“She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.” Since I first read these words in college, I’ve wondered how a man as troubled as Lord Byron could write anything so beautiful.
This past summer I finally found the answer while reading Edna O’Brien’s Byron in Love. The book revealed the tormented heart of Lord Byron, a brilliant and breathtakingly handsome man, who never found a safe haven for the deep emotions he felt anywhere in the world. For all the romances he pursued, love always remained just beyond his reach.
As a biographer, Byron in Love reminded me to look for the secret sorrows in every person I write about.
Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce, Edna O'Brien has written a "jaunty" (The New Yorker) biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four. With "a novelist's understanding of tempo and characterization" (Miami Herald), O'Brien captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait that explodes the Romantic myth. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O'Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.
When the Encyclopedia Virginia asked me to write a short biography of the Marquis de Lafayette for the anniversary of his 1824 visit to the United States, I read every book I could find on him.
From popular biographies to academic studies, I learned one important thing about Gilbert du Motier. It was impossible not to like him. His devotion to the American cause, his defense of the equality of all people, and his faith in democracy jumped off the pages of each book.
But Mike Duncan’s Hero in Two Worlds was the best because of the hours he spent reading Lafayette’s writings in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. That’s the only way for a biographer to bring a person to life—by studying his or her every word!
Few in history can match the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over fifty incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought courageously on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a soldier, statesman, idealist, philanthropist, and abolitionist.
As a teenager, Lafayette ran away from France to join the American Revolution. Returning home a national hero, he helped launch the French Revolution, eventually spending five years locked in dungeon prisons. After his release, Lafayette sparred with Napoleon, joined an underground conspiracy to overthrow King Louis XVIII, and became an international symbol of liberty. Finally, as…
When I was a child, I remember watching What’s My Line, where panelists guessed a contestant’s occupation.
The contestant in question sold letters of famous people. After his identity was revealed, he was asked, “Who was the greatest letter writer of all time?” He answered, “Without a doubt. Jacqueline Kennedy.” I never forgot that line. Now as a writer and historian myself, I’m happy to see biographies of Jackie Kennedy finally being published – all based on her brilliant letters.
My favorite is Carl Sferrazza’s Camera Girl. In its pages, we meet a vibrant and witty young woman working for the Washington Times-Herald – who little knows the destiny that lay ahead of her. While the future reverberates in every biography, an author must keep that future a mystery as the work unfolds.
An illuminating new biography of the young Jackie Bouvier Kennedy that covers her formative adventures abroad in Paris; her life as a writer and photographer at a Washington, DC, newspaper; and her romance with a dashing, charismatic Massachusetts congressman who shared her intellectual passion.
Camera Girl brings to cinematic life Jackie's years as a young, single woman trying to figure out who she wanted to become. Chafing at the expectations of her family and the societal limitations placed on women in that era, Jackie pursued her dream of becoming a writer. Set primarily during the years of 1949 to 1953,…
In the spring of 1792, President George Washington chose “Mad” Anthony Wayne to defend America from a potentially devastating threat. Native tribes had decimated the nation’s only standing army, and Washington needed a champion to open the country stretching from the Ohio River westward to the headwaters of the Mississippi for settlement.
A spendthrift, womanizer, and heavy drinker who had just been expelled from Congress, Wayne was an unlikely savior. Yet this disreputable man raised a new army and, in 1794, scored a decisive victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, successfully preserving his country and Washington’s legacy. Drawing from Wayne’s insightful and eloquently written letters, Mary Stockwell sheds light on this fascinating and underappreciated figure in her masterful and page-turning biography of General Wayne.
