Katherine Kelley is an American journalist and author of best-selling unauthorized biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the British royal family, the Bush family, and Oprah Winfrey.
Kelley at Borders Books and Music in Chicago, April 2010
An unauthorized biography sometimes called a kiss-and-tell, or a tell-all, is a biography written without the subject's permission or input. The term is usually restricted to biographies written within the subject's lifetime or shortly after their death; as such, it is not applied to biographies of historical figures written long after their deaths.
1882 edition of Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott (1834) by James Hogg, an unauthorized biography