Her biographies of Anaïs Nin (1996) and de Beauvoir (2001) were selected by The New York Times as Best Books of the Year.

Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 19, respectively. She received a 1981 National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978). Writings īair authored seven biographies and one autobiography during her lifetime. īair 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. She was also a visiting lecturer at Paris VII, University of Kassel, Uppsala University, and University College Dublin. Īt various times during her life, Bair served as a visiting professor, writer in residence, or distinguished scholar at Ohio State University, Bennington College, Macquarie University, Griffith University, and Australian National University. Starting in 1976, Bair served as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked as a stringer for Newsweek and a reporter for the New Haven Register before earning her doctorate. She went on to earn her Master of Arts degree (1968) and Doctor of Philosophy degree (1972), both in comparative literature, at Columbia University. īair earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1957. Her father was a small-business owner, her mother a homemaker. She grew up in nearby Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Early life and education īair was born Deirdre Bartolotta on Jin Pittsburgh. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981. Deirdre Bair (J– April 17, 2020) was an American literary scholar and biographer.

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