The Crucible, first produced in 1953, is a play by one of Dore Schary's contemporaries, Arthur Miller. On the surface the play deals with the Salem witch trials of seventeenth-century New England. On a deeper level, however, the work is said to be an allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s.

FDR's Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt's Massive Disability—And the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (1999), by Hugh Gregory Gallagher, explores the attempts by those around FDR to hide his disability and how Gallagher's discovery of such historical facts impacted his own life as a former polio patient and historian.

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Math Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (1998), by Sylvia Nasar, is the story of a mathematical genius who slipped into madness at age thirty but, with the...