They're 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 in Adams, MA on Oct. 26, 1961 Schiff was an editor before shifting into writing biography and non-fiction.  She’s the author of half-a-dozen acclaimed biographies sandwiched around numerous essays and articles in many magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.

 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Vera Nabokov, she also was a finalist for the Pulitzer for her biography of Antoine de Saint Expurey (author of The Little Prince).   Her work The Witches: Salem, 1692 was hailed by The New York Times as "an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.”

 

 Schiff’s most recent book The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams also has won numerous awards, including the Colonial Dames of America Book Prize and the William Hickling Prescott Award for Excellence in Historical Writing.    

 

Schiff enjoys research but sometimes runs into walls trying to decipher her subjects’ writing.  “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 an English that positively sings.” 

 

 “The biographer,” she said, “has two lives:  The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.”