The journalistic profile is one of the most popular, widely read types of magazine feature writing. Helen Benedict, a master of the genre, has collected for Portraits in Print nine of her best pieces, and provided a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the art of portrait journalism.

Among the persons profiled here are Joseph Brodsky, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag, Paule Marshall, Bernard Malamud, and Beverly Sills. In a general introduction and in lively discussions after each profile, Helen Benedict describes how she selected the subjects, got them to agree to be...

Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a legendary English aristocratic family. Her sisters included Nancy, doyenne of the 1920s London smart set and a noted novelist and biographer; Diana, wife to the English fascist chief Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, who fell head over in heels in love with Hitler; and Deborah, later the Duchess of Devonshire. Jessica swung left and moved to America, where she took part in the civil rights movement and wrote her classic expose of the undertaking business, The American Way of Death.
Hons and Rebels is the hugely...