Biographers International Organization

On December 3, more than 70 BIO members, editors, agents, and writers gathered at the New York Society Library to hear Robert Caro (left) pay tribute to Robert Gottlieb, the first winner of BIO’s Editorial Excellence Award. Board member Will Swift introduced Caro, and after his tribute Gottlieb spoke for 35 minutes on biography and his decades-long collaboration with Caro. Former BIO president James McGrath Morris said, “The evening was riveting and represented the kind… Read More »

Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor appeared as the biography of another iconic African American comedian was stirring controversy, as TBC explores below. Saul’s book has been praised for its thorough examination of Pryor’s life, with Kirkus Reviews calling it “the place to start” for anyone curious about the comedian’s life. Saul is a professor of English at Berkeley. His first book, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, came out… Read More »

Old allegations that comedian Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted more than a dozen women have filled the news in recent weeks—and brought unflattering attention to Cosby biographer Mark Whitaker. In Cosby: His Life and Times, Whitaker, a seasoned journalist, wrote about Cosby’s extramarital affairs and other dark moments in his life, but he left out the rape allegations and the out-of-court settlement Cosby made in 2006 with Andrea Constand, one of the alleged… Read More »

              On December 3, BIO will present its first Editorial Excellence Award to Robert Gottlieb. The award honors an editor who has made outstanding contributions to the field of biography. A former editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster and Knopf, Gottlieb has edited countless best-selling novels as well as modern classics of the biographer’s craft. Robert Caro, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the many writers who has benefited… Read More »

By Dona Munker In fifty years of writing biography, the innovative and prolific Richard Holmes has become known to his fellow practitioners as “a biographer’s biographer” for his reflections on the art and craft of biography (Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer). At the 2014 annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture in New York, Holmes shared some insights with a rapt audience. Holmes was about 18 when… Read More »

By James McGrath Morris From the twerks of Miley Cyrus to the typography of Giambattista Bodoni, from the humor of Bill Cosby to the antics of Charlie Chaplin, from the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower to the rule of Joseph Stalin, the more than 100 biographies coming to bookstores this fall run the gamut of possibilities. While biography, like other segments of publishing, is navigating rough waters, writers keep producing a remarkably rich selection of works.… Read More »

The following list of biographies appearing between September 2014 and February 2015 was assembled using Edelweiss, a web-based interactive publisher catalog system widely used in the book industry. If we missed a title, please let us know at editortbc@biographersinternational.org September Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography by Elizabeth Maslen (Northwestern University Press) American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century by Leilah Danielson (University of Pennsylvania… Read More »

It’s rare when biographies and biographers make the front page of a national magazine — in this case it’s the September 5, 2014 issue of Newsweek. But don’t rush to celebrate just yet.  In a lengthy piece for the magazine, reporter David Cay Johnson  debunks the work of celebrity biographer C. David Heymann — author of juicy tell-alls on Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Liz Taylor, to name a few — finding that much of… Read More »