Each year, the Leon Levy Center for Biography selects an eminent biographer to deliver a lecture on the process of researching and writing biography. Learn about past Leon Levy Biography Lecturers below.
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2023 — Walter Isaacson“Lessons about Living with Geniuses” Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and, most recently, Elon Musk. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at https://isaacson.tulane.edu/. |
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2022 – Ramachandra Guha“Preparing for Gandhi” Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), and a widely acclaimed history of his country, India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) He is also the author of a two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi Before India, 2013, and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 2018, both published by Knopf), and of a memoir of his life as a cricket fan, The Commonwealth of Cricket (William Collins, 2020). His most recent book is Rebels against the Raj (Knopf, 2022). His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Howard Milton Prize of the British Society for Sports History, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Yale University. |
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2022 – Annette Gordon-Reed“Writing the Lives of the Well Known and the Unknown” Annette Gordon-Reed, the renowned historian and author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), gives this year’s talk on writing and researching biography. Her many other books include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy; Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History; and On Juneteenth. Gordon-Reed, who is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, has received numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal. |
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2020 – Judith ThurmanTuesday, September 22, 2020, 6:00 p.m. Judith Thurman has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1987, and since 2000, as a Staff Writer specializing in profiles and cultural criticism. She is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-winning film, Out of Africa. Her second biography, “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” won the Los Angeles Times and the Salon Book Awards for Biography. She is also the author of “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire,” a collection of her essays. Thurman won the Harold G. Vursell Award for prose style, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Rungstedlund Prize from the Danish Royal Academy; and Bard College’s Mary McCarthy Award for a woman writer’s life work. She is also a chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. |
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2019 – David NasawWednesday, September 25, 2019, 6:30 p.m. In telling the stories of three powerful men—Andrew Carnegie, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph P. Kennedy—David Nasaw discovered that individuals, no matter how rich and politically influential, do not make history by themselves. Nasaw—who is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY—reveals what he learned about the exercise and limits of power, in this year’s annual talk on writing and researching biography. His highly acclaimed and best-selling books include The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy; Andrew Carnegie; and The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. |
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2018 – Geoffrey WardThursday, September 27, 2018, 6:30 p.m. Geoffrey C. Ward delivers the Annual Leon Levy Lecture: “The Biographer’s Dilemma: Searching for the Known and Unknowable.” Historian, biographer and screenwriter, Ward the author of sixteen books, including A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has written or cowritten many documentary films, including The War, The Civil War, Baseball, The West, Mark Twain, Not for Ourselves Alone, and Jazz. |
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2017 – Taylor BranchWednesday, September 27, 2017, 6:30 p.m. Taylor Branch is best known for his landmark trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the history of the American Civil Rights Movement. The trilogy’s first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards in 1989. The third and final volume of the 2,912-page trilogy—collectively called America in the King Years—was released in January 2006, and a selected summary of the trilogy, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, was published in 2013. His 2009 memoir, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, chronicles an unprecedented eight-year project to gather a sitting president’s comprehensive oral history secretly on tape. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland. |
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2016 – Hermione LeeWednesday, September 28, 2016, 6:30 p.m. Hermione Lee is the author of the definitive life of Virginia Woolf, a signal achievement in literary biography, as well as biographies and critical studies of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Elizabeth Bowen, and most recently, the brilliant late-developer Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first book (a biography) at age 58; Lee won the 2013 James Tait Black Prize for Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. She has written extensively on the art and craft of ‘life-writing,’ in Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography and Biography: A Very Short Introduction, and participated memorably in the Leon Levy Center’s 2013 Biography Conference. Educated at Oxford, she has taught at the College of William & Mary, the University of Liverpool, and the University of York. In 1998 she was the first woman to be named Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and in 2008 she was elected the President of Wolfson College, Oxford, where she directs the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, she was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). |
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2015 – Brenda WineappleMonday, October 5, 2015, 6:30 p.m. Brenda Wineapple is the author of the widely acclaimed biographies Genêt; A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; Hawthorne: A Life (2003, winner of the Ambassador Award for Best Biography); and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2013 she published Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, a groundbreaking study of how America confronted slavery and redefined itself as a nation. Writing in the New York Times, David S. Reynolds described it as “history as it feels in real time … delivered through its vivid portrayal of the human side of an era.” Wineapple has received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim, and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, and the New York Institute of the Humanities. Formerly Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, she has taught at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, The New School, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Union College. She is now teaching a new master’s course on biographical narrative sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center. |
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2014 – Richard HolmesTuesday, September 23, 2014, 6:30 p.m. Richard Holmes has made his mark in two fields, literary biography and science writing. He transfigured the way the Romantic poets are written about with his first book, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), of which The New York Times noted, “If the art of biography was ever damned, Shelley: The Pursuit redeemed it.” He is best known for his definitive two-volume biography: Coleridge: Early Visions (1989, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award) and Coleridge: Darker Reflections. His other books include Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (which Stacy Schiff has called a book every biographer secretly wishes he’d written), Sidetracks, and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the James Tait Black Prize). After ten years of teaching, he published his international bestseller, The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the British Academy. In 1992, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE). View the video of the 2014 Leon Levy Biography Lecture. |
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2013 – David Levering LewisWednesday, September 18, 2013, 6:30 p.m. David Levering Lewis is Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History, Emeritus, at New York University. Twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, for each volume of W.E.B. DuBois (an unrivaled feat), Lewis has received the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, and the National Humanities Medal, which was presented to him by President Obama. His other books include the first biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (King), God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, and a classic history of Harlem, When Harlem Was in Vogue. He is currently completing a biography of Wendell Willkie. View the video of the 2013 Leon Levy Biography Lecture. |
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2012 – Robert K. MassieMonday, September 24, 2012, 7 p.m. Robert K. Massie is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Russian history and the author most recently of Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, which won the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction, and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Born in Kentucky and raised in Tennessee, Massie studied at Yale and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Massie’s first book,Nicholas and Alexandra, published in 1967 and translated into 17 languages, was a New York Times bestseller for 46 weeks, and became an Academy Award-winning film. His book Peter the Great: His Life and World won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1981, and became an Emmy Award-winning television mini-series. Massie is also the author of Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War; Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea; and The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. |
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2011 – Hilary SpurlingWednesday, September 21, 2011, 7 p.m. The Fourth Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture featured distinguished author Hilary Spurling. Born in 1940 and educated at Somerville College, Oxford University, Ms. Spurling has written biographies of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Paul Scott, Sonia Orwell and Henri Matisse in 2 volumes, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times biography prize in 2005. She is a CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and founder of the Royal Literary Society’s Writers Fellowship scheme. Her latest book is Pearl Buck in China, of which The New York Times writes, “Hilary Spurling approaches Buck’s life the way an art restorer approaches a serious but neglected painting. She clears away decades’ worth of grime, repairs some buckling, smoothes out a bit of flaking craquelure. The resulting portrait … has an absorbing glow.” (Photo by Graeme Robertson) |
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2010 – Ron ChernowTuesday, September 28, 2010, 7 p.m. Mr. Chernow has written The House of Morgan, which won a National Book Award, The Warburgs, which was cited by the American Library Association as one of the year’s ten best books in 1993, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and praised by The Times of Londonas “one of the great American biographies,” and Alexander Hamilton, which won a George Washington Book Prize for the year’s best book about the founding era. The New York Times has called Mr. Chernow “as elegant an architect of monumental histories as we’ve seen in decades.” A frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Chernow is a familiar figure on national radio and television shows—he has appeared on C-Span, CNN, the History Channel, and National Public Radio, and in numerous documentaries. And in 2010, his Washington: A Life, a rare single volume, full-length portrait of George Washington, was released by Penguin Press and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. (Author photo by Sigrid Estrada) |
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2009 – Robert A. CaroSeptember 29, 2009, 7 p.m. Robert A. Caro, the master biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson, gave the Second Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture in 2009. Caro is the author of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and The Years of Lyndon Johnson, whose first three published volumes are The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate. Mr. Caro was then at work on the fourth volume, The Passage of Power, an examination of Johnson’s years in the White House, published to great acclaim in 2012. Caro’s biographies of Moses and Johnson have garnered numerous honors, incluing two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography, two National Book Critics Circle Awards for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” The Boston Globe notes that “Caro has a unique place among American political biographers. He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” A graduate of Princeton University, Caro has been a Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor at The American Academy in Berlin, a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia University, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. |
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2008 – Stacy SchiffNovember 5, 2008, 7 p.m. Stacy Schiff gave the inaugural Leon Levy Lecture on Biography, speaking on the process of researching and writing her biography Cleopatra: A Life, at the time a work-in-progress, published in 2010 by Little, Brown. Schiff is also the author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, which won the 2005 George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the InstitutFrançais’s Gilbert Chinard Prize. She received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), published by Random House. Her first book, Saint-Exupéry, published by Knopf in 1994, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of numerous awards abroad. |
