Stacy Schiff
Author of Cleopatra: A Life
About the Author
Stacy Schiff was born on October 26, 1961 in Adams, Massachusetts. She received a B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster until 1990. She is the author of several nonfiction books including Saint-Exupéry: A Biography about Antoine de Saint Exupéry, show more Cleopatra: A Life, and The Witches: Salem 1692. She won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov in 2000. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Stacy Schiff
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Schiff, Stacy
- Other names
- De La Bruyère, Stacy
- Birthdate
- 1961-10-26
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Williams College (BA|1982)
Phillips Andover Academy - Occupations
- editor
non-fiction writer
columnist - Organizations
- Simon & Schuster
- Awards and honors
- American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature, 2006)
- Agent
- Eric Simonoff (William Morris Endeavor)
- Short biography
- Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City. Her newest book is entitled "Cleopatra: A Life" (Little, Brown & Co., 2010).
Official website: www.stacyschiff.com - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Adams, Massachusetts, USA
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada - Map Location
- USA
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Discussions
Cleopatra; A Life by Stacy Schiff in Ancient History (August 2013)
Reviews
As I write this, it is March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre (or an "Unhappy Disturbance" if you were British) on a cold night in 1770. It started as an argument between a British soldier and several Boston residents and soon escalated as a crowd gathered, chasing the soldier back to the Customs House, where a sentry stood guard. Other British soldiers came out to defend the soldier as the crowd taunted, throwing snowballs and pieces of ice (and perhaps objects) at the soldiers, show more daring them to fire. Then, in the confusion, shots were fired, and when the smoke cleared, five people lay dead, while three more were injured.
Famously, John Adams became the man chosen to defend the British soldiers, though he was by no means a supporter of the British soldiers in Boston. The soldiers--two thousand strong--had arrived in 1768 to quell riots and to enforce the Townsend Duties, which taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea; set up courts to prosecute smugglers; and allowed British officials to search colonists' homes.
You can imagine how popular all that was. For many years Boston had been the center of colonial discontent. Tensions were already high, and the arrival of the soldiers, 1 for every 8 Bostonians, was destined to create and exacerbate the friction.
It was no accident that the deaths quickly became the center of an ongoing war of words in the press, the Committees of Correspondence throughout the American Colonies, and the efforts of the Sons of Liberty. And while there were many men in the midst of these efforts one man sticks out as the chief rabble-rouser, a man that King George called the "most dangerous man in the colonies": Samuel Adams.
Who was this man? To me, my experience with Samuel was as the older cousin of John Adams, the man who saved the Revolution by securing financing for it from Europe, who wrote the Massachusetts constitution, helped write the Declaration of Independence, and became our second president. Sam barely gets a supporting role in that story. And yet, if you were to poll Americans and British of the day, Samuel Adams was among the leading voices, if not the leading voice, in the years up to and during the Revolution.
So on this anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a seminal event in the years before the American Revolution, I read Stacy Schiff's biography of Samuel Adams, appropriately titled "The Revolutionary." In these pages, we see Samuel as a gifted orator and writer, the man of a hundred pseudonyms, a planner and connecter, an "everyman" who is anything but that. Unique among the Founding Fathers, he never had money, never had resources, and yet was at one point the most wanted man in America.
Even as the Revolution passed into the Founding of the nation and he began to fade, he remained forefront in the minds of those who did not. On the eve of the anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1801, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged his role in bringing about the break with England, calling him the "patriarch of liberty" and asking himself if Samuel would approve of his speech. Having read Samuel's rise in spite of failure, I am convinced that it was no amount of hyperbole to see him as more than just a rabble-rouser, but a gifted politician and leader who predicted almost every aspect of the fight for independence, and was seen as almost as important as George Washington by his contemporaries.
And there's this: it's a really good piece of history and a great addition to the modern understanding of the Founding generation. show less
Famously, John Adams became the man chosen to defend the British soldiers, though he was by no means a supporter of the British soldiers in Boston. The soldiers--two thousand strong--had arrived in 1768 to quell riots and to enforce the Townsend Duties, which taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea; set up courts to prosecute smugglers; and allowed British officials to search colonists' homes.
You can imagine how popular all that was. For many years Boston had been the center of colonial discontent. Tensions were already high, and the arrival of the soldiers, 1 for every 8 Bostonians, was destined to create and exacerbate the friction.
It was no accident that the deaths quickly became the center of an ongoing war of words in the press, the Committees of Correspondence throughout the American Colonies, and the efforts of the Sons of Liberty. And while there were many men in the midst of these efforts one man sticks out as the chief rabble-rouser, a man that King George called the "most dangerous man in the colonies": Samuel Adams.
Who was this man? To me, my experience with Samuel was as the older cousin of John Adams, the man who saved the Revolution by securing financing for it from Europe, who wrote the Massachusetts constitution, helped write the Declaration of Independence, and became our second president. Sam barely gets a supporting role in that story. And yet, if you were to poll Americans and British of the day, Samuel Adams was among the leading voices, if not the leading voice, in the years up to and during the Revolution.
So on this anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a seminal event in the years before the American Revolution, I read Stacy Schiff's biography of Samuel Adams, appropriately titled "The Revolutionary." In these pages, we see Samuel as a gifted orator and writer, the man of a hundred pseudonyms, a planner and connecter, an "everyman" who is anything but that. Unique among the Founding Fathers, he never had money, never had resources, and yet was at one point the most wanted man in America.
Even as the Revolution passed into the Founding of the nation and he began to fade, he remained forefront in the minds of those who did not. On the eve of the anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1801, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged his role in bringing about the break with England, calling him the "patriarch of liberty" and asking himself if Samuel would approve of his speech. Having read Samuel's rise in spite of failure, I am convinced that it was no amount of hyperbole to see him as more than just a rabble-rouser, but a gifted politician and leader who predicted almost every aspect of the fight for independence, and was seen as almost as important as George Washington by his contemporaries.
And there's this: it's a really good piece of history and a great addition to the modern understanding of the Founding generation. show less
Until reading this book I knew little about Cleopatra beyond the word on the street, which is based more on Elizabeth Taylor's portrayal than on Cleopatra. Schiff's meticulous biography is fascinating. She covers all kinds of detail: life, culture, medicine, politics, government, warfare, and education. She also describes a lavish opulence that is - and was at the time - astonishing. But what Schiff does best is to disparage the image of Cleopatra as a wicked temptress, instead showing the show more reader a more credible picture of a remarkably intelligent woman and powerful monarch who brought prosperity to her country. This is a compelling book with balanced opinions that I will keep to read again, and for reference. Highly recommended.
"Her power has been made to derive from her sexuality... It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest, against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence, in her ropes of pearls, there should at least be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress. It is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent."
"There was a glamour and a grandeur to her story well before Octavian or Shakespeare got his hands on it." show less
"Her power has been made to derive from her sexuality... It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest, against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence, in her ropes of pearls, there should at least be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress. It is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent."
"There was a glamour and a grandeur to her story well before Octavian or Shakespeare got his hands on it." show less
The turbulent times of the last century BC and the varied cultures, wars, and characters of the period spring to life in Stacy Schiff's fascinating biography, making Cleopatra, as compelling and remarkable a woman as she was (and not in the ways you may imagine), almost a hook for a book about the classical world at a time of dramatic change. Schiff is a wonderful writer who packs a lot of detail and research into a very readable writing style; while there are, alas, no contemporary sources show more for Cleopatra's life, she has delved into both the classical authors who wrote within a few centuries of the period as well as modern scholarly works, and is careful to discuss difference among these close-to-primary sources and how she believes politics may have influenced what they wrote.
The outlines of Cleopatra's life are well known, that she inherited the throne of Egypt as a teenager but had to outsmart her brother to claim it, met and became lovers with Julius Caesar and subsequently Mark Antony, and ultimately killed herself. In the course of the book, Schiff makes the claim that Cleopatra has been misinterpreted all these centuries, maligned as "the wickedest woman in the world" and the seductress who caused men to throw away their kingdoms, because it is easier and more comfortable for people (read: men, mostly) to think of powerful men being undone by a woman's sexual power than by her intellectual and political power. And she provides strong evidence for this.
In the last century BC, Alexandria, where Cleopatra reigned, was a cosmopolitan city, a center of intellectual life (the famed library was there and people knew that the earth was round, that the moon controlled tides, and much more that was lost to the west for centuries), art and the decorative arts, music and entertainment, great wealth and excesses of hospitality, and people who appreciated and expected all of these. As Schiff writes, "it was a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture, where the Greek penchant for commerce met the Egyptian mania for hospitality, a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air. Even the people watching was best there." As a side note, some of the most interesting aspects of this book for me were the differences between the Roman system and culture and the Alexandrian system and culture, and the turbulence of the times, with civil wars in Rome and shifting loyalties among the varied rulers who were part of the far-flung Roman empire
Furthermore, women had for centuries had rights in Egypt that were unheard of in the west, among them the right to make their own marriages, to be supported after divorcing, and to inherit and hold property. And Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from Macedonian aristocrats who had ruled Egypt for centuries by the time she was born and the inheritor of a strong tradition of Ptolemaic queens: she was educated and groomed to rule. All evidence suggests that she was an extremely competent, politically savvy, and ultimately beloved queen, who as ruler of Egypt had powers almost unimaginable today: not only did she determine military strategy, oversee all commerce, issue currency, receive petitioners of all sorts, put on fabulous entertainments, travel among and gain the support of the Egyptian population who, through a bureaucratic taxing system of immense proportions, essentially worked for her, but she also aligned herself with goddess Isis and was worshiped almost as a goddess herself.
Schiff portrays Cleopatra as an extremely intelligent and politically accomplished woman, yet writes: "The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all. We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty." show less
The outlines of Cleopatra's life are well known, that she inherited the throne of Egypt as a teenager but had to outsmart her brother to claim it, met and became lovers with Julius Caesar and subsequently Mark Antony, and ultimately killed herself. In the course of the book, Schiff makes the claim that Cleopatra has been misinterpreted all these centuries, maligned as "the wickedest woman in the world" and the seductress who caused men to throw away their kingdoms, because it is easier and more comfortable for people (read: men, mostly) to think of powerful men being undone by a woman's sexual power than by her intellectual and political power. And she provides strong evidence for this.
In the last century BC, Alexandria, where Cleopatra reigned, was a cosmopolitan city, a center of intellectual life (the famed library was there and people knew that the earth was round, that the moon controlled tides, and much more that was lost to the west for centuries), art and the decorative arts, music and entertainment, great wealth and excesses of hospitality, and people who appreciated and expected all of these. As Schiff writes, "it was a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture, where the Greek penchant for commerce met the Egyptian mania for hospitality, a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air. Even the people watching was best there." As a side note, some of the most interesting aspects of this book for me were the differences between the Roman system and culture and the Alexandrian system and culture, and the turbulence of the times, with civil wars in Rome and shifting loyalties among the varied rulers who were part of the far-flung Roman empire
Furthermore, women had for centuries had rights in Egypt that were unheard of in the west, among them the right to make their own marriages, to be supported after divorcing, and to inherit and hold property. And Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from Macedonian aristocrats who had ruled Egypt for centuries by the time she was born and the inheritor of a strong tradition of Ptolemaic queens: she was educated and groomed to rule. All evidence suggests that she was an extremely competent, politically savvy, and ultimately beloved queen, who as ruler of Egypt had powers almost unimaginable today: not only did she determine military strategy, oversee all commerce, issue currency, receive petitioners of all sorts, put on fabulous entertainments, travel among and gain the support of the Egyptian population who, through a bureaucratic taxing system of immense proportions, essentially worked for her, but she also aligned herself with goddess Isis and was worshiped almost as a goddess herself.
Schiff portrays Cleopatra as an extremely intelligent and politically accomplished woman, yet writes: "The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all. We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty." show less
This book was recommended to me by a friend whose opinion I trust. When it first arrived I will admit to doubts. The cover looks like a ‘chick lit’ version of the supposedly passionate love affairs of a beautiful ancient queen, and nothing like an academic book of any weight. On opening it, however, I found not only some beautiful photographic illustrations, but also a Selected Bibliography. A good start.
It got better. Schiff manages to be both readable and accurate. She tells the story show more in the third person, but from Cleopatra’s point of view. For the reader this could be an eye opener. Cleopatra is one of those historic characters everybody knows about, either from Shakespeare or from the famous (infamous?) film with Elizabeth Taylor. She was a stunningly beautiful Egyptian queen who had passionate love affairs with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Or was she? Schiff sets the record straight. Her Cleopatra is a fiercely intelligent, politically astute queen fighting for her throne and her people, at a time of huge turmoil. The major power, Rome, was in the throes of a civil war, and in order to survive, Cleopatra had to choose sides not once, but twice. The first time was easy; she was fighting for her own throne and Caesar appeared in Egypt at just the right time to come to her aid. Schiff does a very good job of explaining the complexities of the Egyptian system, including the fact that Cleopatra, being a Ptolemy, is Greek, not actually Egyptian. Schiff also explains how ‘love’ was probably not a motivation on either side; they both had something to gain. Caesar had his army, and Cleopatra had the money, something Caesar needed desperately. A match made in heaven one might say. After the death of Caesar the second choice was a little more difficult. Mark Antony or Octavian? At the time Mark Antony was the stronger of the two. Cleopatra could not have known how politically astute Octavian was, at least as good as she was, and how haphazard Mark Antony could be. He chose with his heart, Octavian always with his head. Schiff manages to make this clear. Also the fact that Cleopatra had given birth to Caesar’s only son, Caesarion, a potential, and very dangerous, rival to Octavian. Schiff does make clear, however, that the nail in the coffin of Mark Antony, and by association Cleopatra, was her very un-Romanness. Cleopatra’s death is full of romantic myth, which Schiff brushes aside. The asp probably didn’t exist. As for her suicide, it was definitely a suicide, but how much Octavian ‘engineered’ it is a subject of much debate. Schiff describes both sides, and leave the reader to make up their own mind. This is not a light read, but it is an enjoyable one. Schiff uses her sources well, and throws light on a turbulent time, and a fascinating and intelligent woman. show less
It got better. Schiff manages to be both readable and accurate. She tells the story show more in the third person, but from Cleopatra’s point of view. For the reader this could be an eye opener. Cleopatra is one of those historic characters everybody knows about, either from Shakespeare or from the famous (infamous?) film with Elizabeth Taylor. She was a stunningly beautiful Egyptian queen who had passionate love affairs with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Or was she? Schiff sets the record straight. Her Cleopatra is a fiercely intelligent, politically astute queen fighting for her throne and her people, at a time of huge turmoil. The major power, Rome, was in the throes of a civil war, and in order to survive, Cleopatra had to choose sides not once, but twice. The first time was easy; she was fighting for her own throne and Caesar appeared in Egypt at just the right time to come to her aid. Schiff does a very good job of explaining the complexities of the Egyptian system, including the fact that Cleopatra, being a Ptolemy, is Greek, not actually Egyptian. Schiff also explains how ‘love’ was probably not a motivation on either side; they both had something to gain. Caesar had his army, and Cleopatra had the money, something Caesar needed desperately. A match made in heaven one might say. After the death of Caesar the second choice was a little more difficult. Mark Antony or Octavian? At the time Mark Antony was the stronger of the two. Cleopatra could not have known how politically astute Octavian was, at least as good as she was, and how haphazard Mark Antony could be. He chose with his heart, Octavian always with his head. Schiff manages to make this clear. Also the fact that Cleopatra had given birth to Caesar’s only son, Caesarion, a potential, and very dangerous, rival to Octavian. Schiff does make clear, however, that the nail in the coffin of Mark Antony, and by association Cleopatra, was her very un-Romanness. Cleopatra’s death is full of romantic myth, which Schiff brushes aside. The asp probably didn’t exist. As for her suicide, it was definitely a suicide, but how much Octavian ‘engineered’ it is a subject of much debate. Schiff describes both sides, and leave the reader to make up their own mind. This is not a light read, but it is an enjoyable one. Schiff uses her sources well, and throws light on a turbulent time, and a fascinating and intelligent woman. show less
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