Stacy Schiff Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Stacy Schiff is an American Pulitzer-winning author and historian.

Her best-known works have been critically acclaimed biographies of major historical figures such as Samuel Adams, and Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov the latter for which she won the Pulitzer.

Stacy was born in 1961 in Adams, Massachusetts, and attended Williams College. She would then proceed to the University of Edinburgh where she got her modern literature Master of Arts degree.
Following that, she was employed at Simon and Schuster, where she was a senior editor.

Schiff currently makes her home in New York City.

Schiff has received many honors including a Director’s Fellowship at the New York Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and another from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Among other gongs, the New York Public Library named her “Library Lion” in 2011 while the New England Historic Genealogical Society gave her a Biography and History Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

The French Ministry of Culture named her a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2018 even as she got the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award in 2019.
Before she became the very well-known author that she is today, she worked as a freelance writer and editor.

Her writing has over the years been featured in a range of publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.
She has also been a guest on several television and radio shows including “Fresh Air” on NPR and Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.”

Stacy Schiff has always loved writing from enormous desks since she does a lot of research. She always does her writing from two enormous desks at her two residences in Canada and Manhattan.
For much of her married life, Schiff and her Canadian businessman husband have commuted between New York City and Canada, even if she spends much of her time in New York.

They have two children who have studied in the United States which means she has had to spend most of her time in the States. But once she gets a huge amount of her writing done, she loves to spend her holidays and summers in Canada to decompress.
Her husband, a fine reader, is usually among the very first readers of her writings.

“Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff tells the story of one of the most famous women from Antiquity.

She lived and ruled over a palace that shimmered with gold, garnets, and onyx and also lived a life rich in sexual and political intrigue. Above everything, she was also an ingenious negotiator and shrewd strategist.
Even though Cleopatra lived for less than four decades, her life had a huge influence on the ancient world. Married twice each time to her brother, she poisoned her second husband after waging a brutal war against the first.
Ultimately she got rid of an ambitious sister as she specialized in assassination and incest just like her ancestors.

Cleopatra had a romantic relationship with Mark Antony and Julius Caesar who were some of the most prominent men of her time. She got a child with Caesar and then three more with Antony his protegee.
Her latter relationship would make her the most influential woman of Antiquity and together, they tried to make a new empire a quest that would be their end.

In returning to the classical sources, the author boldly separates fiction from fact as she attempts to rescue the credibility of the magnetic Cleopatra, whose death resulted in a new world order.
Epic in scope and rich in detail, Stacy’s work is a deeply original and luminous reconstruction of what has to be one of the most dazzling lives.

Stacy Schiff’s “The Witches: Salem, 1692” is a fresh and electrifying view of the “Salem Witch Trials.”

It all began on a raw winter in Massachusetts in 1692 when a minister’s niece began to roar and writhe. The panic would then quickly spread and confound the most prominent politicians and the educated men in the colony.

Wives accused husbands, neighbors accused neighbors, and children and parents one another. Less than a year later it was all over but it had taken with it nineteen women and men who had been hanged with an elderly man crushed to death.
Speaking emphatically and loudly at the center of the crisis were adolescent girls. Along with Prohibition and suffrage, The Salem Witch trials are some of the few moments when women were critical in shaping American history.
Drawing from the archives, the author introduces us to the challenges facing an adolescent Puritan girl and the authorities who feel their agendas are under threat.

Showcasing the vulnerability of new settlements and the demands of a rigorous faith, Schiff illuminates early American anxieties and compares and contrasts them with our own.
In an era of invisible enemies, crowdsourcing, and religious provocations, it is an enthralling story in lyrical prose and crackling detail.

Stacy Schiff’s work “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams” tells the story of Samuel Adams, whom Thomas Jefferson said was the best choice for leader of just about any revolution.
He was a man with bare-knuckle tactics and high-minded ideals, who was the leader of one of the most successful civil resistance movements in the history of the United States.
In this work, Stacy Schiff introduces her readers to the eloquent and shrewd Adams who was the moral backbone of the American Revolution.

He was a man who amplified the Boston Massacre and was a significant cog in the engineering of the Boston Tea Party.

He made use of every tool he could lay his hands on to rally a colony and a town and ultimately got several colonies to unite with him, which resulted in the Revolution that created the United States.
For his efforts, he would become America’s most wanted man who was to be charged with treason upon his arrest.

In the novel, Stacy brings to bear her masterful skill as she illuminates his transformation from being an aimless youth, to becoming a beguiling and tireless radical who united the colonies.
Deliriously dramatic, original, and arresting, it is a long overdue chapter in the history of the United States.