Deirdre Bair

Deirdre Bair (June 21, 1935 – April 17, 2020) was an American literary scholar and biographer. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981.

Early life and education Bair was born Deirdre Bartolotta on June 21, 1935 in Pittsburgh.

Bair earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1957. She went on to earn her Master of Arts degree (1968) and Doctor of Philosophy degree (1972), both in comparative literature, at Columbia University.

Bair was awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (then the Bunting Institute), and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, among other institutions. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1991 and 2004, respectively. Her biographies of Anaïs Nin (1996) and de Beauvoir (2001) were selected by The New York Times as Best Books of the Year. Her biography of Jung won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in 2004.

Bair's Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over (2007) was profiled on CBS’s The Early Show, NBC's The Today Show, the Brian Lehrer radio show, and CBC Canada. She published a biography of cartoonist Saul Steinberg in 2012 (it was named a New York Times Notable Book) and a biography of Chicago mobster Al Capone in 2016, using previously unknown sources from his family. Her final book, Parisian Lives, related her experiences as Beckett's and de Beauvoir's biographer.