Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both " monumental" (The Boston Globe) and " utterly romantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's Ve ra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the e migre author of "Lolita"; " Pale Fire"; and "Speak, Memory"--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, Ve ra, and third for no one at all.
" Without my wife, " he once noted, " I wouldn't have written a single novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Ve ra, 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. Stacy Schiff's Ve ra is a triumph of the biographical form.