The Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege

The Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege
Heidi Ardizzone
New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007
Rare Book Collection
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

The Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege by American studies scholar Heidi Ardizzone serves as the first published book-length biography on Belle da Costa Greene. Ardizzone’s research often focuses on multiracial identity and experience in nineteenth and twentieth-century America. In The Illuminated Life, she offers a social biography of Belle da Costa Greene, analyzing Greene’s correspondences and professional papers, public records, and contemporaries’ memoirs to document the social circles that Greene inhibited and how she moved across lines of color, class, and culture.