Marion Meade

In 2014 she published her most recent book, returning to the subject of Dorothy Parker.

Her 2010 book Lonelyhearts paired Nathanael West with Eileen McKenney. It received mixed reviews in The Washington Post and The New York Times, which criticized its "grating prose" and "half-baked analogies." It was also noted that West had been profiled just a few years before. National Public Radio reviewed the book positively.

Her 1995 HarperCollins book Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase recorded the journey of Keaton from a Kansas medicine show to vaudeville headliner to cinematic pioneer. Her 2000 biography The Unruly Life of Woody Allen was, The New York Times said, "not a vile book" and "not irresponsible" but did adhere to the standard "consensus of opinion on its subject, depicting him as self-involved, misogynist, egotistical, inconsiderate, isolated and stagnant."

Following Bitching, Meade wrote a trilogy of feminist-themed works set in medieval France. Eleanor of Aquitaine chronicles the life of the powerful 12th-century queen. Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard retells one of the most famous love stories of European history (a film adaptation of the novel was released in 1988). A second novel, Sybille, concerns the death of literature during the Albigensian Crusade and a 13th-century troubadour grappling with her verse as her homeland collapses.

In 1988, Meade published the biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, which remains an authoritative source of the author's life and work. New interest in Parker led to the making of the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. Meade further explored Parker in her 2004 book Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. The work covered three other notable female writers of the Jazz Age—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post named it among the best books of the year., Kirkus Reviews called it "largely apocryphal and hardly scholarly, but a lot of fun." In 2006 Meade edited Parker’s collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker, updating the 60-year-old anthology with fresh material and many personal letters. Penguin Books commissioned a jacket from the well known illustrator Seth.

Meade’s first book, Bitching, published in 1973, stemmed from her involvement in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. Following her participation in feminist consciousness-raising groups, she asked women of various ages how they secretly regarded the men in their lives. The result was a less than favorable review of the opposite sex.

Meade studied journalism at Northwestern University, graduating in 1955. The following year she moved to New York, earned a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and found her first reporting job as an assistant to Earl Wilson, the popular Broadway columnist for the New York Post. She subsequently worked for publications in New York and Washington before becoming a freelancer and publishing articles in The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic and McCall's.

Marion Meade (born January 7, 1934) is an American biographer and novelist. She is best known for her portraits of literary figures and iconic filmmakers.