In its 75 successful years, The New Yorker has set the standard for feature-length magazine biography. In fact, the magazine owns a copyright to the title Profiles. No other periodical has brought to this kind of biographical reporting more distinguished writers or more wide-ranging subjects, and none has achieved more incisive and revealing results.

The compilation includes telling, subtle, and often funny portraits of figures that come from every field of human endeavor and accomplishment: Ernest Hemingway, Legs Diamond, Thomas Edison, Roseanne Bart, Queen Mary, Julia Child, Marlon Brando, Adolf Hitler, Benjamin Cardozo, Edith Warton and Hillary Clinton. The contributors' names also speak for themselves: Ian Frazier, Janet Flanner, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, Mark Singer, Dorothy Parker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Truman Capote.

Profiles are the jewel in The New Yorker's nonfiction crown. They not only display the riches of a great magazine, but shed light on many of the great figures who have helped to shape the world we live in.