Madeleine B. Stern, as a rare-book dealer, specializes in French, Italian, Latin, and English books of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; as a writer, Stern specializes in the work and lives of nineteenth-century American women and publishers. She regards her endeavors as complementary, finding herself "drawn irresistibly to literary and biographical detective work." She is not interested in facts for their own sake but for what they can tell about the time and place in which a person lived and worked. The results of Stern's half century of literary detective work are accurate, vivid accounts of nineteenth-century American life and people.

Madeleine Bettina Stern, the daughter of Moses R. and Lillie Mack Stern, was born on 1 July 1912 in New York City. She became fascinated with the written word at an early age. When she was only seven years old, she took on the running of a newspaper...