew L. Kaufman
- This first complete biography of the longtime member and chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals and Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States during the turbulent years of the New Deal is a monumental achievement by a distinguished interpreter of constitutional law.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi
- Sándor Ferenczi
- Edited by Judith Dupont
- Translated by Michael Balint
- Translated by Nicola Zarday Jackson
- In the half-century since his death, the Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi has amassed an influential following within the psychoanalytic community. In a sequence of short, condensed entries, Ferenczi's diary records self-critical reflections on conventional theory--as well as criticisms of his own experiments with technique--and his obstinate struggle to divest himself and psychoanalysis of professional hypocrisy.
- Hardcover 1988 / Paperback
- The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Walter Benjamin
- Edited by Henri Lonitz
- Translated by Nicholas Walker
- The correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, which appears here for the first time in its entirety in English translation, must rank among the most significant to have come down to us from that notable age of barbarism, the twentieth century. Benjamin, riddle-like in his personality and given to tactical evasion, and Adorno, full of his own importance, alternately support and compete with each other throughout the correspondence, until its imminent tragic end becomes apparent to both writers. Each had met his match, and happily, in the other. This book, in more than one hundred letters, is the story of an elective affinity.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- The Crucible of Experience
- Daniel Burston
- One of the great rebels of psychiatry, R. D. Laing challenged prevailing models of madness and the nature and limits of psychiatric authority. In this brief and lucid book, Laing's widely praised biographer distills the essence of Laing's vision, which was religious and philosophical as well as psychological. The Crucible of Experience reveals Laing's philosophical debts to existentialism and phenomenology in his theories of madness and sanity, family theory and family therapy.
- Hardcover 2000
- Descent from Glory
- Paul C. Nagel
- There has never been any doubt that the Adams family was America's first family in our politics and memory. This research-based and insightful book is a multigenerational biography of that family from the founder father John through the mordant writer Brooks.
- Paperback 1999
- Dorothea Dix
- Thomas J. Brown
- An influential lobbyist as well as a paragon of the doctrine of female benevolence, Dorothea Dix vividly illustrated the complexities of the "separate spheres" of politics and femininity. An activist who disdained the women's rights and antislavery movements, Dix, an old-line Whig, sought to promote national harmony and became the only New England social reformer to work successfully in the lower South right up to the eve of secession.
- Hardcover 1998
- The Education of Laura Bridgman
- Ernest Freeberg
- In the mid-nineteenth century, Laura Bridgman, a young child from New Hampshire, became one of the most famous women in the world. Philosophers, theologians, and educators hailed her as a miracle because she was the first deaf and blind person to learn language. Her life was transformed when she became the star pupil of the educational crusader Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. Against the backdrop of an antebellum Boston, Freeberg tells this extraordinary tale of mentor and student, scientist and experiment.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings
- Amy Kelly
- Kelly's story of the queen's long life is a modern biography that brings together more authentic information about her than has ever been assembled and reveals in Eleanor a greatness of vision, an intelligence, and a political sagacity that have been missed by those who have dwelt on her caprice and frivolity. It also brings to life the whole period in whose every aspect Eleanor and her four kings were so intimately and influentially involved.
- Hardcover 1950 / Paperback 1991
- Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
- Bruce A. Ronda
- This is the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, one of the three notable Peabody sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. In elegant prose it traces the intricate private life and extraordinary career of one of nineteenth-century America's most important Transcendental writers and educational reformers.
- Hardcover 1999
- Franklin of Philadelphia
- Esmond Wright
- The most original and delightful of the Founding Fathers, Franklin was publisher and printer, essayist and author, businessman and "general," scientist and philologist, politician and diplomat, moralist and sage--and a thoroughly rational patriot. This first comprehensive biography in fifty years has taken advantage of Yale's massive edition-in-progress of Franklin's papers and of the many specialized studies inspired by the correspondence. Designed for the general reader, it is also a work for scholars, for the author appends a thorough analysis of other interpretations of Franklin's career and personality.
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback 1988
- Gehennical Fire
- William Newman
- Reputed to have performed miraculous feats in New England--restoring the hair and teeth to an aged lady, bringing a withered peach tree to fruit--Eirenaeus Philalethes was also rumored to be an adept possessor of the alchemical philosophers' stone. That the man was merely a mythical creation didn't diminish his reputation a whit--his writings were spectacularly successful, read by Leibniz, esteemed by Newton and Boyle, voraciously consumed by countless readers. Gehennical Fire is the story of the man behind the myth, George Starkey.
- Hardcover 1994
- The Ghost of the Executed Engineer
- Loren Graham
- Stalin ordered his execution, but here Peter Palchinsky has the last word. Palchinsky tells of Soviet technology and industry, the mistakes he condemned in his lifetime, the corruption and collapse he predicted, the ultimate price paid for silencing those who were not afraid to speak out. The story of this visionary engineer's life and work, as Graham tells it, is also the story of the Soviet Union's industrial promise and failure.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- Henry Adams
- Ernest Samuels
- Samuels' Pulitzer Prize-winning, multi-volume work on Henry Adams is now a compact, updated, one-volume biography.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback
- Henry Adams
- Ernest Samuels
- Hardcover 1964
- Henry Adams
- Ernest Samuels
- "Education had ended in 1871, life was complete in 1890." With this paradoxical statement, Adams apparently dismissed from the record twenty of the most interesting and active years of his career. Opening on the highest note of expectation and closing with his desperate flight to the South Seas in 1890, a divided and lonely figure, that season of fulfillment and inner growth is the subject of this book. Through detailed analyses of Adams' writings, Samuels shows how this drama eventually became transformed into works of literary art.
- Hardcover 1958
- The Highly Civilized Man
- Dane Kennedy
- Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Richard Burton contributed so forcefully to his generation that he provides us with a singularly panoramic perspective on the world of the Victorians. Engagingly written and vigorously argued, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a crucial era.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- How To Do Biography
- Nigel Hamilton
- Following his recent Biography: A Brief History (from Harvard), award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton tackles the practicalities of doing biography in the first succinct primer to elucidate the tools of the biographer’s craft.
- Hardcover 2008
- In Search of Africa
- Manthia Diawara
- In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returned to Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. Diawara's journey gives us the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and above all for an Africa that is struggling to find its future.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- Jefferson and the Indians
- Anthony F. C. Wallace
- Adding a troubled dimension to one of the most enigmatic figures of American history, Anthony Wallace takes us on a tour of discovery to unexplored regions of Jefferson's mind. There, the bookish Enlightenment scholar--chronicler of the eloquence of America's native peoples and mourner of their tragic fate--sits uncomfortably close to Jefferson the imperialist and architect of Indian removal. Impelled by the necessity of expanding his agrarian republic, he became adept at putting a philosophical gloss on his policy of encroachment, threats of war, and forced land cessions--a policy that led, eventually, to cultural genocide.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- John Quincy Adams
- Paul C. Nagel
- Adams was raised, educated, and groomed to be President. At fourteen he was secretary to the Minister to Russia and, later, was himself Minister to the Netherlands and Prussia. He was U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, and then President for one ill-fated term. His private life showed a parallel descent. He was a poet, writer, critic, and Professor of Oratory at Harvard. He married a talented and engaging Southerner, but two of his three sons were disappointments. This polymath and troubled man, caught up in both a democratic age not to his understanding and the furies of passion, was an American lion in winter.
- Paperback 1999
- The Last Best Hope of Earth
- Mark E. Neely
- Mark E. Neely, Jr., gives us the first compact biography of Abraham Lincoln based on new scholarship. Neely, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian, vividly recaptures the central place of politics in Lincoln's life.
- Paperback / Hardcover
- The Legacy of Erich Fromm
- Daniel Burston
- This is the first full-scale intellectual biography in English of Erich Fromm, perhaps the most widely read psychoanalyst after Freud, whose contributions to clinical and social psychology and the history of the psychoanalytic movement have long been underrated.
- Hardcover 1991
- Linnaeus
- Lisbet Koerner
- Drawing on letters, poems, notebooks, and secret diaries, Lisbet Koerner tells the moving story of one of the most famous naturalists who ever lived, the Swedish-born botanist and systematizer, Carl Linnaeus. The first scholarly biography of this great Enlightenment scientist in almost one hundred years, Linnaeus also recounts for the first time Linnaeus' grand and bizarre economic projects: to "teach" tea, saffron, and rice to grow on the Arctic tundra and to domesticate buffaloes, guinea pigs, and elks as Swedish farm animals. Koerner's narrative goes against the grain of Linnaean scholarship old and new by analyzing not how modern Linnaeus was, but how he understood science in his time.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Love's Story Told
- Forrest Robinson
- Searching out the private man as well as the public figure, this elegantly written biography follows Henry Murray through his life as a pioneer in the field of clinical psychology, as a co-founder of Harvard's Psychological Clinic, as the co-inventor of the Thematic Apperception Test, and as a biographer of Herman Melville.
- Paperback 1998 / Hardcover
- Martin Luther
- Richard Marius
- Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Luther. In this occasionally irreverent--but always humane--biography, Richard Marius provides a full portrait of Luther: his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to define the Reformation.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000
- Melanie Klein
- Phyllis Grosskurth
- Paperback
- Mikhail Bulgakov
- Edythe C. Haber
- One of the foremost Russian writers of the Soviet period, Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) has attracted much critical attention, yet Edythe Haber is the first to explore in depth his formative years. Blending biography and literary analysis of motifs, story, and characterization, Haber tracks one writer's answer to the dislocations of revolution, civil war, and early Bolshevism.
- Hardcover 1998
- Mikhail Kuzmin
- John Malmstad
- Nikolay Bogomolov
- Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), Russia's first openly gay writer, stood at the epicenter of the turbulent cultural and social life of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad for over three decades. Kuzmin was also a prose writer, playwright, critic, translator, and composer who was associated with every aspect of modernism's history in Russia. This biography, the first in any language to be based on full and uncensored access to the writer's private papers, including his notorious Diary.
- Hardcover 1999
- Moscow Diary
- Walter Benjamin
- Translated by Richard Sieburth
- Preface by Gershom Scholem
- Edited by Gary Smith
- The life of the literary critic and philosopher Benjamin (1892-1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin's intellectual odyssey included an eventful trip to the Soviet Union. His stunning account of that journey is unique among his writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and his conscience.
- Paperback 1986 / Hardcover 1986
- New England Life in the 18th Century
- Clifford Shipton
- In 1859 John Langdon Sibley projected and began a series of biographical sketches of all Harvard graduates; at his death in 1885 he had published three volumes, covering the Classes from 1642 through 1689. In 1930 the work was resumed by Clifford Shipton, who carried the series through the Class of 1750. This book offers a representative selection from the nine volumes of Shipton's biographies; together they form a cross section of Colonial life.
- Hardcover 1963 / Paperback 1995
- Notable or Notorious?
- Gordon Wright
- Paperback 1969
- Origins
- Alan Lightman
- Roberta Brawer
- Origins reveals the human being within the scientist in a study of the philosophical, personal, and social factors that enter into the scientific process.
- Hardcover 1990 / Paperback
- A Prince of Our Disorder
- John E. Mack
- When this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography first appeared in 1976, it rescued T. E. Lawrence from the mythologizing that had seemed to be his fate. In it, John Mack humanely and objectively explores the relationship between Lawrence's inner life and his historically significant actions. Extensive interviews, far-flung correspondence, access to War Office dispatches and unpublished letters provide the basis for Mack's sensitive investigation of the psychiatric dimensions of Lawrence's personality.
- Paperback
- Samuel Johnson
- Lawrence Lipking
- Tracing Samuel Johnson's rocky climb from anonymity to fame, in the course of which he came to stand for both the greatness of English literature and the good sense of the common reader, Lipking shows how this life transformed the very nature of authorship.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- Samurai and Silk
- Haru Matsukata Reischauer
- Samurai and Silk is a rare treasure: a book of penetrating insight into the Japanese character and the forging of modern Japan from the feudal Tokugawa shoguns to present day economic titans. Only Haru Reischauer could have written this extraordinary family account, beginning with her two illustrious grandfathers: one, a provincial samurai who became a founding father of the Meiji government; the other, a scion of a wealthy and enterprising peasant family who almost single-handedly developed the silk trade with America. Their remarkable stories, and those of their notable descendants, demonstrate the unbounded vision and determination that explain so much about Japan's legendary success.
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback
- Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning
- John Solt
- Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. In his long career, Kitasono was instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by futurism, dadaism, and surrealism before World War II and in contributing a Japanese voice to the international avant-garde movement after the war. This critical biography of Kitasono examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and flamboyant figure.
- Hardcover 1999
- Stutter
- Marc Shell
- In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Marc Shell plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and word. This provocative and wide-ranging book shows that stuttering has implications for myriad types of expression and helps to define what it means to be human.
- Hardcover 2006
- Subject to Biography
- Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
- A practicing psychoanalyst, a distinguished scholar, and the widely-praised biographer of Anna Freud and Hannah Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl here reflects on the relations between self-knowledge, autobiography, biography, and cultural history. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and what areas--theory of character, for instance--must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000
- Thomas More
- Richard Marius
- Over the centuries, biographers of Thomas More have always praised him and made him an example for their own times. He was a man for all seasons. Truly, he was a Renaissance man with the contradictions such praise imposes on a towering figure. In Richard Marius's authoritative and engaging portrait, Sir Thomas More, the martyr and brilliant public figure, is a lesson for our season.
- Paperback 1999
- The Trials of Anthony Burns
- Albert J. von Frank
- Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999
- Unsentimental Reformer
- Joan Waugh
- This book challenges all previous interpretations of Josephine Shaw Lowell as a "genteel" elitist reformer. Such was the massive and pitiless industrialization of the nation after the Civil War that Lowell sought a new way to approach poverty. She rationalized charity toward hapless families and children in ways that established social responsibility for the welfare of the poor. This introduction of "scientific" methods in social work bridged two great eras of social reform, and created a civic maternalism which gave women opportunities to enlarge their presence in the public life of the country.
- Hardcover 1998