Stacy Schiff

Schiff was born in Adams, Massachusetts, to Morton Schiff, the president of Schiff Clothing, a store founded by Schiff's great-grandfather in 1897, and Ellen, a professor of French literature at North Adams State college (now called Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts).[2] Schiff graduated from Phillips Academy (Andover) preparatory school, and subsequently earned her B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990.

Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Vera, a biography of Vera Nabokov, the wife and muse of the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography of Antoine de Saint Exupéry.[1]

Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) won the George Washington Book Prize.[3] It is being made into Franklin, an upcoming miniseries starring Michael Douglas.

Her fourth book, Cleopatra: A Life, was published in 2010. As the Wall Street Journal's reviewer put it, "Schiff does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist."[4] The New Yorker termed the book "a work of literature;"[5] Simon Winchester predicted "it will become a classic."[6] Cleopatra appeared on The New York Times's Top Ten Books of 2010,[7] and won the 2011 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography.[8]

Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 was published in 2015. The New York Times described it as "an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative."[9] David McCullough declared the book "brilliant from start to finish."[10]

Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post.[11][12][13] A former guest columnist at The New York Times, Schiff resides in New York City and is a trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.[14]

• National Endowment for the Humanities, fellowship[15]
• 1996 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, fellowship[15][16]
• 2000 Pulitzer Prize, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)[17]
• 2006 George Washington Book Prize, "A Great Improvisation"[18]
• 2015 Lapham's Quarterly Janus Prize[19]
• 2017 New England Historic Genealogical Society Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography[20]
• 2018 French Ministry of Culture, Chevalier des Arts et Lettres[21]
• 2019 American Academy of Arts and Letters[22]

• Essjay controversy

• "An Interview with Stacy Schiff" Archived August 14, 2009, at the Wayback Machine by Suellen Stringer-Hye, published in April 1999 by Random House.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Q&A interview with Schiff, November 6, 2011
• Interview with Schiff on "New Books in Biography"
• Stacy Schiff, The Art of Biography No. 6 Paris Review, Winter 2017