Dreamer’s Journey is a tremendous work of research, offering sympathetic insight into a gifted, complicated author who created in his work a world to match his odd temperament.

IN SECRET HISTORIAN, Justin Spring offers a compelling, well-written account of Samuel Steward’s many lives as an accomplished professor and teacher, a respected novelist writing as Phil Andros, and a skilled tattoo artist and pornographer. Steward knew many of the noted artists and personalities of his era—André Gide, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Mann, George Platt Lynes, and Alfred Kinsey, among others—but Steward himself has remained a footnote in the cultural and sexual history of the mid-20th century.

In Gertrude Stein, the latest story of her life, author Lucy Daniel considers the ways in which Stein consciously constructed her public self, and in turn how the public came to construct an Idea of Gertrude Stein.

A Dangerous Liaison is a well-researched, thought-provoking biography. It reveals the complex, sometimes distressing human beings behind two of the most influential philosophers and writers of the 20th century.

In the introduction to her fascinating study, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, Magdalena Zaborowska opens with a striking quote from the writer: “Perhaps only someone who is outside of the States realizes that it’s impossible to get out.”

Included [here] are numerous portraits of Diaghilev; photographs of friends, family, artists, nobility, and philanthropists; contemporary caricatures; drawings of Leon Bakst’s costumes (including his design for Nijinsky in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the ballet that scandalized audiences); photos of Igor Stravinsky (who composed the music for The Firebird and Le Sacre du Printemps) and other famous dancers, both male and female.

Cheever lived a life of pretense-about his sexuality and his gentility. He discovered early on that words were the way to beguile readers, and maybe himself, into believing that his hoped-for world was possible. Blake Bailey’s biography demonstrates how close the connection was between Cheever’s life and his writing. It is a sad book, but if it sends readers back to this writer’s stories and novels, it will have done John Cheever a worthwhile service.