biographer

Famed biographer Walter Isaacson sits at the “Truth Under Fire” table, too.

In her introduction, Lee’s appointed biographer Casey Cep observes that it “takes enormous patience and unerring instincts to refine a scrap of story into something ... keen and moving.”

The British journalist and biographer had by this time been a thorn in the side of Anglophone Christianity for two decades.

Yet in their exhaustive, three-part account of Cooper’s life—the first two are by Mr. Clark, a biographer, and the third by Mr. Calvocoressi, a modern-art curator—they aim to resurrect another Cooper as well.

William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s future law partner and biographer, said “it was highly sophomoric in character and abounded in striking and lofty metaphor . . . the thing people expect from a young man.”