Meryle Secrest is known for her many biographies of famous men and women in the arts & humanities. She was born in 1930, by coincidence the same year as Princess Margaret Rose, and grew up in Bath, England. After graduating, she and her parents emigrated to Hamilton, Ontario, where she began her career as women's editor with the Hamilton News a year later. She received an award as "Most Promising Young Writer" from the Canadian Women's Press Club at the age of twenty and continued at papers in Britain, Ohio and at the Washington Post, where she spent the next twelve years. At the Post she specialized in profile interviews with the famous: Gregory Peck, Katherine Anne Porter, Gian Carlo Menotti, Artur Rubinstein, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Lady Bird Johnson, among them. In 1974, she published her first biography, Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks. The book was reviewed by Anais Nin in the New York Times and included in the American Library Association's "Thirty Most Notable Books" of 1974. In 1976 she left the Post to concentrate on writing biography full time. Her landmark study, Being Bernard Berenson, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Awards in 1980. Her books on Salvador Dali and Stephen Sondheim were best sellers as is her book on Frank Lloyd Wright. Additionally, she has received many grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In November 2006, President Bush presented Meryle Secrest with the Presidential National Humanities Medal for her services to biography in the Oval Office at the White House. She resides in Washington, DC.