Marilyn Monroe has been the subject of countless books, ranging from lavish pictorials to bonafide oddities including a biography, published earlier in the decade, penned by a quartet of psychics who interviewed the spirits of the deceased Monroe, the Kennedys, and others. But don’t think the Monroe saga has been played out in print. The scholarly biography, Marilyn Monroe, looks as the indelible ’50s icon through a distinctly different lens, providing a vivid portrait of an enigmatic woman who could be both strong and self-willed, as well as fragile. For this fresh depiction, Barbara Leaming author of respected biographies of Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and Katharine Hepburn has focused on a tangled love triangle set against the era’s tumultuous political atmosphere. Monroe was a struggling 24-year-old hopeful a party girl who was passed from man to man, as she sought to further her career when she became involved with the acclaimed theater and film director Elia Kazan. At the same time she met and was attracted to his colleague, the distinguished playwright Arthur Miller. After going on to dazzle audiences with her undeniable charisma and her talent the lush-bodied, luminous Monroe achieved superstardom. She also married baseball great Joe DiMaggio, who dearly loved the woman but not her career. All the while, Monroe’s life continued to intersect those of Kazan and Miller. When marriage to DiMaggio crashed, Monroe found solace in New York, where she hobnobbed in the heady theater world and came under the spell of acting guru Lee Strasberg and his Actor’s Studio. She also married Miller, who like Kazan had come under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was conducting witchhunt-like investigations into the ties between show business and the Communist Party. The hearings would impact the careers of both men who each reacted differently before HUAC. (Kazan ratted out fellow artists who had had Communist ties; Miller refused.) Throughout Miller’s ordeal, Monroe showed surprising resolve never wavering in her support of her husband. But she disintegrated in other ways, as she unsuccessfully battled her demons with the use of pills and alcohol. The former Norma Jeane Baker used to relate how, at the age of three months, she was nearly smothered in her crib by her mentally ill mother. When she died at age 36 a suicide, per Leaming she may have been finishing what her mother had started.

The ultimate suicide blonde? Another death theory is explored in another book out this month, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, by Donald H. Wolfe and D.W. Wolfe (William Morrow).

Biographer Pat H. Broeske’s latest book is about that other enduring ’50s icon, Elvis Presley.

Thomas More’s Christian faith was inseparable from all other aspects of his life. All of his public achievements a brilliant career as a lawyer, administrator, diplomat, and writer as well as his exemplary private life were linked with his understanding of the authority of the Church and the primacy of the pope. Early in the 16th century, More was part of the larger European community of scholars, associated with the new humanism, and a close friend of Erasmus. But with the writings and actions of Martin Luther and others much closer to him in England, the secure foundations of the world More had know began to collapse around him. Among other actions, he ordered heretics to be burned at the stake. In the face of Henry VIII’s challenge tot he authority of the established religious order, More remained steadfast and died a martyr, a man of conscience.

But the complex life of More, one of the most sophisticated and powerful men in the England of his time, remains enigmatic in many respects. In The Life of Thomas More, acclaimed novelist (Chatterton, Hawksmoor, Milton in America) and biographer (William Blake, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot) Peter Ackroyd gives us a fresh and compelling recreation of More and his times. Ackroyd has the rare ability to not only vividly explore the sights, sounds, and personalities of the late 14th- and early 15th-century England, but to also illuminate More’s intellectual development. He shows us how More’s emotional as well as reasoned commitment to religious faith developed naturally within the comfortable and prosperous household of his childhood. And later, as he studied law, it is made clear, as Ackroyd writes, that religion and law were not to be considered separately; they implied one another. Ackroyd notes that More’s death came to define him. The biographer explores the religious controversies of the time and notes the stories of cruelty and death for both Catholics and Protestants, in which More was involved. The fiery polemics, the intolerance, the unyielding positions of figures on all sides. Ackroyd writes that after his resignation as Lord Chancellor, the highest post next to the King, More’s attention was focused on heretics. It remained the greatest battle of his life and, deprived of the chance to imprison or to burn, he returned to angry and elaborate polemic. The biographer’s novelistic skills are much in evidence as he deeps events and personalities moving steadily along. He is also careful about his use of sources. Although he relates anecdotes of questionable authenticity, he is careful to give the reader warning.

A biography of More is unlikely to please everyone. Ackroyd has been judicious, and as balanced as an open-minded reader could wish. The last 100 pages or so as More awaits his fate wanting his death to be for the right reason, as he views it, and not treason are beautifully done.