Several BIO members have new books out this month: 

• Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking)
• Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos, The Pirate’s Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd  (Hanover Square Press)
• Lyndall Gordon, The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Nathan Hobby, The Red Witch: A Biography of Katherine Susannah Prichard (Melbourne University Press)
• Steve Kemper, Our Man In Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor (Mariner Books)
• Elaine Showalter, Between Friends: The Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, 1920–1935 (Virago) 

Three BIO members have paperback editions out this month:  

• Debby Applegate, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age (Anchor)
• Andrew Lownie, Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor (Pegasus Books)
• Claire Tomalin, The Young H. G. Wells (Penguin) 

BIO member Marc Leepson has secured a book deal for The Unlikely War Hero: The Amazing Vietnam War POW Saga of Doug Hegdahl. It was sold to Stackpole Books by agent Katherine Flynn of Kneerim & Williams. Additionally, Kai Bird sold his next project, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn and the World He Made, to Scribner (Gail Ross at Ross Yoon Literary was the agent).  

As the following list shows, the November episodes of the BIO Podcast will feature BIO members taking on both hosting duties and guest appearances:  

November 4: Bernice Lerner is interviewed about her book All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl and British Doctor and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) by Kitty Kelley.  

November 11: E. Stanly Godbold is interviewed by Lisa Napoli about his book Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights, 1975–2020 (Oxford University Press, 2022).  

November 18: Soyica Diggs Colbert will be interviewed by Kevin McGruder about her book Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (Yale University Press, 2021).  

November 25: Allison Gilbert will be interviewed by Jennifer Skoog about her book Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman (co-authored with Julia Scheeres, Seal Press, 2022). 

You can access all episodes of the BIO Podcast, as they are released, here. Want to just try a sample of the podcast? Check out these short excerpts from a couple of the October episodes here and here. 

Here are additional updates:  

John A. “Jack” Farrell was longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction for his biography Ted Kennedy: A Life (Penguin Press, 2022).  

Nigel Hamilton wrote “Anthony Bourdain and the Farce of the ‘Unauthorized’ Biography,” for The Conversation.

Megan Marshall and Lydia Moland will be in conversation for a hybrid event at the Massachusetts Historical Society, on Wednesday, November 16, at 6 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time). They will discuss Moland’s new book, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (University of Chicago Press). Additional information can be found here. 

Michael N. McGregor published an article called “The Ethics of Writing About Others,” for AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle. You can read it here. 

Eugene Meyer was interviewed by the Washington Independent Review of Books about how he chooses the subjects of his works. He also self-published Hidden Maryland: In Search of America in Miniature, in late September.  

Todd Peppers has been selected by the Warren Burger estate to be an official biographer for the late chief justice.  He will be joined by former Burger law clerk Tim Flanigan, and the two men will jointly write the biography. The designation will allow Peppers access to the chief justice’s extensive personal papers, which are housed at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and are closed to the general public for at least another 10 years. Chief Justice Warren Burger was the longest-serving chief justice of the 20th century. To date, no full-length biography has been written about Burger. Peppers holds the Fowler Chair in Public Affairs at Roanoke College and is a longtime visiting professor of law at Washington and Lee. He has written extensively on Supreme Court history. Tim Flanigan is chief legal officer for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. He is a new BIO member.  

Tim Spofford, also a new BIO member, wished to share this introduction with the community:  “I’m the author of a new dual biography released in August by Sourcebooks, What the Children Told Us, the dual biography of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, the Black psychologists who, among other things, developed the famous doll test and worked with the NAACP to upend dual, segregated school systems in the South and border states (i.e., Brown v. the Board of Education, 1954). They founded a psychiatric center for Harlem children, Northside Center, which was directed by Mamie and exists to this day. Kenneth was the most prominent Black scholar in the civil rights era and the bestselling author of the classic Dark Ghetto. He founded the first Black think tank, Metropolitan Applied Research Center. Mamie was one of a committee of 12 who established Head Start. Working together, they did much more than I have space here to recount.” 

Spofford also said, “I’m a white writer who’s spent 15 years (full time) researching, writing, and struggling to get this, the first Clark biography, published. The book unfolds like a novel, explores the Clarks’ romance and family life, set against the backdrop of civil rights history, in which they played major roles. They were friends and colleagues of all the major Black leaders of their day, including Dr. King, as well as the friends of countless African Americans in sports, entertainment, and the arts.” You can visit Tim’s website here.