Deirdre Bair, who as an unknown writer half a century ago scored a coup by getting the reclusive Samuel Beckett to agree to let her write his biography, then secured the same permission from another ...

(Lev Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays. Subscribe to his RSS feed.) I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark ...

W. B. Yeats's occultism fits into an Irish Protestant literary tradition that includes Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Maturin, Bram Stoker and Elizabeth Bowen. These, according to R. F. Foster in W.B.

American academic Deirdre Bair won global acclaim for her biographies of the writers Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). In this memoir, she recalls those heady years in ...

Deirdre Bair had never written a biography when she sent a letter to Samuel Beckett in 1971, suggesting she write his. At the time, she was a 31-year-old journalist ...

Deirdre Bair, biographer of Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Al Capone – obituary Beckett agreed to her project but put up numerous obstacles and even forbade her from using a tape recorder or ...

A self-proclaimed “accidental biographer”, Deirdre Bair has documented the lives of subjects as varied as Anaïs Nin, the graphic artist Saul Steinberg and gangster Al Capone. In this memoir, she ...