Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

*Winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts&Letters Award for Life Writing*

“A wickedly entertaining” (The New York Times) detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare.

Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevale...