Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author best known for her biographies.
Schiff was born on October 26, 1961 in Adams, Massachusetts. She went to Phillips Andover Academy and later graduated with her B.A. from Williams College in 1982. Schiff would go on to work as an editor at Simon and Schuster and achieved the rank of senior editor before she left in 1990 to pursue her writing career. Her first major work was a biography of the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote the enduringly popular novella The Little Prince. It was published in 1994 to critical acclaim and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Schiff followed up her extraordinary debut with a biography of Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Vera Nabokov, titled Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (1999). In Véra, Schiff elucidates the role of an enigmatic wife of a literary icon in her husband’s career, and as a result illuminates his own work. Véra was the recipient of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize.
Schiff continued her illustrious career throughout the 2000s. After a successful account of Benjamin Franklin’s role in France during the American war for independence (A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, 2005), Schiff published Cleopatra: A Life in 2010. Cleopatra was critically acclaimed, and Schiff was lauded for her scintillating prose and engrossing storytelling ability in a nonfiction setting. It was a New York Times top ten bestseller for the year 2010. Her most recent work, published in 2015, was The Witches: Salem, 1692. The Witches is an incredibly detailed and compelling account of the Salem witch trials, and Schiff was especially praised for her impeccable research. It was a frequent presence on year-end top ten book lists.
Schiff has emphasized her love of working with primary sources and obtaining physical copies of the source in order to view the document closely. Beyond her biographical work, she has contributed essays to several publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. She currently resides in New York City, where she is a fellow at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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