David Michaelis notes, in this handsomely illustrated and carefully detailed biography, that the artist acclaimed as dean of American illustrators did not want to think that his future reputation depended upon his narrative painting. Even though, by 1942, his name was stamped on the spines of a long shelf of literature, more than a hundred volumes, Newell Convers Wyeth still felt after 40 years of picture making that everything he had done seemed insufficient. Part of the reason for that sense of inadequacy was that, all his life, N.C. Wyeth wanted to shake the dust of the illustrator from his shoes and emerge into the art world as a real painter. Following Wyeth’s death, October 19, 1945, in a car-train collision, the magnitude of his work still appeared ambiguous if not misunderstood. The Washington, D.C. Evening Star wrote: Thousands of people admired his achievements without comprehending why they were good. On the other hand, he was a painter’s painter, an illustrator’s illustrator. But those qualities that made him supreme as an illustrator are just those qualities that distinguish Wyeth as a real painter. Through his narrative paintings for Treasure Island (1911) to those in The Yearling (1939) in masterpiece after masterpiece of illustration Wyeth thrilled the viewer with the danger and excitement of seeing

Out of the stereo speakers comes the sound of the low strings of an acoustic guitar. A pattern emerges from the sounds and then a voice appears, also low and breathy. Three hours from sundown . . . The lyrics impart a story that matches the spare, haunted landscape of the music. It is a story about flight, about escaping a place without fully knowing where you are going. In this way the song is also about a search a search dictated more by a muse than by a plan. Such was the life and music of Nick Drake. Born in Burma to an upper-middle class English family, Drake, his parents, and his older sister returned to England when he was a young boy. The young Nick was educated in public school and then went on to Cambridge to study literature. The 1960s electrified Cambridge, and in the burgeoning scene Drake expanded his passion for music and the guitar. After leaving Cambridge, Drake landed a recording deal with a then up-and-coming folk producer named Joe Boyd and proceeded to record three albums for release on a young label named Island Records. Then at 26 Drake was found dead by his mother in their family home. The Drakes had lost their only son and the world an incredible talent.

Given a brief outline on Drake’s life one can turn to Patrick Humphries’s new biography in order to flesh out the details. Though neither Drake’s sister nor his producer conceded to talk to Humphries about the lost brother/singer-songwriter, Humphries’s research turns up everyone from schoolyard chums to session musicians and scenesters who knew the artist and the man. Almost all who knew Drake paint a portrait of a fragile, introverted man who seemed too delicate for this world. Humphries great talent as a biographer comes in bringing this ephemeral character to light against the backdrop of the English folk scene of the ’60s and ’70s. Drake’s dislike of performing live as well as doing interviews left little material to research. Poor record sales combined with an inherent manic-depressive condition finally took their toll on the troubled man. In the end Humphries’s biography serves as a wonderful tribute to a lost soul an almost Robert Johnson-like singer and guitarist whose muse eventually drew him from our world.

Charles Wyrick plays guitar for the band Stella.

Marilyn Monroe has been the subject of countless books, ranging from lavish pictorials to bonafide oddities including a biography, published earlier in the decade, penned by a quartet of psychics who interviewed the spirits of the deceased Monroe, the Kennedys, and others. But don’t think the Monroe saga has been played out in print. The scholarly biography, Marilyn Monroe, looks as the indelible ’50s icon through a distinctly different lens, providing a vivid portrait of an enigmatic woman who could be both strong and self-willed, as well as fragile. For this fresh depiction, Barbara Leaming author of respected biographies of Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and Katharine Hepburn has focused on a tangled love triangle set against the era’s tumultuous political atmosphere. Monroe was a struggling 24-year-old hopeful a party girl who was passed from man to man, as she sought to further her career when she became involved with the acclaimed theater and film director Elia Kazan. At the same time she met and was attracted to his colleague, the distinguished playwright Arthur Miller. After going on to dazzle audiences with her undeniable charisma and her talent the lush-bodied, luminous Monroe achieved superstardom. She also married baseball great Joe DiMaggio, who dearly loved the woman but not her career. All the while, Monroe’s life continued to intersect those of Kazan and Miller. When marriage to DiMaggio crashed, Monroe found solace in New York, where she hobnobbed in the heady theater world and came under the spell of acting guru Lee Strasberg and his Actor’s Studio. She also married Miller, who like Kazan had come under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was conducting witchhunt-like investigations into the ties between show business and the Communist Party. The hearings would impact the careers of both men who each reacted differently before HUAC. (Kazan ratted out fellow artists who had had Communist ties; Miller refused.) Throughout Miller’s ordeal, Monroe showed surprising resolve never wavering in her support of her husband. But she disintegrated in other ways, as she unsuccessfully battled her demons with the use of pills and alcohol. The former Norma Jeane Baker used to relate how, at the age of three months, she was nearly smothered in her crib by her mentally ill mother. When she died at age 36 a suicide, per Leaming she may have been finishing what her mother had started.

The ultimate suicide blonde? Another death theory is explored in another book out this month, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, by Donald H. Wolfe and D.W. Wolfe (William Morrow).

Biographer Pat H. Broeske’s latest book is about that other enduring ’50s icon, Elvis Presley.

Thomas More’s Christian faith was inseparable from all other aspects of his life. All of his public achievements a brilliant career as a lawyer, administrator, diplomat, and writer as well as his exemplary private life were linked with his understanding of the authority of the Church and the primacy of the pope. Early in the 16th century, More was part of the larger European community of scholars, associated with the new humanism, and a close friend of Erasmus. But with the writings and actions of Martin Luther and others much closer to him in England, the secure foundations of the world More had know began to collapse around him. Among other actions, he ordered heretics to be burned at the stake. In the face of Henry VIII’s challenge tot he authority of the established religious order, More remained steadfast and died a martyr, a man of conscience.

But the complex life of More, one of the most sophisticated and powerful men in the England of his time, remains enigmatic in many respects. In The Life of Thomas More, acclaimed novelist (Chatterton, Hawksmoor, Milton in America) and biographer (William Blake, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot) Peter Ackroyd gives us a fresh and compelling recreation of More and his times. Ackroyd has the rare ability to not only vividly explore the sights, sounds, and personalities of the late 14th- and early 15th-century England, but to also illuminate More’s intellectual development. He shows us how More’s emotional as well as reasoned commitment to religious faith developed naturally within the comfortable and prosperous household of his childhood. And later, as he studied law, it is made clear, as Ackroyd writes, that religion and law were not to be considered separately; they implied one another. Ackroyd notes that More’s death came to define him. The biographer explores the religious controversies of the time and notes the stories of cruelty and death for both Catholics and Protestants, in which More was involved. The fiery polemics, the intolerance, the unyielding positions of figures on all sides. Ackroyd writes that after his resignation as Lord Chancellor, the highest post next to the King, More’s attention was focused on heretics. It remained the greatest battle of his life and, deprived of the chance to imprison or to burn, he returned to angry and elaborate polemic. The biographer’s novelistic skills are much in evidence as he deeps events and personalities moving steadily along. He is also careful about his use of sources. Although he relates anecdotes of questionable authenticity, he is careful to give the reader warning.

A biography of More is unlikely to please everyone. Ackroyd has been judicious, and as balanced as an open-minded reader could wish. The last 100 pages or so as More awaits his fate wanting his death to be for the right reason, as he views it, and not treason are beautifully done.

Film writer Andy Dougan chronicles the topsy-turvy career of the alien-turned-Oscar winner in Robin Williams. Dougan details Williams’s life through a series of interviews with various insiders, including the actor himself. Readers are introduced to Williams’s often lonely childhood and travel with Williams to his Academy Award acceptance speech for his role in Good Will Hunting. This is not a smooth journey — there are many stops, stalls, and re-starts along the way. Very thorough and engaging.

It is rare to read a biography these days that doesn’t trash its subject. Mary Beth Rogers’s book, Barbara Jordan: American Hero, presents Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, as the consummate politician and Constitutional orator. Courage and commitment are the major themes in this haunting, important account of a woman who battled illness, isolation, and bigotry in her short, accomplished life.

Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University professor, has done the impossible with his reconstruction of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled from the vast collection of King’s writings, speeches, and interviews. With the blessing of the slain civil rights leader’s family, Carson assembles a fascinating portrait of King as spokesman, husband, and father in this excellent introduction to one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.

In this meticulously researched biography, Michael Lydon presents a thorough, appreciative appraisal of Ray Charles’s music even as he lays bare the singer’s monumental defects of character. Born in 1930 to a mother too young and sick to take care of him and abandoned by his father, Ray Charles Robinson learned early to live by his wits. When he was seven, he lost his sight. He spent the next eight years far from home at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. Here he developed his astounding musical talent and the resolve to do something with it.

From the beginning of his career, Charles (he dropped the Robinson in 1948) was a melting pot of musical styles — loving and performing every pop sound from big band to jazz to country. Lydon has amassed and arranged so many details about Charles and his milieu that reading the book is very much like watching a fine documentary. Often the power of the writing pulls us into the action. We stand quietly at the back of the studio as Charles wades excitedly into a recording session; or we sprawl exhausted on the band bus at night as it barrels and rattles through the anonymous American countryside. Besides exploring such high points as Charles’s breakthrough at Atlantic Records, his involvement in civil rights, and his popularizing of country music, Lydon also invites us to share in the everyday tedium and pettiness of the maestro’s performing life.

In spite of his reverence for the music, Lydon pulls no punches in depicting Charles’s cold-hearted treatment of band members and his indifference to his wives, lovers, and the children they bore him. Charles’s voracious appetite for women, Lydon shows, was rivaled only by his ultimately quenched passion for hard drugs. This engaging text is accompanied by photographs, bibliography, discography, index, and extensive source notes. Edward Morris is a Nashville-based journalist.