Nation Topics - Biography | The Nation

Ann Beattie is an artist of the things we don’t say, or can’t, and that find expression anyway.

A new biography shortchanges the poetic achievement of William Carlos Williams.

Why was Joseph Lelyveld’s history of Gandhi’s years in South Africa attacked by India’s Hindu right?

A biographer's flawed attempt to rediscover the politics in the decidedly political life of Malcolm X.

Christopher Lasch and his quest for the moral resources of the next New Deal.
 

Bettany Hughes's biography of Socrates is a book that Socrates himself, on a mean day, would have torn to shreds.

How Alan Lomax became the most significant Baedeker of America’s folkways.

Isaac Casaubon was a model citizen of the republic of letters—a community more durable than any church and broader than academia.

The musical and political strands of Dmitri Shostakovich's life were intertwined like the braids of a noose.

Rosa Luxemburg wanted it all: books and music, sex and art, evening walks and the revolution. Her lover, Leo Jogiches, told her this was nonsense.