Mary Dearborn is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 biographer and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. Dearborn has published biographies of John Dewey

John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...

, Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...

, Henry Miller

Henry Miller

Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...

, and Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim

Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...

.

Dearborn graduated from Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

 in 1977 with a degree in English and Classics. In 1978 she got her M.A. from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

from the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She received her Ph.D from Columbia in 1984 for her dissertation "Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture Since the Civil War."

Dearborn currently lives in New York City.

Works

• Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (1986)
• Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey (1988)
• "The Happiest Man Alive": A Biography of Henry Miller (1991)
• Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (1996)
• Mailer: A Biography (1999)
• Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (2004)