Biographers

British novelist A.S. Byatt. Her novel Possession was a bestseller, and her novella Angels & Insects was turned into an arthouse film. Byatt's new novel is The Biographers Tale (Knopf). This interview was recorded before a live audience at the Free Public Library in Philadelphia.

A.E. Hotchner's book Papa Hemingway (Carroll & Graff) is about his friend and colleague, Ernest Hemingway. Hotchner met Hemingway when he was a 20-something journalist, on assignment to interview Hemingway for Cosmopolitan magazine. That first interview in 1948 developed into a 14 year friendship. In 1957, he wrote The World of Nick Adams, a dramatization of Hemingway's Nick Adams stores for CBS. The TV special starred Paul Newman and was scored by Aaron Copland.

Kaplan died Sunday at 88. His biography of Mark Twain won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He also edited two editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Kaplan spoke to Fresh Air in 1992.

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Robert Caro has spent decades researching and chronicling the lives of notable men.