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Lives of
the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush
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Nigel Hamilton was born in Alnmouth,
Northumberland in 1944, but spent his early life in London. He attended Munich University and Trinity College, Cambridge where
he received an honors degree in history and a Master of Arts degree. Subsequently he trained under André Deutsch and
Diana Athill as a book publisher at André Deutsch Publishers. After leaving Deutsch, he taught school in Greenwich
where he assisted in reviving the historic borough on the Thames River. Hamilton opened a bookstore and began writing with
his mother, Olive Hamilton, the first history of Greenwich in nearly a century, Royal Greenwich. He wrote several more guide
books and edited the arts page in a London newspaper.
After
moving to Suffolk, Hamilton published his first major biography in 1978, The Brothers Mann, recording the lives of the German
novelists Heinrich and Thomas Mann which received high praise in Britain and the United States and was translated into several
languages.
In 1981, Hamilton published the first volume
of his official life of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Monty: The Making of a General, 1887-1942, which established Hamilton’s
international reputation as a military historian and biographer. This work was followed by Monty: Master of the Battlefield,
1942-1944, and Monty: The Field Marshal, 1944-1976. The Making of a General won the Whitbread Award for Biography in 1981[4],
and the Templer Medal for Best Contribution to Military History in 1986. The BBC Film Documentary Monty – In Love and
War, which Hamilton wrote and presented, won the 1988 American Film and Video Association Award for Best Documentary Profile.
In 1988, Hamilton moved to the U.S. to undertake a book on
the life of former President John F. Kennedy and he was named the John F. Kennedy Scholar at the University of Massachusetts
Boston and a visiting professor of history. The first volume of his biography was published by Random House in the fall of
1992 as JFK: Reckless Youth. The New York Times Book Review welcomed it as “rich, gripping... a book not only about
a remarkable young John F. Kennedy but also about American democracy’s own still reckless age.” It became a New
York Times bestseller and film rights were sold to Hearst Entertainment, who turned it into a television mini-series, JFK:
Reckless Youth, which starred Patrick Dempsey as the young JFK.
In
1994, Hamilton moved back to the UK, where he became Visiting Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London,
and Professor of Biography at De Montfort University, in Leicester.
Hamilton
again returned to the U.S. in 2000 to undertake a two volume biographical work on the life of former President, William Jefferson
Clinton. The first volume was published as Bill Clinton: An American Journey in 2003 while the second volume, Bill Clinton:
Mastering the Presidency (taking Clinton’s life up to 1996), followed in 2007. Both were lauded in the press and received
outstanding reviews. After having become Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies and a visiting
scholar at both Georgetown University and George Washington University in 2005, Hamilton returned to his first love, the study
of the art of biography. He published Biography: A Brief History in 2007, to high acclaim from the New York Times and followed
in 2008 with How To Do Biography: A Primer, based on his many years of teaching and life writing, which received additional
praise for Hamilton's work on the art of biography.
Scheduled
for publication in 2010, Hamilton’s latest work, American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents, From Franklin D. Roosevelt
to George W. Bush, is his most ambitious work to date. In addition to this work, Hamilton reviews books for The Boston Sunday
Globe, The Journal of Military History, and the London Review of Books, among others. He has also had Op-ed pieces and articles
in the New York Times, the London Independent, and the Times Higher Education, among others. Hamilton has contributed to dozens
of television documentary programs, and lectures at many universities around the world on his work. He is currently Senior
Fellow in the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston. In May, 2010, Hamilton
was elected President of the new Biographers International Organization.
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 Praise for Nigel Hamilton’s
presidential, military and literary biographies:
JFK: Reckless Youth
“Rich,
gripping . . . easily takes its place beside the best of recent presidential portraits. . . . It is a book not only about
a remarkable young John F. Kennedy, but also about democracy’s own still-reckless age.”—Roger Morris, The
New York Times Book Review
Bill Clinton: An American Journey
“Distinguished biographer Nigel Hamilton is the first to probe the inner self of Clinton in a
sustained and unflinching narrative. . . . A bold, highly readable interpretive study of the man from Hope in which no aspect
of his inner or external life is off-limits.”—Douglas Brinkley, Boston Sunday
Globe
Bill
Clinton: Mastering the Presidency
“Hamilton
ably illustrates Clinton’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader, how he thrived whenever the occasion called for him
to inspire or commiserate, and how time and again his failures could be traced to what Hamilton calls his ‘inability
to function as a manager of men and women in a structured environment.’”—Washington
Post Book World
“Once again,
Hamilton has proved he is a fine biographer, in whose voice Clinton’s see-sawing career is told with zest and clarity.”—Literary Review
Monty: The Making of a General
“Magnificent. . . . As outstanding as the achievements of Montgomery himself. This is a splendid book:
flawless in its presentation and above all in its understanding of a difficult personality.”—A.J.P. Taylor, Observer
“Nigel
Hamilton’s biographical study of Bernard Montgomery could not be more brilliantly written. It is the kind of book that
commands the reader’s attention not merely to every page but to every word.”—The
Indianapolis Star
The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann
“An utterly and absorbing and important story.”—George Steiner, New Yorker
“A rich
and informative double biography. . . . He makes it sound every bit as interesting as it was.”—Peter Gay, New York Times Book Review
Biography: A Brief History
“Hamilton has distilled enormous wisdom into his remarkable little book. Read it and enjoy.”—Washington Times
“As
artful as it is provocative.”—Boston Globe
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