Deirdre Bair
Deirdre Bair was an American writer and biographer. She was the author of six works of nonfiction.
Bair received a National Book Award
for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her biographies of Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir were chosen by The New York Times as “Best Books of the Year”, and her biography of Jung won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in 2004. Her book, Calling It Quits, examines late-life divorce and starting over and has been profiled on CBS’s The Early Show, NBC's The Today Show, the Brian Lehrer radio show and on CBC Canada. She published a biography of New Yorker cartoonist and artist Saul Steinberg in 2012 and a biography of Chicago mobster Al Capone in 2016, using previously unknown sources from his family.
Bair was awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was also a literary journalist who wrote frequently about travel, feminist issues, and cultural life. A former professor of comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, she wrote and lectured internationally. She divided her time mostly between New York and Connecticut and was a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
