Witches (Schiff)

Witches: Salem, 1692
Stacy Schiff, 2015
Little, Brown and Co.
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316200608


Summary
It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.

The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other.

Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story—the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1961
• Where—Adams, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Williams College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize in Biography (more below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author. Born in Adams, Massachusetts, Schiff attended Phillips Andover Academy preparatory school and went on to earn her B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990.

Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times and Times Literary Supplement. She is a guest columnist at the New York Times, as well as a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, which noted that she has been "regularly praised for both her meticulous scholarship and her witty style."

In 2000, Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Vera Nabokov, wife and muse of author Vladimir Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography of Antoine de Saint Exupery.

Her work, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) won a number of awards. In discussing the book, author and historican Ron Chernow wrote, "Even if forced to at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence." Gordon S. Wood hailed the book as "Stunning. A remarkably subtle and penetrating portrait of Franklin and his diplomacy."

Schiff's 2010 biography Cleopatra: A Life reached number 3 on the New York Times Best Seller list and garnered extraordinary reviews. The Wall Street Journal's critic wrote, "Stacy Schiff does a rare thing; she gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist." Rick Riordan declared Cleopatra "impossible to put down;" Simon Winchester predicted the book would become a classic.

Witches: Salem, 1692, published in 2015, recounts the witch trials and mass hysteria in New England, as well as Europe. Harvard historian David D. Hall said the book "is as close as we will ever come to understanding what happened in and around Salem in 1692. Courtrooms, streets, churches, farm yards, taverns, bedrooms-all became theater-like places where anger, anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy are entangled. An astonishing achievement."

Schiff resides in New York City. She is a trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Award and honors
Fellowships
♦ National Endowment for the Humanities
♦ Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, New York Public Library
♦ John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Awards and honors
2000 - Pulitzer Prize, Vera
2006 - Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters
2006 - Gilbert Chinard Prize, A Great Improvisation
2006 - George Washington Book Prize, A Great Improvisation
2006 - Ambassador Book Award (American Studies), A Great Improvisation
2010 - EMMA Award for journalistic excellence, "Who's Buried in Cleopatra's Tomb?"
2011 - Library Lion by the New York Public Library
2011 - PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, Cleopatra
2012 - Phillips Academy Alumni Award of Distinction
2012 - The French-American Foundation Vergennes Achievement Award
2014 - BIO Award, Biographers International Organization
2015 - Newberry Library Award
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/13/2015.)

Book Reviews
Enchanting. Out of the shadows of the past come excitable young girls, pompous ministers, abusive judges, grieving parents, and angry neighbors, all of them caught up in a terrifying process that seemed to have no end: discovering who among them deserved death for being in league with Satan. The Witches is as close as we will ever come to understanding what happened in and around Salem in 1692. Courtrooms, streets, churches, farm yards, taverns, bedrooms-all became theater-like places where anger, anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy are entangled. An astonishing achievement.
David D. Hall, Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History - Harvard University


Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a reliably entertaining guide...[to] one of the strangest, most fascinating chapters in American history.
Tom Beer - Newsday


Schiff, who had a hit with her biography Cleopatra, may get even more attention for her new look at America's infamous witch trials.
Jane Henderson - St. Louis Post-Dispatch


A vivid picture of 1692 Massachusetts [that] brings the Salem trials to life.
Steve Bennett - San Antonio Express News


Schiff has made a career of exploring the private lives of iconic women throughout history.... Now she's expanding her focus to a group of notable women: the women in the center of the hysteria over witches that consumed the early days of the U.S. colonies.... The episode lasted only a year, but had a sizable influence on our nation's history, which Schiff's book will unpack with her elegant prose and exhaustive research.
Shelby Pope - KQED


(Best of the Fall) The Pulitzer-winning historian conjures a big year for witchcraft hysteria and hangings.
New York Magazine


Riveting nonfiction.
Entertainment Weekly


Few authors set the scene of history quite like Stacy Schiff.... The Witches brings a fresh eye to the worst misogynist atrocity in American history, tracing the complex cultural and psychological origins of the Puritan hysteria.
Megan O'Grady - Vogue.com


[Schiff] reconstructs the time and place in remarkable detail, offering portraits of the protagonists in all their poignant, if often infuriating, humanity. Through an immersive narrative involving a cast of dozens pulled from the historical record, Schiff skillfully re-creates the visceral tensions at the heart of everyday life in the Massachusetts Bay settlement.
Peter Manseau - Bookforum


No stone [is] left unturned.... Schiff recreates the most chill-inducing, finger-pointing months in American history.
Steph Opitz - Marie Claire


Schiff applies her descriptive prowess and flair for the dramatic to the Salem witch trials. The book is packed with details and delivered with a punch, but it suffers from a dearth of nuance.... This retelling succeeds as a work of gripping popular nonfiction, but for those already familiar with the subject, it will serve only as light reading.
Publishers Weekly


Schiff traces the course of the witch hunts, ... provid[ing] exciting digressions into the nature of...witchcraft, local political and social disputes, religious instruction, and Puritan life; though....the work is weak in structure and organization...[it] will find a welcome audience among readers of witchcraft or colonial histories. —Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Compulsively readable.... The best-selling Schiff never disappoints, and her eagerly anticipated account of the Salem witchcraft tragedy lives up to expectations, providing a fascinating account of one of the most infamous years in American history. —Margaret Flanagan
Booklist


[Shciff] ably weaves together all the assorted facts and many personalities from the 1692 Salem witch trials and provides genuine insight into a 17th-century culture that was barely a few steps away from the Dark Ages.... As history, The Witches is intelligent and reliable; as a story, it's a trudge over very well-trod ground.
Kirkus Reviews

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