Thalia Book Club: Autobiography of a Biographer

Renowned biographers James Atlas (Saul Bellow), Edmund Morris (Theodore Roosevelt) and Stacy Schiff (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) reveal the fascinating, all-absorbing process of researching and writing another person’s life story.


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Performance playlist:

Conversation
James Atlas, Edmund Morris and Stacy Schiff

A Discussion with the Audience

James Atlas is the author of the biographies Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and Bellow: A Biography. He also wrote the novel The Great Pretender and a memoir, My Life in the Middle Ages. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, he was also an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. He is the president of Atlas & Co. and founder of the Penguin Lives series.

Edmund Morris was born and educated in Kenya and went to college in South Africa. He is the author of four biographies, including Beethoven: The Universal Composer, Theodore Rex and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award in 1980, and which is being developed for film by Martin Scorcese. As President Reagan's authorized biographer, he published the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan in 1999. He has written extensively on travel and the arts for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine.

Stacy Schiff is the author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, which won the 2006 George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies and the Institut Français's Gilbert Chinard Prize. Schiff received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. Her first book, Saint-Exupéry, was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A guest columnist for The New York Times' Op-Ed Page, she has written for the Page about Susan B. Anthony and other topics. Currently, she is at work on a biography of Cleopatra, which will be published by Little Brown.