André Bernard, vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, leads a conversation with nonfiction writer Stacy Schiff, hailed as “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America,” her six biographies include Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, Cleopatra: A Life, and Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, a revelatory biography of arguably the most essential Founding Father that was named one of the Wall Street Journal’s Best 10 Books of 2022.
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Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. Published to ecstatic reviews, Cleopatra: A Life was a #1 bestseller. Named one of the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, it has been translated into 35 languages and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. David McCullough greeted Schiff’s 2015 The Witches, also a #1 bestseller, as “brilliant from start to finish;” the New York Times hailed it as “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.”
Schiff’s most recent book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, was a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of 2022 and figured on President Obama’s list of Favorite Books of 2022. The Wall Street Journal has called Schiff “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time.” Among other honors, Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she has been named a Library Lion. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government.
Photo: Elena Seibert
The author of five books of literary miscellany, André Bernard has served as a Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster, Editorial Director of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and VP and Publisher of Harcourt Brace before joining the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as its Vice President, administering its Fellowship program.