Deirdre Bair published seven biographies and one memoir over five decades, working from interviews, letters and archives rather than secondhand accounts. This section looks closely at two of them — what she found, how she worked, and where the record runs out.
- Parisian Lives — her own memoir of writing about Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, built around a single sentence Beckett said to her in 1971.
- Al Capone — her 2016 biography, the first to draw at length on people who had actually known him.