Published biographies
Patchen Barss; The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
Patchen Barss is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists.
Adam Shatz; The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
Adam Shatz is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War–era thriller.
Adam Plunkett; Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry
Adam Plunkett is a 2016 – 2017 Fellow
By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost’s death, these clichés gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson.
Dan Nadel; Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life
Dan Nadel is a 2021 – 2022 Fellow
Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic.
Claire Hoffman; Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson
Claire Hoffman is a 2023 – 2024 Fellow
On a spring day in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson wandered into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. Weeks later she reappeared in the desert, claiming to have been kidnapped. A national media frenzy and months of investigation ensued. Who was this woman?
Siobhan Roberts; Genius at Play: the Curious Mind of John Horton Conway
Siobhan Roberts is a 2012 – 2013 Fellow
A mathematician unlike any other, John Horton Conway (1937–2020) possessed a rock star’s charisma, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a sly sense of humor. Conway found fame as a barefoot professor at Cambridge, where he discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry and the aptly named surreal numbers. He also invented the cult classic Game of Life, a cellular automaton that demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity—and provides an analogy for mathematics and the entire universe.
Aidan Levy; Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins
Aidan Levy is a 2016 – 2017 Fellow
Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the “Saxophone Colossus,” he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time, winning Grammys, the Austrian Cross of Honor, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize and a National Medal of Arts. A bridge from bebop to the avant-garde, he is a lasting link to the golden age of jazz, pictured in the iconic “Great Day in Harlem” portrait. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called “the only jazz recluse” has gone largely untold – until now.
D. T. Max; Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim
D.T. Max is a 2011 – 2012 Fellow
In 2017, New Yorker staff writer D.T. Max began working on a major profile of Stephen Sondheim that would be timed to the eventual premiere of a new musical Sondheim was writing. Sadly , that process – and the years of conversation – was cut short by Sondheim’s own hesitations, then the global pandemic, and finally by the great artist’s death in November 2021.