Who is Hillary Clinton?

What you don't know about Hillary Clinton is a lot.

She'd tell you herself: "I am a very well-known unknown person."

Biographers and journalists have spent years studying the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, coming away with partial portraits at best.

That's because Clinton is a mass of contradictions.

Analysts say she is: graspingly ambitious, brilliant, thin-skinned, a do-gooder, deceptive, caring, inauthentic, shockingly unself-aware, entitled, bighearted, vindictive, funny, mean, foulmouthed, and dedicated to God.

People project onto Clinton whom they think she is based on their own prejudice - a human Rorschach test, observers have said.

In her remarkable life, Clinton, 68, has triumphed, and she has suffered. She has absorbed decades of misogyny - "Iron my shirt!" men have yelled to her at speeches. And she has maddened millions with the way she has explained her actions.

Nothing can be fully understood about Hillary Clinton without factoring in her husband. Is their union a coldly forged political partnership or a deeply felt lifelong love?

What follows is a survey of all things Hillary, the person and the political figure, based on books - including two she wrote - and news reports.

If Clinton beats Republican Donald Trump this fall, it won't be her first time as chief executive.

In the early 1960s, Hillary Rodham was president of the Fabian fan club, dedicated to Fabian Forte, the Philadelphia crooner, she writes in her book Living History.

Following her pattern of liking cute boys, Clinton, born in October 1947, also was a Paul (McCartney) girl. She was a Cubs fan and a Parcheesi devotee as well, growing up on idyllic Elm Street in white, middle-class Park Ridge, Ill., a suburb of Chicago.

Her mother was a Democrat, her father a Republican. Many August days, she'd shoot guns near her maternal grandfather's cabin at Lake Winola, Pa., above Scranton. And, back home, Clinton attended Bible school to support her devout Methodist faith.

Clinton's mother, Dorothy, was a homemaker who told people her daughter was "born an adult." Clinton's father, Hugh, was reared in Scranton and won a scholarship to Pennsylvania State University as a tight end. After moving to Chicago, he prospered in the textile-supply industry.

In Living History, Clinton remembers her father as gruff. In A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Carl Bernstein is less diplomatic: Hugh Rodham "descended into continuous bullying."

During Clinton's childhood, Bernstein writes, she developed her brains, her "puritan sensibility," her "chronic impatience" and belief in public service, and, "above all, the balm, beacon, and refuge of religion."

What's more, writes Gail Sheehy in Hillary's Choice, Clinton internalized her "drillmaster father's" style to develop her own perfectionism. Hugh Rodham's overbearing behavior helped create Clinton's "inner dictator," who would rule her life.

Clinton was a Goldwater Republican when she entered Wellesley College. Tacking leftward, she became president of student government and helped banish mandatory prayer from the dining halls.

Upon graduation in 1969, Clinton took a job sliming salmon in Alaska - "preparation for life in Washington," she writes.

At Yale Law School, she grew "staggeringly confident" in her intellect and in her views, Sheehy says.

One day in the library, she spotted a "Viking" of a man - tall, reddish-bearded, long-haired. She introduced herself.

"He . . . had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores," Clinton writes.

Bill Clinton admired what he saw, too, Sheehy writes, quoting him: She's the "greatest thing on two legs."

Announcing that she was moving to Arkansas to be with her husband, Hillary Clinton shocked friends. "Why on earth would you throw away your future?" one asked.

Because "money means almost nothing to Bill," Clinton writes, she became a corporate lawyer for the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, and joined the board of Walmart.

"She spent years on the board of one of the most viciously antilabor employers in the country . . . and never once spoke up in favor of unions," writes Kathleen Geier, contributor to a collection of essays from the Nation for the book Who is Hillary Clinton? Two Decades of Answers from the Left.

The affiliation helped burnish Clinton's image as Wall Street's favorite Democrat, says Geier.

Governor of Arkansas for nearly 12 years, Bill Clinton decided to run for president. Problems developed.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, America met Hillary Clinton in a 60 Minutes interview in which her husband addressed a reported infidelity with a woman named Gennifer Flowers.

As the camera rolled, Clinton didn't affix her husband with a loving Nancy Reagan gaze, Sheehy writes. Instead, "this was the look of a consigliere sitting vigil over a member of the Family."

Making sure the world understood who she was, Clinton famously said, "I'm not some Tammy Wynette standing by my man." Plaudits and ridicule followed.

"For better or worse, I was outspoken," Clinton writes. People who wanted to fit her into a box - feminist or traditionalist - "would never be satisfied with me as me."

When Bill Clinton was elected, he told the electorate they were buying one Clinton and getting a second free. That didn't sit well with much of America, especially after Hillary Clinton unsuccessfully tried to enact universal health care, alienating Congress with her perceived arrogance.

Problems from Arkansas vexed Clinton as first lady. Her billing records at the Rose firm were subpoenaed as part of the investigation into a Whitewater land deal. The papers disappeared, then turned up months later in the White House.

Though Clinton was never found to have committed a crime, suspicions lingered because, Bernstein writes, she hadn't responded in a straightforward manner.

When her friend and Arkansas colleague Vince Foster committed suicide in Washington, some conservative writers suggested she had killed him - a falsity that nevertheless revealed the depth of anger toward the first lady.

Despite this, Clinton managed to earn accolades after speaking at the U.N. World Conference in Beijing in 1995: "Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights."

Clinton's most trying time as first lady began when her husband had an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton had told his wife there was nothing to the allegations.

"I was dumbfounded, heartbroken, and outraged that I'd believed him at all," she writes.

Why did they stay together? "Love persisted," she writes, adding, "He's the most interesting, energizing, and fully alive person I ever met."

Some more cynically believe Clinton elicited a deal from her husband - to move to New York, allowing her to run for Senate in 2000. Elected to two terms, Clinton was a steady force for the people of the Empire State, say Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. in Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

They point to her battle to fund AIDS patients. And they include raves from fellow senators surprised at her "good nature" and how "industrious" and "not judgmental" she was. Even Republican Sen. John McCain praised her, saying she withstood more scrutiny than any recently elected senator and was "always well-prepared" and "conducted herself admirably."

With a view toward running for president one day, she joined the Senate Armed Services Committee to harden her credentials, analysts say.

When President George W. Bush incorrectly linked Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda, he asked Congress to vote for invading Iraq in 2002. Clinton's "aye" is a decision that haunts her.

"I got it wrong . . . plain and simple," Clinton writes in Hard Choices - a mea culpa that critics charge is years late.

Gerth and Van Natta criticize the "brainiest" U.S. senator for not reading the existing intelligence that showed Bush's error.

After Clinton decided to run for president in 2008, her eyes welled up when she beat then-Sen. Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary.

Many believe the emotional display "humanized" her, Katha Pollitt writes in Who is Hillary Clinton? Middle-age women, Pollitt says, "see in Hillary a calm and competent multitasker like themselves." They enjoyed her self-deprecating description of herself and her staff as the "sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits."

Some said the tears made her look too soft. Others contended they were a phony display to combat the perception of Clinton's being too hard.

"Everybody else has a margin for error," Clinton concludes. "But I don't."

When Clinton lost the election to Obama, media analysts explained how his message for change overwhelmed hers of experience. Also, he was said to possess a superior fund-raising organization. And Clinton was denigrated for her old bugaboo: conducting her campaign with a sense of entitlement.

She has continued to be hammered, Pollitt writes, absorbing remarks by writers such as syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who labeled Clinton "a castrating female persona."

As Obama's secretary of state, Clinton made the United States a sought-after world partner again, Kim Ghattas says in The Secretary: A Journey With Hillary Clinton From Beirut to the Heart of American Power.

No longer "riding on derivative power" from her husband, Ghattas says, Clinton distinguished herself on the world stage, castigating sexual violence in the Congo, lobbying against cookstoves whose black carbon killed Third World women preparing family meals, and speaking out against child marriage in Nicaragua.

As Madame Secretary, Clinton was enjoying a 70 percent approval rating. Her resumé as a former senator and cabinet member who spent eight years in the White House helping a president appealed to those who believed she was most qualified to become the country's first female president.

But the good feelings didn't last.

While Clinton was secretary of state, the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments. Hillary Clinton has been accused of being opaque about the donations. The foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to global health, economic growth, and opportunities for girls and women.

Declining to release speeches she gave to Wall Street players for which she was compensated, Clinton raised suspicions about campaign money she received from businesspeople.

Similarly, Clinton was criticized but exonerated for alleged wrongdoing in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.

And this month, FBI Director James Comey judged her to have been "extremely careless" but not criminally culpable for using a private email server as secretary of state.

Many of Clinton's alleged indiscretions begin as minor errors in judgment then blow up because she is unwilling to fully acknowledge errors, say Gerth and Van Natta.

"Admitting a mistake would arm her enemies and undermine her carefully cultivated image as a . . . bright person who yearns only to do good," the authors conclude.

Clinton's problems may explain why she endured a long and bruising primary battle with Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose progressive agenda appealed to voters - many of them millennials - who saw him as a more authentic alternative to Clinton.

As the campaign has unspooled, Clinton has been revealed to be an unpopular presidential candidate. Just 43 percent of Democrats and of people who say they are Democratic-leaning are satisfied with her, according to numbers released last week by the Pew Research Center.

That level of antipathy is rivaled by Trump's 40 percent satisfaction level among Republicans and those leaning Republican. Still, Clinton is able to draw support from ever-increasing numbers of minority voters who say she's on their side. And her government experience, along with her unique standing as a woman who has gone farther in American politics than any other, afford Clinton positives that Trump cannot claim.

Ultimately, as people contemplate pulling the lever for Clinton, many are realizing that the more they study her, the less they appear to know.

What's clear about Clinton is that nothing is clear at all.

Writing in Who is Hillary Clinton?, novelist and feminist Erica Jong declares: "It's impossible to glimpse the human being beneath the mask."

Hillary Clinton, say Gerth and Van Natta, "is the most closely observed politician in America - and its most enigmatic."

alubrano@phillynews.com

215-854-4969@AlfredLubrano