Stacy Schiff

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.

Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 was published in 2015.

The New York Times described it as "an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative".

David McCullough declared the book "brilliant from start to finish".

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.

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.

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).

Stacy Madeleine Schiff (born October 26, 1961) is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies.

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.

She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Her biography of Véra Nabokova won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Vera, a biography of Véra Nabokova, the wife and muse of the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) won the George Washington Book Prize.

It is being made into Franklin, an upcoming 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."

The New Yorker termed the book "a work of literature"; Simon Winchester predicted "it will become a classic".

Cleopatra appeared on The New York Times 's Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the 2011 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.