Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.

[1] Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) won the George Washington Book Prize.

As The Wall Street Journal's reviewer put it, "Schiff does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist.

[6] Cleopatra appeared on The New York Times's Top Ten Books of 2010,[7] and won the 2011 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

[10] Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jane Kamensky found it to be “curiously flat,” offering “banalities” and a “tenuous grip on the period.” Kamensky concluded, “For all her talents in sketching the who, what, where and when of the Salem trials, [the] vexed question of why is one that Schiff simply cannot manage.” [11] Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Felipe Fernández-Armesto found that Schiff offered "a trial narrative unsurpassed for detail and impressive for her mastery of the fragmentary and frustrating sources."