Brenda Wineapple’s newest book, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, will be published this August by HarperCollins.
It's the story of when and how America faced the crime of slavery and redefined the meaning of itself as one nation. Stay tuned.
Brenda Wineapple’s other books include the award-winning White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf 2008/Anchor Vintage 2009); a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, a winner of the Washington Arts Club National Award for arts writing, and a New York Times "Notable Book" (2008); White Heat was also named best nonfiction of 2008 in The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, among other publications. She is also the author of Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, which received the Ambassador Award of the English-speaking Union for the Best Biography of 2003 and the Julia Ward Howe Prize from the Boston Book Club.
Elected in 2012 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Wineapple has received a 2009 Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities. A regular contributor to such major publications as The New York Times Book Review and The Nation, among others, she is the editor of The Selected Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier for the Library of America's American Poets Project and the anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing.
She is now writing a meditation about biography.
Formerly Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at The Graduate School, CUNY–and Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies at Union College–Brenda Wineapple teaches in the MFA programs at The New School and Columbia University's School of the Arts.
Selected Recent Essays and Reviews
Jellyfish or Fossil? On Louis Agassiz The Nation March 6, 2013
Where Credit is Due: 'Marmee & Louisa' and 'My Heart is Boundless' The New York Times Sunday Book Review December 21, 2012
Sybille Bedford: Legacies The Paris Review March 21, 2011