Pessoa

Like Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Richard Zenith's Pessoa (a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography) immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or "heteronyms," under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this "most multifarious of writers" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer-but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet's life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa's teeming imagination and literary genius.

Finalist: 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography
Longlisted for the 2021 Plutarch Award
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021
Best Books of the Year: Spectator, New Statesman, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly