An evening with two award-winning biographers and historians: Stacy Schiff (The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams) and Kerri K. Greenidge (The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family).

“Schiff’s previous books [on Cleopatra, The Witches, Véra Nabokov and Antoine de Saint-Exupery] offer complex, thoroughly imagined, stylishly written portraits of figures whose histories have previously been subsumed in a murk of myth or otherwise obscured,” wrote Ruth Franklin. In her new book, she reintroduces readers to the shrewd, eloquent and intensely disciplined man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. “For too long, Adams has evaded historians, but Schiff draws him from the shadows," wrote Ron Chernow. “This is a time for Americans to meditate on the fate of their republic and no better place to start than here, at the beginning, with this book.”

Kerri K. Greenidge, whose previous book, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, now publishes The Grimkes, a landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century. It is “remarkable for its deft storytelling; its intelligent interweaving of themes such as slavery and abolitionism, race and gender, family and high society; and its definitive painting of an extraordinary American family across multiple generations,” wrote Gene Andrew Jarrett.