“Brenda Wineapple provides a nuanced and quite moving account of the improbable relationship between an ‘activist’ and a ‘recluse.’”

–New York Sun

“[Wineapple] brings a scholar’s diligence and a novelist’s imagination to her account of Dickinson and Higginson’s relationship, crafting a tour de force that should delight specialists and casual readers alike. The book’s individual strands of inquiry–Higginson’s life, Dickinson’s poems, the letters that passed between them, and the historical, political and artistic contexts of the age–are interesting in and of themselves, but when intertwined so as to inform and strengthen each other, they’re fascinating….Wineapple is a tremendously versatile and sensitive writer, and she elucidates her subjects’ subtleties with authority and grace. She conjures up vivid scenes but never oversteps the historian’s duty to fact, dispenses an enormous amount of documentary information without ever overburdening her narrative, and interprets Dickinson’s often challenging poems with eloquence and lucidity. Not a biography, history or literary analysis, yet something of each, White Heat amply demonstrates that indirect illumination sometimes casts the brightest light.”
–Joel Brouwer, The Washington Post

“Much more than a biography–rather, a sweeping cultural and political history of the lead-up to the American civil war and its aftermath…[Wineapple] has too much intellectual integrity to pretend to pin the poet down. Instead she achieves what the best literary biography should: a portrait which provides close-up moments of tangible intimacy while allowing the subject to remain ultimately mysterious.”

–The Economist

“Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat is one of the most astonishing books about poetry I have ever read. It causes us to see Emily Dickinson, perhaps for the first time, as an actual human being of a particular time and place, rather than as a timeless, ghostly and ethereal instrument of first-rank poetic genius–and she had red hair!  Wineapple clarifies our past misconceptions about Higginson, and captures how he wisely and cunningly sought to protect a sensitive and eccentric poet from the vicious idiocies of the literary world.  Beautifully written, illuminated by Wineapple’s grasp of nineteenth-century American history, with its astonishing cast of literary, philosophical and military personalities, the book is irresistibly entertaining.”

–Franz Wright

“Wineapple is an astute literary biographer with a feisty prose style and a relish for unsettling received ideas. Social history–the taproot of character–is her forte… White Heat is written with a dry heat that does justice to its impassioned protagonists.”

–Judith Thurman, The New Yorker

“White Heat succeeds magnificently in shining a light into the work of two unlikely friends…a powerful insight into two extraordinary figures who where there, in a rather unusual way, for each other.”

–Bookpage

“A nuanced and insightful study.”

–Booklist, starred


“(A) brilliant study…she elegantly delves into a life and offers rich insights into a little-known relationship between two of the late-19th century’s most intriguing writers.”

–Publishers Weekly, starred


“A moving portrait of two unalike but kindred spirits who did indeed “Dare [to] see a Soul at the ‘White Heat.’”

–Kirkus Reviews, starred

“White Heat is the story of a famous friendship in American Literature, but it is much more than that. Wineapple’s decision to let Higginson’s life carry the narrative, with Dickinson’s work providing the light from within–the epiphanies–is a stroke of structural genius worthy of Dickinson herself. This brilliant and moving sortie is without question the best account of Emily Dickinson ever written. It is a great story, greatly told.”

–Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Brenda Wineapple, a superb literary critic, has a historian’s soul.  In White Heat, she beautifully describes the quiet drama and elusive tempos of one of the most improbable and fateful authorial friendships in all of American writing. Few contemporary interpreters, if any, could have understood the story in all its richness as Wineapple has–and then related it with such grace as well as authority.”

–Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln   

 “Sensitive and haunting evocation of an epistolary love affair between a famously reclusive poet and a handsome activist minister, told with all the power and passion of Emily Dickinson’s art.”

–Meryle Secrest

“For those of us who have all but memorized Dickinson’s poems and for anyone who has yet to discover this irresistible American original, Brenda Wineapple’s gorgeously composed portrait of an extraordinary friendship will be a revelation. Her research is impeccable, partly because she is wise about the nuances of love, and partly, and this is no small matter for a literary historian, because she writes like an eloquent angel. Always a brilliant story teller, she has somehow managed, this time, to outdo even her own previous outdoing.”

-Joel Conarroe

“White Heat is biography at its very best. It brings these two to life more exactly, more sympathetically, more vividly than ever before. A triumph!”

–J.D. McClatchy, poet, editor of Yale Review

“Brenda Wineapple brilliantly excavates and tracks the surprising relationship between Emily Dickinson, the reclusive genius of American literature, and Wentworth Higginson, her unlikely Preceptor. The book tells an unknown story. It also further establishes Wineapple as one of our finest literary biographers.”

– Edward Hirsch

“White Heat captures the most elusive of “elective affinities” in American letters. With matchless authority and knowledge, Wineapple restores, for the first time, the friendship between the reclusive genius and the bustling public man.”

–Benita Eisler

“Toeing the circumferences of biography and literary criticism, Brenda Wineapple has done an admirable and eloquent job of unraveling this intriguing chapter in the Emily Dickinson story, but always with respect for the mystery of compatibility at its core. No book I know brings us deeper into the inner chambers of this poet’s private life.”

–Billy Collins, former poet laureate