In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. Isaacson also describes the joys of the "so-called writing life" and the challenges he sees for journalism in the digital age.

"In this contemporary fantasy, the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subject"-- American Charles Hayden came to England to forget the past. Failed father, failed husband, and failed scholar, Charles hopes to put his life back together with a biography of Caedmon Hollow, the long-dead author of a legendary Victorian children's book, In the Night Wood. But soon...

"Essays by twenty-five memoirists, including Faith Adiele, Alison Bechdel, Jill Christman, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rigoberto González, Robin Hemley, Dinty W. Moore, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Mimi Schwartz, explore the fraught territory of family history told from one perspective, which, from another angle in the family drama, might appear quite different indeed. In her introduction to this book, Joy Castro, herself a memoirist, explores the ethical dilemmas...

Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, a collection of reminiscences by the critically acclaimed author integrates social history and humor as he discusses such topics as his psychologists, lovers, family, and friends.

"Mamoon Azam is an eminent Indian-born writer who has made a career in England--but now, in his early seventies, his reputation is fading, his book sales are nonexistent, and his flamboyant second wife's expensive habits are bleeding him dry. In an attempt to revitalize his career and reputation, Mamoon's publisher commissions Harry, an ambitious young writer, to pen the famous writer's biography. Honored and slightly intimidated, Harry promises himself...

After the death of her beloved husband, Katrin, a literary biographer, copes with the loss by writing his personal history. While researching the letters and journals he left behind, however, she comes to the devastating conclusion that his life before their marriage was far richer than the one they shared. To understand and recreate the period of his greatest happiness hitch-hiking through France as a young man, madly in love with his companion,...

"The biographer's autobiography: a funny, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented, by the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. The biographer--so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts--here comes to the stage. James Atlas takes us back to his childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives. We meet Richard...