Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff discusses and signs copies of her new book, The Witches: Salem, 1692, Tuesday, December 1 at 7 p.m. at Princeton Public Library.

Stacy Schiff is known for her biographies, many of them about notable women throughout history. In her latest project, she looks to one of the few historic events to center around women, the Salem Witch Trials. The book is set during the mysterious year of hysteria and injustice that resulted in the execution of 19 alleged witches and wizards and reveals the religious, social, and political context in which it took place.

According to Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller, “Stacy Schiff’s The Witches is an indelibly etched morality fable, the best recounting of the Salem hysteria in modern times. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Schiff makes the complex seem simple, crafting a taut narrative that takes in religion, politics, folklore, and the intricate texture of daily life in Massachusetts Bay, with particular attention to those ‘wonder-working’ women and girls who chose this moment to blow apart the Puritan utopia they’d helped to found. It’s all here in one devilish, oracular book.”

Stacy Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Autobiography for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage. She is also the author of Cleopatra: A Life and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker.

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