Published biographies
Miriam Horn; Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller
Miriam Horn is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
In this riveting portrait of George B. Schaller, the world’s leading field biologist, Miriam Horn captures the seventy years he spent living among wild animals in the world’s remotest regions, forever altering how we see – and save – the natural world.
Francesca Wade; Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Francesca Wade is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
Drawing on never-before-seen interviews, a richly researched, sweeping examination of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century and her partner’s emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.
Nicholas Boggs; Baldwin: A Love Story
Nicholas Boggs is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.
Lance Richardson; True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
Lance Richardson is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
Peter Matthiessen (1927 – 2014), a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, achieved so much during his lifetime, in so many different areas, that people have struggled to pin him down. While ambivalent about his WASP privilege—as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the New York Social Register—he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review as he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, after a rebellious stint as a Long Island fisherman, he escaped into a series of wild expeditions.
Cynthia Carr; Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar
Cynthia Carr is a 2016 – 2017 Fellow
Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world.
Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol’s films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.
Susan Morrison; Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Susan Morrison is a 2020 – 2021 Fellow
Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of Saturday Night Live, he has become a revered and inimitable presence in the entertainment world. He’s a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys – and, essentially, a mystery.
Rachel Swarns; The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
Rachel Swarns is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.
David Greenberg; John Lewis: A Life
David Greenberg is a 2019 – 2020 Fellow
Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, becoming second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions. As a Freedom Rider, he played a crucial role in integrating bus stations across the South. Lewis was a prominent leader in the Nashville sit-in movement and delivered a historic speech at the 1963 March on Washington.