Honor roll:Biography books of the 1990s

Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

Daniel Stashower

• 2000 Edgar-Critical/Biography winner
• 1999 Agatha–Nonfiction winner
• 2000 Anthony-Critical nominee
• 2000 Macavity-Nonfiction nominee
• Score: 32.5

This fresh, compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as one of his adventures. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Teller of Tales sets aside many myths and misconceptions to present a vivid portrait of the man behind the leg of Baker Street, with a particular emphasis on the Psychic Crusade that dominated his final years-the work that Conan Doyle himself felt to be “the most important thing in the world.

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

Frank McCourt

• 1997 Pulitzer–Biography winner
• 1996 LATimes–Biography winner
• 1996 NBCC–Biography winner
• Score: 30.47

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling— does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures…

Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery

Russell Freedman

• 1994 Horn Book-nonfiction winner
• 1993 Golden Kite-nonfiction winner
• 1994 Newbery honor
• Score: 26.44

The intriguing story of Eleanor Roosevelt traces the life of the former First Lady from her early childhood through the tumultuous years in the White House to her active role in the founding of the United Nations after World War II.

Shot in the Heart

Mikal Gilmore

• 1994 LATimes–Biography winner
• 1994 NBCC–Biography winner
• 1994 Hammett nominee
• Score: 26.44

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father’s favorite and the shame of being Gary’s brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale “from inside the house where murder is born… a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave.” Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and…

A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

Geoffrey C. Ward

• 1990 LATimes–Biography winner
• 1989 NBCC–Biography winner
• 1990 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
• Score: 26.4

 

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

Judith Thurman

• 1999 LATimes–Biography winner
• 1999 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
• 1999 NBCC–Biography finalist
• Score: 22.49

A scandalously talented stage performer, a practiced seductress of both men and women, and the flamboyant author of some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, Colette was our first true superstar. Now, in Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh, Colette at last has a biography worthy of her dazzling reputation.

Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage with the sexy, unscrupulous Willy—a literary charlatan who took credit for her bestselling Claudine novels. Weary of Willy’s sexual domination, Colette pursued an extremely public lesbian love affair with a niece of Napoleon’s. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter who bored her, at forty-seven she seduced her teenage stepson, and in her seventies she flirted with the Nazi occupiers of Paris, even though her beloved third husband, a Jew, had been arrested by the Gestapo. And all the while, this incomparable woman poured forth a torrent of masterpieces, including Gigi, Sido, Cheri, and Break of Day.

Judith Thurman, author of the National…

Victor Hugo: A Biography

Graham Robb

• 1997 Whitbread-Biography winner
• 1998 JT Black-Biography shortlist
• 1998 LATimes–Biography finalist
• Score: 22.47

The life of a writer whose books were such powerful social and political statements that he lived in exile from both France and England. Victor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in France: founder and destroyer of the Romantic movement, revolutionary playwright, seminal poet, epic novelist, author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was also a radical political thinker (and eventual exile); a gifted painter and architect; a visionary and mystic who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ—in short, a tantalizing, protean personality who dominated, distracted, and maddened his contemporaries.

Attempts to explain Hugo’s bewildering complexity have generated a literature of memorable paradoxes. If there were a being higher than God, wrote Ford Madox Ford, one would have to say that it was Victor Hugo. Andr Gide, asked who the greatest French poet was, replied, “Victor Hugo, alas!” And Jean Cocteau famously defined Victor Hugo as a madman…

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography

Sam Tanenhaus

• 1997 LATimes–Biography winner
• 1998 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
• 1997 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
• Score: 22.47

Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad—including still-classified KGB dossiers—Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America’s greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers’s days as New York’s “hottest literary Bolshevik”; his years as a Communist agent and then defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time magazine, where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948, when Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that changed America. Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts…

Lindbergh

A. Scott Berg

• 1999 Pulitzer–Biography winner
• 1998 LATimes–Biography winner
• Score: 20.49

Bestselling author and National Book Awardwinner A. Scott Berg is the first and only writer to be given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives—more than two thousand boxes of personal papers, including reams of unpublished letters and diaries—and to be allowed freely to interview Lindbergh’s friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The result is a brilliant biography that clarifies a life long blurred by myth and half-truth.

From the moment he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, Lindbergh found himself thrust on an odyssey for which he was ill-prepared—becoming the first modern media superstar, deified and demonized many times over in a single lifetime. Berg casts dramatic new light on the lonely, sometimes twisted childhood that formed the aviator’s character; the astonishing transatlantic flight and thrilling, then overwhelming aftermath; the controversies surrounding the trial of his son’s kidnapper, Lindbergh’s fascination with Hitler’s Germany and his leadership of America First; his remarkable…

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

Robert Polito

• 1996 Edgar-Critical/Biography winner
• 1995 NBCC–Biography winner
• Score: 20.46

Jim Thompson wrote some of the darkest, boldest, and most celebrated modern crime novels, including The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me. In Savage Art, Robert Polito provides the first comprehensive biography of this brilliant American original. Combining exhaustive research with novelistic fluency, Polito reproduces the vital textures of Thompson’s world and provides the first thorough chronicle of his private and public history, tracing Thompson’s dramatization of his innermost life in the “savage art” of his surprisingly personal novels. A vivid and compelling reclamation of a lost American writer, Savage Art is also a stunning addition to the literary annals of twentieth-century America.