American Women Biographies

Acclaimed Irish novelist Nuala O’Connor’s bold reimagining of the life of James Joyce’s wife, muse, and the model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses is a “lively and loving paean to the indomitable Nora Barnacle” (Edna O’Brien). Dublin, 1904. Nora Joseph Barnacle is a twenty-year-old from...

This biography, based on firsthand knowledge and interviews with Mrs. Astor's friends and the heads of New York's great cultural institutions, gives us back the woman so loved and admired. At the age of fifty-one, Brooke Astor wedded the notoriously ill-tempered Vincent Astor, who died in 1959.

Julia Ward (1819-1910) was an heiress and aspiring poet when she married Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the education of the blind. Together the Howes knew many of the key figures of their era, from Charles Dickens to John Brown. But Samuel also wasted Julia's inheritance, isolated and discouraged her, and opposed her literary ambitions. Julia persisted and continued to publish poems and plays while raising six children.

One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment. Calling themselves "The Sisterhood," the group would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.

The Watergate scandal began with a break-in at the office of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1971, and ended when President Gerald Ford granted Richard M. Nixon a pardon on September 8, 1974, one month after Nixon resigned from office in disgrace. Effectively...

For centuries, women who emerge as mystic leaders have played vital roles in American culture. For just as long, they've been subjugated and ridiculed. Today, women and others across the nation are once again turning to their mystic powers to #HexThePatriarchy and help fight the forces that seem bent on relegating them to second-class citizenry.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet. Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of...

Spies played significant roles on both sides of the American Civil War, and many were women. These fascinating women contributed to the war effort when women could not vote or own property. Yet, Union or Confederate, all of these women had conviction. This audiobook explores the experiences of women whose courage and conviction played a key role in the outcome of the Civil War battle strategies and tactics. Their stories of courage, betrayal, and even love still resonate with women of today. North or South, all the women within lived fascinating lives that deserve to be told.

In Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome, Levenstein writes, with love and exasperation, about navigating her career through the renowned Italian tangle of brilliance and ineptitude, sexism and tolerance, rigidity and chaos. Part memoir starting with her epic quest for an Italian medical license and part portrait of Italy from a unique point of view, Dottoressa is packed with vignettes that illuminate the national differences in character, lifestyle, health, and health care between her two countries.

Governor Andrew Cuomo tells the riveting story of how he took charge in the fight against COVID-19 as New York became the epicenter of the pandemic, offering hard-won lessons in leadership and his vision for the path forward. “An impressive road map to dealing with a crisis as serious as any...

Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?” It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery.

The heroines of Lauren Willig's bestselling Pink Carnation series have engaged in espionage all over nineteenth-century Europe. In the sixth stand-alone volume, our fair English heroine travels to India, where she finds freedom—and risk—more exciting than she ever imagined. Everyone warned...

Hepburn acted in some capacity from the start of the 1930s through the early-1990s, and it is important to view how the nature of Hepburn's roles changed from her youth to old age. Aside from being one of the most recognized and acclaimed actresses in history, Hepburn's career is also of great importance because she forced Americans to reevaluate their expectations for female behavior, both in films themselves and off the movie set as well.

The story of the American Civil War is not complete without examining the extraordinary and influential lives of Jessie Frémont, Nelly McClellan, Ellen Sherman, and Julia Grant, the wives of Abraham Lincoln's top generals. They were their husbands' closest confidantes and had a profound impact on the generals' ambitions and actions. Most important, the women's own attitudes toward and relationships with Lincoln had major historical significance.

Few actresses lived their lives in the public eye more than Marilyn Monroe, and yet her life remains shrouded in mystery to this day. While it's common knowledge that Marilyn's life is a rags-to-riches story, her life is bookended by hazy details surrounding her early life and even more mysterious death.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the groundbreaking backstairs look at the White House, The Residence, comes an intimate, news-making look at the true modern power brokers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the First Ladies, from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama. One of the most...

Shortly before Christmas 1933 in Depression-scarred Canton, Ohio, a small newspaper ad offered cash gifts to seventy-five families in distress. Readers were asked to send letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr. B. Virdot. The author’s grandfather, Sam Stone, was...

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life.

Many people in history have claimed that Abraham Lincoln never loved Mary Todd Lincoln, and that in fact his love was focused upon Anne Rutledge. They have claimed that his wife hurt him politically though she drove him to the Presidency, that she embarrassed him financially as well as socially and inflicted on him the agony of adjustment to her psychopathic personality. Yet, is there any truth to any of these claims?

In Writings to Young Women from Laura Ingalls Wilder: On Life As a Pioneer Woman, Laura tells her readers what it was like to be a pioneer in the early 1900s. Her stories and insights show us how difficult even the simplest chores or tasks were for the early pioneers, yet through it all she...