Nation Topics - Biography | The Nation

A new biography shows how the poet Robert Duncan fed a line backward into the labyrinthine history of human imagination.

How Charles de Gaulle’s story became a collective fairy tale that the French have agreed to believe in.

How did Lillian Hellman become the archetype of hypocrisy?

Hitchcock delighted in manipulating the audience. Early on Luis Buñuel learned to be satisfied with amusing himself.

A nineteenth-century feminist's exceptional life.

For a young black student, France was not the refuge it was reputed to be.

Angela Davis’s student years in France were an alchemy of discipline and distraction.

Two new biographies differ over the astronomer’s view of the relationship between science and faith.

Margaret Sanger’s legacy continues to haunt debates about abortion and family planning.

The swirl of controversy over Jodi Kantor’s biography reflects deep cultural anxieties about the limits we place on women in power.