Stacy Schiff – Author Biography
Early Life
Stacy Schiff was born on 26 October 1961 in Adams, Massachusetts. She studied at Williams College and worked as an editor at Simon & Schuster before leaving to write biographies full time.
Career
Schiff’s first biography, Saint-Exupéry (1994), was a Pulitzer finalist. Her second, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (1999) — a portrait of the woman behind the great novelist — won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2000. She then turned to subjects history had mythologised: Cleopatra: A Life (2010) stripped away two millennia of legend to recover the brilliant strategist; The Witches: Salem, 1692 (2015) reconstructed the witch trials in forensic detail.
Major Works
Véra (1999) and Cleopatra: A Life (2010) are her landmark biographies, alongside The Witches (2015).
Writing Style and Themes
Schiff writes elegant, novelistic biography — archival rigour delivered in lapidary prose. Her recurring themes are women misremembered by history, the gap between legend and evidence, and the way power distorts reputation. She is a master of the telling detail that reframes a whole life.
Legacy
Schiff is among America’s most decorated biographers: a Pulitzer winner whose books consistently reshape public understanding of iconic figures. Cleopatra was a bestseller that changed how a generation pictures its subject.
