I would say is that any new biographer needs to understand the importance of the cast of characters or historical figures who surround their subject. It is remarkable to think about how important the lives of other people are when you are writing a biography. Even though I was researching Christophe’s life, I had to pull threads that involved his family, his friends, his allies, and his enemies, as far as I could, not to the same in-depth degree, of course. But, for example, his wife, whose last name you will see by reading the book, is not the one that most people present. Marie-Louise Coidavid, Christophe’s wife, in fact, had another last name that she used before she married him, which is not Coidavid. And again, it’s one of those stories where I could have missed this by thinking, nope, this must be a mistake, and instead I pulled that thread, and I found out that, no, the mistake was in not having that name attached to her in other writings about her life.

Aspart of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Marlene L. Daut.

Marlene L. Daut is Professor of French, African American Studies, and History at Yale University. She is the author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025); the award-winning Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017); and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Liverpool, 2015).

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