Biographies About
Acclaimed Authors

More fascinating than fiction, the true stories of award-winning
and best-selling novelists are sure to keep you riveted.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF WRITING with fresh testimonials from fellow writers about why they love Stephen King and On Writing—and a few new words on the joy of writing from King himself. *ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S TOP 100 NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME* Immensely helpful and illuminating to any...

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird...

To most audiences, Philip Roth is a literary icon, author of probing, provocative works like American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Goodbye, Columbus. But to James Atlas, Philip Roth was more than just a writer—he was a friend....

National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2005"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband...

In this now classic biography, Linda Lear offers the astonishing portrait of an extraordinary woman who gave us some of the most beloved children's books of all time. Beatrix Potter found freedom from her conventional Victorian upbringing in the countryside. Nature inspired her imagination as an...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland—now with a new introduction by Patrick Radden Keefe. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a...

A former CIA officer and curator of the CIA Museum unveils the shocking, untold story of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway s secret life as a spy for both the Americans and the Soviets before and during World War II. While he was the curator of the CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a...

“One of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer.” —The Sunday Times (London) From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply moving recollections about his...

A New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson, the acclaimed author of Another Brooklyn, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares...

Award-winning author Stephen Greenblatt is one of the most influential literary thinkers in the world....

From the author of The BFG, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and many more beloved classics—a whimsical, witty, and revealing collection of the legendary children’s author and writer Roald Dahl's letters written to his mother, from early childhood...

A genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language....

From the author of The House on Mango Street, a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography—an intimate album of a beloved literary legend. From the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up and set her groundbreaking The...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world...

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge....

First published in 1989, this scarifying memoir has become a classic of the genre, as notable for its artful structure and finely wrought prose as for the events it describes. The book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. It was made into a movie in 1993...

In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer desperate for adventure, college cash, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners...

Take a trip back to Jane Austen's world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses - both grand and small - of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and...

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord...