'The packhorses of literature'

 

“Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.” – Stacy Schiff

Born on this day in 1961, Schiff started her career as an editor and was the senior editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990.  That’s when she shifted into writing and, in particular, began her focus on biography and non-fiction.  Since then she has written many acclaimed biographies (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vera) and nonfiction bestsellers sandwiched around numerous essays and articles in such notable magazines and newspapers as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times Book Review.

Among her other acclaimed works are Cleopatra: A Life and The Witches: Salem, 1692, hailed by The New York Times  as "an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.”  Schiff "gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist," noted the Wall Street Journal.

                             Schiff said she enjoys research but sometimes runs into walls trying to decipher her subjects’ writing and works.  “In an ideal world,” she said, “ the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write in English that positively sings.” 

As for biography as her topic, something a novelist friend once told her “was not a real book,” she added, “The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.”