Max Beerbohm once observed there were some writers who have been spoiled by their desire to do “important” work: “Some people are born to lift heavy weights. Some are born to juggle with golden balls.

As an experienced biographer, Hermione Lee knows a hungry audience. “Readers of biography are greedy readers, with an insatiable appetite for detail and story,” writes the British scholar, a professor ...

We were surprised to discover that Louis Begley, consummate chronicler of Waspy things, had written a “biographical essay” on Franz Kafka. (Perhaps we shouldn’t have been: Both men, besides being ...

(Editor's note: This is Zylo Hefferan's biographical essay for college admissions and scholarship applications.) My name is Zylo Alexander Hefferan, and I am the fourth of seven siblings. I was born ...

MR. SABINE has attempted in these volumes to present in a judicial spirit a chapter of our Revolutionary history which usually bears the most of passion in its recital, — believing, as he does, that ...

In 1997, Bob Dylan was a Kennedy Center Honoree. Below is the text of a speech given by writer and music critic Tom Piazza for that occasion. The central question for an American artist – both as an ...

LADY PRESTWICH, who survived her husband, Sir Joseph Prestwich, but little more than three years, died in 1899 at the age of sixty-six. They were married in 1870, and settled at Shoreham, near ...