A prolific, best-selling author whose entertaining biographical novels and "biohistories" have proved far more popular with readers than with scholars or critics, Irving Stone is best known for works that, in the words of one critic, are pleasing to people who like their history "a little embellished with fiction." By far his two most memorable works are a pair of books that offer monumental, sweeping accounts of the lives of two world-class artists: Lust for Life: A Novel of Vincent van Gogh (1934) and The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo (1961). Stone also wrote a series of popular fictionalized histories of the nation's First Families: The President's Lady (1951), about Andrew and Rachel Robards Jackson; Love Is Eternal (1954), about Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln; and Those Who Love (1965), about John and Abigail Smith Adams. American political radicals figured in some of Stone's other works...