Stacy Madeleine Schiff (born October 26, 1961)[1] is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Stacy Schiff
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Schiff in 2016
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| Born | Stacy Madeleine Schiff (1961-10-26) October 26, 1961 (age 62) Adams, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Writer and editor |
| Education | Phillips Academy (Andover) |
| Alma mater | Williams College |
| Genre | Biography, essay, non-fiction |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize |
| Website | |
| stacyschiff | |
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 Véra, a biography of Véra 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 BiographyofAntoine 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 was made into Franklin, a 2024 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] Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jane Kamensky found it to be “curiously flat,” offering “banalities” and a “tenuous grip on the period.” Kamensky concluded, “For all her talents in sketching the who, what, where and when of the Salem trials, [the] vexed question of why is one that Schiff simply cannot manage.” [11] Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Felipe Fernández-Armesto found that Schiff offered "a trial narrative unsurpassed for detail and impressive for her mastery of the fragmentary and frustrating sources." He found the overall result, however, to be "unsatisfying" because "she uncovers no new clues to understanding" the context of the trials.[12]
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.[13][14][15] 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.[16]
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