Margaret Sanborn was an American writer and biographer of Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee

Robert Edward Lee was a career military officer who is best known for having commanded the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War....

 and Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

 (aka Samuel Clemens).

History

Margaret Sanborn resided in Mill Valley, California

Mill Valley, California

Mill Valley is a city in Marin County, California, United States located about north of San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge. The population was 13,903 at the 2010 census.Mill Valley is located on the western and northern shores of Richardson Bay...

, north of San Francisco near the Pacific Ocean. She died early in 2005 leaving a son, David R. Sanborn, and a daughter, Catherine.

Margaret Sanborn came to prominence in 1966 with the publication of Robert E. Lee: A Portrait [1807-1861], the first volume of her two volume biography of the Confederate

Confederate States of America

The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...

 general which won critical acclaim.

In an interview given in 1997 at the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

, Sanborn relates the story of how she came to be the writer of the final volume in the Rivers of America Series

Rivers of America Series

The Rivers of America Series is a landmark series of books on American rivers, for the most part written by literary figures rather than historians. The series spanned three publishers and thirty-seven years.- History :...

, The American, River of El Dorado.

In 2004 Sanborn received a Milley Award for contributions to the arts from the Mill Valley Art Commission.

Partial bibliography

Non-Fiction

Robert E. Lee. A Portrait. [1807-1861] (J. B. Lippincott Company

J. B. Lippincott Company

J. B. Lippincott & Co. was an American publishing house founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1836 by Joshua Ballinger Lippincott.Formed by descendants of the Religious Society of Friends, Joshua Lippincott's company began selling a line of Bibles, prayer books and other religious works before...

, Philadelphia & New York, 1966)

Robert E. Lee: the Complete Man 1861-1870 (J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia & New York, 1967)

The American: River of El Dorado (Holt, Rinehart and Winston., New York, 1974)

The Grand Tetons (G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1978)

Yosemite – Its Discovery, Its Wonders & Its People (Random House

Random House

Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

, New York, 1981)

Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years: A Biography (Doubleday, New York, 1990.)