8th annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture: Brenda Wineapple on "The Rosebud Effect: Mystery in Biography." Wineapple is the author of the widely acclaimed biographies Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; Hawthorne: A Life(2003, winner of the Ambassador Award for Best Biography); and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2013 she publishedEcstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, a groundbreaking study of how America confronted slavery and redefined itself as a nation. Writing in the New York Times, David S. Reynolds described it as “history as it feels in real time . . . delivered through its vivid portrayal of the human side of an era.” Wineapple has received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim, and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, and the New York Institute of the Humanities. Formerly Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, she has taught at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, The New School, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Union College. She is now teaching a new master’s course on the art of biography at the Graduate Center.