She was a lover of the arts and literature a woman who spoke four languages and taught and translated modern langauages. This is how Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife, Véra. She lives in New York City.įor you are the only person I can talk to-about the hue of a cloud, about the singing of a thought, and about the fact that when I went out to work today and looked each sunflower in the face, they all smiled back at me with their seeds.

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 was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 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. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions. All three were New York Times Notable Books the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. 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. Stacy Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form.Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine-a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy.

Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the twentieth century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. 'Without my wife,' he once noted, 'I wouldn't have written a single novel.' Nabokov wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, and third for no one at all. Stacy Schiff brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time: Vladimir Nabokov, émigré author of Lolita Pale Fire and Speak, Memory, and his beloved wife, Véra. ONE OF ESQUIRE'S 50 BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME Description WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the award-winning author of The Revolutionary and The Witches comes 'an elegantly nuanced portrait of wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov's marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work.'-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Vera by stacy schiff