We know Washington Irving best for his folk tales The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. Born in the year the American Revolution ended, Irving died not long before the start of the Civil War. During his lifetime, his versatility as an author who could successfully write satire, history and biography helped to establish him as the country’s first professional man of letters. How this lifelong bachelor and citizen of the world put Manhattan on the literary map is the subject of Andrew Burstein’s discerning biography The Original Knickerbocker.

From early on, Irving was part of a mutually supportive New York literary community that included three of his brothers, who were well-connected and politically engaged. His first book, 1809’s A History of New York, allegedly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a mock history, a widely read satiric masterpiece. In 1815, Irving sailed to Europe in search of new directions for his writing. When he returned home 17 years later, he was an international celebrity.

Burstein guides us carefully through Irving’s works, explaining both how each was received in its time and how later readers viewed them. [Irving] gave his country the epic historical romances they craved, he writes, He celebrated an at once vigorous, amusing, and opportunistic people. Although Irving the historian appreciated primary sources and archives, Burstein says he had a jaunty, sometimes starry-eyed way of telling history. He could not help but re-create it imaginatively. Irving was congenial and witty, had a naturally tolerant personality, was good company for the likes of Sir Walter Scott and Martin Van Buren, and was generous in trying to help other authors, even James Fenimore Cooper, who did not care for him. Burstein, who is best known for his books on Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, demonstrates here that he is also skilled in bringing readers the life and times of an important literary figure.

Thomas Hardy’s extraordinary journey from modest beginnings as the son of a builder to the pinnacle of British literary society was the result of his exceptional talent and fierce ambition. His road to critical acclaim and commercial success was fraught with numerous challenges as he steered his way between two worlds in a class-conscious society. Claire Tomalin, the author of distinguished biographies of Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Pepys the last receiving the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award gives us an elegant and incisive account of Hardy’s life in Thomas Hardy.

Her careful narrative vividly evokes his development from a bright young man, unable to go to university, who works as an architect’s clerk while becoming an aspiring author. He found his true voice with Far from the Madding Crowd, where he established the territory in which he worked best in fiction, in which rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist’s eye and he portrays country people as they cope with custom and change. Tomalin notes that while in all of his works Hardy wasted no scrap of experience, some readers may have misunderstood him. Although he has been read as a realist, she notes, he was not producing documentaries but writing fiction. In addition to his work, at the center of his life for many years was his first wife, Emma Gifford. She was the inspiration for some of his best work, both before and, with regard to his poetry, after her death in 1912. He was in love with her, there was no doubt of that, Tomalin writes, but she was also a precious commodity a mine,’ as he so frankly told her. . . . She gave him material for his writing. Years later, Emma felt that her husband cared more for his fictional women than he did the real ones he encountered. Tomalin writes perceptively about Hardy’s relationships with other women, including his mother and his second wife, Florence.

Throughout Thomas Hardy Tomalin takes us behind the scenes of late 19th- and early 20th-century literary life in England and shows that Hardy was a shrewd businessman as well as a major author. She explains that early in his career he did whatever was necessary to have his work serialized in publications and for circulating libraries, as well as being deemed appropriate for family reading. Nevertheless, she writes, [h]e did want to become a serious novelist, and his best novels are great works of imagination each with its own seam of poetry sewn into the narrative. Tomalin gives us skillful and helpful readings of Hardy’s fiction and poetry and considers the poems an essential part of the narrative of his life. Although his works sometimes aroused controversy because of his views on religion and marriage, Tomalin says that he remained conventional and conservative in his personal life. He chose not to get involved with causes, for example, because he believed a writer was more effective if he appeared open-minded on strictly political questions. Tomalin’s beautifully crafted biography helps us to better understand the man and his work.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

There are few portraits more beloved in jazz than that of Dizzy Gillespie playing his upturned horn, cheeks billowing as notes come cascading out. Gillespie skillfully navigated the tight line between artistry and entertainment, spearheading radical changes in jazz technique while remaining extremely popular throughout his career. Despite being self-taught, he had phenomenal technical facility and could execute intricate passages with ease and insert a warm, engaging lyricism into every solo.

Author and longtime jazz concert producer Donald L. Maggin’s authoritative Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie is not only the first complete biography of the bebop legend, it explains Gillespie’s musical innovations in precise language that doesn’t confuse novices or alienate knowledgeable players and fans. Maggin emphasizes Gillespie’s role as a soloist, bandleader and musical thinker. He credits Gillespie’s family with instilling in him both the discipline and hunger essential for success and enough self-esteem to overcome the racist attitudes toward blacks he endured while growing up in South Carolina (where he witnessed the lynching of a member of his high school band).

Dizzy carefully traces Gillespie’s two major legacies. One was his participation with saxophonist Charlie Parker, drummer Kenny Clarke, pianist Thelonious Monk and guitarist Charlie Christian in the bebop revolution. The second came through his collaborations with bandleader Mario Bauza in the late ’40s. They brought the multi-textured beats and syncopation of Africa and Cuba into jazz, enabling the style to expand its rhythmic reach and broaden its compositional framework.

Maggin also covers the complex relationship between Gillespie and Parker, his emergence as an international ambassador and spokesperson for the Baha’i faith, his 53-year marriage, and his role as mentor to numerous musicians. Maggin’s book effectively documents the many changes pioneered by Gillespie, who never lost contact with either the experimental or traditional wings of the jazz world. Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and several other publications.

Enron’s Ken Lay and Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski made headlines for living lavishly, basking in the money their corporations made. But no one seems to live larger than Donald Trump does. Host of the NBC series The Apprentice, real-estate mogul, celebrity magnet and all-around intriguing personality, Trump is the subject of Robert Slater’s No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump. Yet, Trump differs from Lay and Kozlowski in one major way: the money he spends or loses is his own.

Trump inherited a nice sum and followed in his dad’s footsteps as a real estate developer, but kicked the marketing up a notch. His lifestyle is part of his marketing plan: he builds places for wealthy people to live and play. And that, Slater argues, is exactly how Trump makes it big in business: he maintains and polishes his celebrity mystique by perfectly timed media management. This is a hugely entertaining book that dispels a few popular myths about the Donald. Take his signature You’re fired phrase apparently Trump rarely fires anyone in his real-life work life; his execs have to beg him to let someone go.

From the first notes he played during his London debut at a trendy nightspot early in 1967, Jimi Hendrix was a sensation. His appearance had a lot to do with it: blues-dazzled Brits lionized black American musicians, and when one showed up, as Hendrix did, in an outfit even wilder than those being marketed on Carnaby Street, that alone was enough to turn heads. Then there was the music, and here he was even more of an oddity: a left-handed virtuoso who held his guitar upside-down. And when he played it, he had no equal and quite probably never will.

As a young UPI journalist, Sharon Lawrence witnessed Hendrix’s ascension. More than that, she befriended and came to know him as shy and quiet offstage, emotionally fragile, willing to trust people who seemed in a hurry to betray him. This picture darkens throughout her narrative in <b>Jimi Hendrix: The Man, the Magic, the Truth</b>, as groupies, drug suppliers, attorneys and dollar-hungry relatives cast their shadows against it.

Lawrence doesn’t overplay her role: the more Hendrix fell under the sway of unscrupulous associates, the less often her path crossed his. When it did, though, she was stunned by his transformation: cynicism and depression replaced Hendrix’s gentle, somewhat goofy humor, and in one encounter he lashed at her with an outburst of four-letter words behavior that would have been unimaginable just a year or so before.

Inevitably Lawrence comes to Hendrix’s death at age 27 and then recounts the lawsuits, recriminations, finger-pointing and two suicides that came in its wake. Much of the ugliness continues to this day and may well stretch into the lives of generations unborn before Hendrix’s demise. Yet Lawrence uses this grim denouement to illuminate the impression that lingers of her friend, as a dove, perhaps, rising finally beyond the reach of the vultures he has left behind.

<i>Robert L. Doerschuk’s investigative piece, "What Really Happened: The Last Days of Jimi Hendrix," ran in the February 1996 issue of</i> Musician <i>magazine.</i>

Beatrix Potter’s characters have been loved by generations of children and adults since the early 1900s, but, as former professor Linda Lear reveals in her new biography Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, she was also a scientific illustrator, mycologist (person who studies fungi), businesswoman and conservationist. Lear also a biographer of environmentalist Rachel Carson spent a decade researching Potter’s life, becoming intimately acquainted with her journals, sketchbooks, story ideas and letters. The resulting book does an excellent job of giving the reader a sense of the time and place in which Potter lived and the real-life locations and people featured in her stories, and includes family photos and a peek at Potter’s scientific illustrations.

Potter introduced Peter Rabbit and his friends in illustrated letters she sent to children of her acquaintance. Initially a self-published author, she wrote and illustrated 23 books by the time of her death at age 77. Children’s books were just one chapter in Potter’s life, however. In her early 20s, she was an avid toadstool hunter and scientist. Her conclusions (initially pooh-poohed by the male scientific establishment) were later proven and accepted and her illustrations are still used today for the study and identification of fungi.

Amid all her work and study, Potter fell in love, and when her fiance her London publisher and editor, Norman Warne died a month after their engagement, Potter left London and bought a farm. There, she embarked on what Lear calls the third act of her life, and deepened her appreciation for and knowledge of the natural world. When she died in 1943, she left significant parcels of land to England’s National Trust.

Lear paints an appealing, revealing picture of an independent, accomplished and loving woman who used her art and research to educate herself and a host of readers. The publication of this biography coincides with the release of Miss Potter, a biopic starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, but read the book first! Linda M. Castellitto still has her Peter Rabbit coloring book.

The carefully researched The Guggenheims: A Family History is an intriguing look at one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential families from the 1880s to the present, as well as a perceptive probe into the constant intermingling of business, politics and anti-Semitism during those years. Their story begins with Simon, who leaves Switzerland for America in 1847; Simon’s oldest son Meyer produces seven sons and three daughters, whose lives the authors document in meticulous detail, beginning with their fortunes gained from mining in Colorado. Meyer passes on to his sons the “core Guggenheim principles” of maintaining strong family solidarity and always hiring the best talent available. By the 1890s, their “breakthrough decade,” they move to New York City and take their place among the Jewish upper-crust, although compromising somewhat by joining an “assimilationist” congregation. With the fall of postwar mineral prices, the Guggenheims see a gradual retreat of their industrial empire. In the second two-thirds of the century, they become known primarily as patrons of the arts and sciences; by 1950, they are no longer listed among the nation’s wealthiest families. The authors delve deeply into the lives of some of the more notable members of the second and third generations, beginning with Harry, Meyer’s grandson, who befriends Lindbergh and helps to promote aviation in America. Solomon, Meyer’s last male survivor, opens a museum for his growing art collection in 1939; the move to the renowned Frank Lloyd Wright building comes in 1959, long after his death. Peggy, daughter of Meyer’s son Ben, leads a flamboyant life while assembling an impressive collection of western 20th-century art of her own.

Although very few family members still carry the last name Guggenheim, the authors conclude that a bond remains, created by their foundations and museums. This thoughtful and well-researched look at the family and the times in which it ro se and fell serves as an insightful journey through the whole of the 20th century.

Michael Streissguth, who has written extensively about Johnny Cash before, essays a final summation of the singer/songwriter’s career and personal struggles in Johnny Cash: The Biography. As the author points out, Cash had a direct hand in shaping his earlier biographies, from which he emerged as a flawed but larger-than-life figure who ultimately had gained control of his demons. While clearly a great admirer of Cash and his music, Streissguth nonetheless chips away at the sanitized version of The Man in Black. In so doing, he makes Cash more human and, thus, his achievements all the more remarkable.

To piece together this complex artist, Streissguth interviewed dozens of people who knew him well at every stage of his development from distant and long-forgotten high school classmates to such inside observers as his daughters Rosanne and Cindy; managers Saul Holiff and Lou Robin; producer Jack Clement; former band members Marshall Grant and Marty Stuart; Bill Walker, the music director for Cash’s TV show; and numerous record company executives who witnessed and/or contributed to Cash’s rise and fall. Of particular relevance are Streissguth’s portraits of two of the most influential figures in Cash life’s his flinty and love-withholding father, Ray, and his second wife, June Carter, who emerges as both self-sacrificing and self-aggrandizing. Obsessed by religion and the desire to live righteously, Cash, nonetheless, was more of a drug addict than he ever admitted and, says the author, a womanizer even as he publicly trumpeted his love for June. This is the best study of Cash to date.

Edward Morris is the former country music editor of Billboard and currently a contributor to CMT.com.

Hepburn was never one of Hitchcock’s leading ladies, though he worked with several other fashionable actresses. Style is obviously not the focus of pop-up legend Kees Moerbeek’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense. Each of the seven spreads in this appropriately bizarre tribute highlights a different movie with scenes rendered in 3-D, an overview of the plot and details about casting and filming. Though one might question the omission of North by Northwest (think of the pop-up possibilities the crop duster, Mount Rushmore) or The Man Who Knew Too Much (oh, well, que ser‡, ser‡), there’s no denying that Moerbeek captures the essence of Vertigo with an impressive re-creation of the tower and the falling man of the opening credits. He evokes the terror of The Birds with menacing black specimens and a window onto the gas station fire, while the Psycho pages are appropriately in all black-and-white (almost). Curiously missing in Alfred Hitchcock are the A-listers who appeared in the films, but that does leave the focus all on Hitch. As in the films, his cameos, interpreted as mini pop-ups, are not-to-be missed treats.

Brooklyn in the ’40s hardly conjures la vie de Boheme the way Paris in the ’20s or Berlin in the ’30s might, but for an eclectic group of writers, musicians and artists who came together and shared a ramshackle townhouse at the start of World War II, Brooklyn Heights was the place to be. At first glance there seems to be little connection between some of these artists or their work. W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and, perhaps strangest of all, Gypsy Rose Lee, living cheek to jowl and breaking daily bread together? Yes, and at various times, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright and Paul and Jane Bowles, too. It all happened at 7 Middagh Street, and Sherill Tippins has done a first-class job recreating the domestic drama, both high and low, in February House, her thoroughly researched, charmingly told group portrait.

At the center of this experiment in communal living was George Davis, a literary editor, now largely forgotten, who by all accounts had a remarkable eye for talent. When his profligate ways lost him his job as fiction editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Davis acted on impulse, inspired by an actual dream he’d had, and rented the dilapidated house on a narrow street abutting New York Harbor. He coaxed McCullers, just 22 years old and riding the crest of the literary tsunami caused by The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, to move in and share the $75-a-month rent. Next to join them was W.H. Auden, newly arrived in New York after years in Berlin. The fourth and final original resident was Gypsy Rose Lee, already a legend in her 20s. Gypsy, who had made and squandered more than one fortune working as a stripper, had literary aspirations, and Davis convinced her to move to Middagh Street so that they could work together on her mystery novel, The G-String Murders. Despite her Burlesque credentials, Gypsy proved a companionable match. And while it is hard to imagine two more different writers or women for that matter she and McCullers grew quite close. Middagh Street evolved naturally into an immovable feast, an unrivaled literary salon that played host to everyone from Salvador Dali and the accomplished offspring of Thomas Mann, to legendary New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner and balletomane extraordinaire Lincoln Kirstein. Yet, despite all this talent, intelligence and glamour passing through, it is the intertwined stories of the main residents that provide the sturm und drang of February House. It was at Middagh Street that Auden first began his tempestuous affair with Chester Kallman, a dysfunctional love that would last their entire lives, despite Kallman’s unapologetic, sadomasochistic promiscuity. Waif-like McCullers, already drinking heavily at this ripe young age, had left her husband and started a series of passionate, often unrequited relationships with women. Paul and Jane Bowles, one of literary history’s most incompatible yet durable couples, verbally duked it out behind the thin walls. Davis savored the house’s proximity to the seedy bars near the Brooklyn Navy Yards, where it was easy to pick up sailors as they passed through town.

The Middagh Street house witnessed the birth of some enduring works of art. McCullers struggled to write what would become one of her masterworks, The Member of the Wedding. Auden and Britten (each agonizing over the war in Europe and whether to return home to England) collaborated on Paul Bunyan, a musical stage work celebrating America. A noble failure, it nonetheless pointed Britten toward his true musical voice, which came into full flower in his next major work, Peter Grimes, one of the 20th century’s greatest operas. As for The G-String Murders, if not great art, it was a huge success and Gypsy, whom Tippins paints as the wisest, most pragmatic and consequently happiest of the bunch, added "author" to her catholic list of accomplishments. In February House, Tippins deftly captures the energy and anxiety of this group of artists who shaped mid-century culture. Their peculiar household succumbed to fragile egos, wanderlust and most of all the war. But its legacy lived on in the friendships these artists forged there, and still survives in the miraculous works of literature and music these budding geniuses created. Robert Weibezahl’s novel, The Wicked and the Dead, will be published this spring.