“By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest. For few poets and novelists are capable of that high degree of tension which gives us reality. But almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Of this, too, there is certain proof. For how often, when a biography is read and tossed aside, some scene remains bright, some figure lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a poem or a novel, to feel a start of recognition, as if we remembered something that we had known before.” –Virginia Woolf
| Image | Name | Summary | Price | Buy | hf:tax:product_cat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Autobiography of W E B Du Bois: Great Barrington Edition | “Your most useful and well done reprogramming of Du Bois’s Autobiography . . . Well done and significant indeed!” –David Levering Lewis. The Berkshire illustrated edition of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is the first to be arranged in accordance with the great Black activist’s own notes. Read about Karen Christensen’s discovery of the original manuscript: “A Du Bois Discovery.” | Price range: $14.99 through $49.95 | biography black-studies | |
 | Writing Great Tom: T. S. Eliot & the Keepers of the Flame | Writing Great Tom is the journal T. S. Matthews kept as he worked on the first major biography of T. S. Eliot. It shows how he brought to light unknown women including Eliot’s first wife Vivien, and how the widow Valerie Eliot tried to repress the book. Read the foreword here. | Price range: $29.99 through $49.99 | biography literature | |
 | Dictionary of Chinese Biography: Modern Era | Volume 4 of the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography is a stand-alone handbook of short biographies of key people in China since 1979. It is a companion to the first 3 volumes, which contain long-form essays by many of the world’s leading China scholars about key figures who have shaped, influenced, and transformed China over the millennia: emperors, politicians, poets, writers, artists, scientists, explorers and philosophers. This is the first time that such comprehensive collection has been available in English, produced by internationally recognized experts, and designed to satisfy the growing thirst for knowledge about China. “No biographical dictionary of China has successfully replaced Herbert Giles’s [1898] work until the new DCB. It’s about time!” –Benjamin Elman, Princeton University. | $199.00 | biography china | |
 | Dictionary of Chinese Biography: Prehistory to Xi Jiinping | The Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography uses the life stories of 135 key individuals, to tell the story of China itself over the entire span of its history. This is the 3-volume set; Volume 4 can be purchased separately. For the complete 4 volumes, click here. | $595.00 | biography china world-history | |
 | Dictionary of Chinese Biography: Complete 4-Volume Set | The Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography uses the life stories of key individuals, selected from the earliest dynasties to the present day, to tell the story of China itself over the entire span of its history. Volume 4, available separately, is on contemporary figures. Long-form essays by many of the world’s leading China scholars introduce key figures who have shaped, influenced, and transformed China over the millennia: emperors, politicians, poets, writers, artists, scientists, explorers and philosophers. This is the first time that such comprehensive collection has been available in English, produced by internationally recognized experts, and designed to satisfy the growing thirst for knowledge about China. “No biographical dictionary of China has successfully replaced Herbert Giles’s [1898] work until the new DCB. It’s about time!” –Benjamin Elman, Princeton University. | $779.00 | biography china world-history |