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Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 21

The 30 best biographies of all time.

Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that his work was “a kind of pursuit… writing about the pursuit of that fleeting figure, in such a way as to bring them alive in the present.”

At the risk of sounding cliché, the best biographies do exactly this: bring their subjects to life. A great biography isn’t just a laundry list of events that happened to someone. Rather, it should weave a narrative and tell a story in almost the same way a novel does. In this way, biography differs from the rest of nonfiction .

All the biographies on this list are just as captivating as excellent novels , if not more so. With that, please enjoy the 30 best biographies of all time — some historical, some recent, but all remarkable, life-giving tributes to their subjects.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great biographies out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized biography recommendation  😉

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1. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

This biography of esteemed mathematician John Nash was both a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and the basis for the award-winning film of the same name. Nasar thoroughly explores Nash’s prestigious career, from his beginnings at MIT to his work at the RAND Corporation — as well the internal battle he waged against schizophrenia, a disorder that nearly derailed his life.

2. Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game - Updated Edition by Andrew Hodges

Hodges’ 1983 biography of Alan Turing sheds light on the inner workings of this brilliant mathematician, cryptologist, and computer pioneer. Indeed, despite the title ( a nod to his work during WWII ), a great deal of the “enigmatic” Turing is laid out in this book. It covers his heroic code-breaking efforts during the war, his computer designs and contributions to mathematical biology in the years following, and of course, the vicious persecution that befell him in the 1950s — when homosexual acts were still a crime punishable by English law.

3. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is not only the inspiration for a hit Broadway musical, but also a work of creative genius itself. This massive undertaking of over 800 pages details every knowable moment of the youngest Founding Father’s life: from his role in the Revolutionary War and early American government to his sordid (and ultimately career-destroying) affair with Maria Reynolds. He may never have been president, but he was a fascinating and unique figure in American history — plus it’s fun to get the truth behind the songs.

Prefer to read about fascinating First Ladies rather than almost-presidents? Check out this awesome list of books about First Ladies over on The Archive.

4. Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

A prolific essayist, short story writer, and novelist, Hurston turned her hand to biographical writing in 1927 with this incredible work, kept under lock and key until it was published 2018. It’s based on Hurston’s interviews with the last remaining survivor of the Middle Passage slave trade, a man named Cudjo Lewis. Rendered in searing detail and Lewis’ highly affecting African-American vernacular, this biography of the “last black cargo” will transport you back in time to an era that, chillingly, is not nearly as far away from us as it feels.

5. Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert

Though many a biography of him has been attempted, Gilbert’s is the final authority on Winston Churchill — considered by many to be Britain’s greatest prime minister ever. A dexterous balance of in-depth research and intimately drawn details makes this biography a perfect tribute to the mercurial man who led Britain through World War II.

Just what those circumstances are occupies much of Bodanis's book, which pays homage to Einstein and, just as important, to predecessors such as Maxwell, Faraday, and Lavoisier, who are not as well known as Einstein today. Balancing writerly energy and scholarly weight, Bodanis offers a primer in modern physics and cosmology, explaining that the universe today is an expression of mass that will, in some vastly distant future, one day slide back to the energy side of the equation, replacing the \'dominion of matter\' with \'a great stillness\'--a vision that is at once lovely and profoundly frightening.

Without sliding into easy psychobiography, Bodanis explores other circumstances as well; namely, Einstein's background and character, which combined with a sterling intelligence to afford him an idiosyncratic view of the way things work--a view that would change the world. --Gregory McNamee

6. E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

This “biography of the world’s most famous equation” is a one-of-a-kind take on the genre: rather than being the story of Einstein, it really does follow the history of the equation itself. From the origins and development of its individual elements (energy, mass, and light) to their ramifications in the twentieth century, Bodanis turns what could be an extremely dry subject into engaging fare for readers of all stripes.

7. Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

When Enrique was only five years old, his mother left Honduras for the United States, promising a quick return. Eleven years later, Enrique finally decided to take matters into his own hands in order to see her again: he would traverse Central and South America via railway, risking his life atop the “train of death” and at the hands of the immigration authorities, to reunite with his mother. This tale of Enrique’s perilous journey is not for the faint of heart, but it is an account of incredible devotion and sharp commentary on the pain of separation among immigrant families.

8. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

Herrera’s 1983 biography of renowned painter Frida Kahlo, one of the most recognizable names in modern art, has since become the definitive account on her life. And while Kahlo no doubt endured a great deal of suffering (a horrific accident when she was eighteen, a husband who had constant affairs), the focal point of the book is not her pain. Instead, it’s her artistic brilliance and immense resolve to leave her mark on the world — a mark that will not soon be forgotten, in part thanks to Herrera’s dedicated work.

9. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Perhaps the most impressive biographical feat of the twenty-first century, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about a woman whose cells completely changed the trajectory of modern medicine. Rebecca Skloot skillfully commemorates the previously unknown life of a poor black woman whose cancer cells were taken, without her knowledge, for medical testing — and without whom we wouldn’t have many of the critical cures we depend upon today.

10. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the Denali wilderness in April 1992. Five months later, McCandless was found emaciated and deceased in his shelter — but of what cause? Krakauer’s biography of McCandless retraces his steps back to the beginning of the trek, attempting to suss out what the young man was looking for on his journey, and whether he fully understood what dangers lay before him.

11. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families by James Agee

"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” From this line derives the central issue of Agee and Evans’ work: who truly deserves our praise and recognition? According to this 1941 biography, it’s the barely-surviving sharecropper families who were severely impacted by the American “Dust Bowl” — hundreds of people entrenched in poverty, whose humanity Evans and Agee desperately implore their audience to see in their book.

12. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

Another mysterious explorer takes center stage in this gripping 2009 biography. Grann tells the story of Percy Fawcett, the archaeologist who vanished in the Amazon along with his son in 1925, supposedly in search of an ancient lost city. Parallel to this narrative, Grann describes his own travels in the Amazon 80 years later: discovering firsthand what threats Fawcett may have encountered, and coming to realize what the “Lost City of Z” really was.

13. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang

Though many of us will be familiar with the name Mao Zedong, this prodigious biography sheds unprecedented light upon the power-hungry “Red Emperor.” Chang and Halliday begin with the shocking statistic that Mao was responsible for 70 million deaths during peacetime — more than any other twentieth-century world leader. From there, they unravel Mao’s complex ideologies, motivations, and missions, breaking down his long-propagated “hero” persona and thrusting forth a new, grislier image of one of China’s biggest revolutionaries.

14. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson by Andrew Wilson

Titled after one of her most evocative poems, this shimmering bio of Sylvia Plath takes an unusual approach. Instead of focusing on her years of depression and tempestuous marriage to poet Ted Hughes, it chronicles her life before she ever came to Cambridge. Wilson closely examines her early family and relationships, feelings and experiences, with information taken from her meticulous diaries — setting a strong precedent for other Plath biographers to follow.

15. The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes

What if you had twenty-four different people living inside you, and you never knew which one was going to come out? Such was the life of Billy Milligan, the subject of this haunting biography by the author of Flowers for Algernon . Keyes recounts, in a refreshingly straightforward style, the events of Billy’s life and how his psyche came to be “split”... as well as how, with Keyes’ help, he attempted to put the fragments of himself back together.

16. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

This gorgeously constructed biography follows Paul Farmer, a doctor who’s worked for decades to eradicate infectious diseases around the globe, particularly in underprivileged areas. Though Farmer’s humanitarian accomplishments are extraordinary in and of themselves, the true charm of this book comes from Kidder’s personal relationship with him — and the sense of fulfillment the reader sustains from reading about someone genuinely heroic, written by someone else who truly understands and admires what they do.

17. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

Here’s another bio that will reshape your views of a famed historical tyrant, though this time in a surprisingly favorable light. Decorated scholar Andrew Roberts delves into the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, from his near-flawless military instincts to his complex and confusing relationship with his wife. But Roberts’ attitude toward his subject is what really makes this work shine: rather than ridiculing him ( as it would undoubtedly be easy to do ), he approaches the “petty tyrant” with a healthy amount of deference.

18. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV by Robert A. Caro

Lyndon Johnson might not seem as intriguing or scandalous as figures like Kennedy, Nixon, or W. Bush. But in this expertly woven biography, Robert Caro lays out the long, winding road of his political career, and it’s full of twists you wouldn’t expect. Johnson himself was a surprisingly cunning figure, gradually maneuvering his way closer and closer to power. Finally, in 1963, he got his greatest wish — but at what cost? Fans of Adam McKay’s Vice , this is the book for you.

19. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Anyone who grew up reading Little House on the Prairie will surely be fascinated by this tell-all biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Caroline Fraser draws upon never-before-published historical resources to create a lush study of the author’s life — not in the gently narrated manner of the Little House series, but in raw and startling truths about her upbringing, marriage, and volatile relationship with her daughter (and alleged ghostwriter) Rose Wilder Lane.

20. Prince: A Private View by Afshin Shahidi

Compiled just after the superstar’s untimely death in 2016, this intimate snapshot of Prince’s life is actually a largely visual work — Shahidi served as his private photographer from the early 2000s until his passing. And whatever they say about pictures being worth a thousand words, Shahidi’s are worth more still: Prince’s incredible vibrance, contagious excitement, and altogether singular personality come through in every shot.

21. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss

Could there be a more fitting title for a book about the husband-wife team who discovered radioactivity? What you may not know is that these nuclear pioneers also had a fascinating personal history. Marie Sklodowska met Pierre Curie when she came to work in his lab in 1891, and just a few years later they were married. Their passion for each other bled into their passion for their work, and vice-versa — and in almost no time at all, they were on their way to their first of their Nobel Prizes.

22. Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

She may not have been assassinated or killed in a mysterious plane crash, but Rosemary Kennedy’s fate is in many ways the worst of “the Kennedy Curse.” As if a botched lobotomy that left her almost completely incapacitated weren’t enough, her parents then hid her away from society, almost never to be seen again. Yet in this new biography, penned by devoted Kennedy scholar Kate Larson, the full truth of Rosemary’s post-lobotomy life is at last revealed.

23. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

This appropriately lyrical biography of brilliant Jazz Age poet and renowned feminist, Edna St. Vincent Millay, is indeed a perfect balance of savage and beautiful. While Millay’s poetic work was delicate and subtle, the woman herself was feisty and unpredictable, harboring unusual and occasionally destructive habits that Milford fervently explores.

24. Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes

Holmes’ famous philosophy of “biography as pursuit” is thoroughly proven here in his first full-length biographical work. Shelley: The Pursuit details an almost feverish tracking of Percy Shelley as a dark and cutting figure in the Romantic period — reforming many previous historical conceptions about him through Holmes’ compelling and resolute writing.

25. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

Another Gothic figure has been made newly known through this work, detailing the life of prolific horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson. Author Ruth Franklin digs deep into the existence of the reclusive and mysterious Jackson, drawing penetrating comparisons between the true events of her life and the dark nature of her fiction.

26. The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

Fans of Into the Wild and The Lost City of Z will find their next adventure fix in this 2017 book about Christopher Knight, a man who lived by himself in the Maine woods for almost thirty years. The tale of this so-called “last true hermit” will captivate readers who have always fantasized about escaping society, with vivid descriptions of Knight’s rural setup, his carefully calculated moves and how he managed to survive the deadly cold of the Maine winters.

27. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The man, the myth, the legend: Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, is properly immortalized in Isaacson’s masterful biography. It divulges the details of Jobs’ little-known childhood and tracks his fateful path from garage engineer to leader of one of the largest tech companies in the world — not to mention his formative role in other legendary companies like Pixar, and indeed within the Silicon Valley ecosystem as a whole.

28. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

Olympic runner Louis Zamperini was just twenty-six when his US Army bomber crashed and burned in the Pacific, leaving him and two other men afloat on a raft for forty-seven days — only to be captured by the Japanese Navy and tortured as a POW for the next two and a half years. In this gripping biography, Laura Hillenbrand tracks Zamperini’s story from beginning to end… including how he embraced Christian evangelism as a means of recovery, and even came to forgive his tormentors in his later years.

29. Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff

Everyone knows of Vladimir Nabokov — but what about his wife, Vera, whom he called “the best-humored woman I have ever known”? According to Schiff, she was a genius in her own right, supporting Vladimir not only as his partner, but also as his all-around editor and translator. And she kept up that trademark humor throughout it all, inspiring her husband’s work and injecting some of her own creative flair into it along the way.

30. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

William Shakespeare is a notoriously slippery historical figure — no one really knows when he was born, what he looked like, or how many plays he wrote. But that didn’t stop Stephen Greenblatt, who in 2004 turned out this magnificently detailed biography of the Bard: a series of imaginative reenactments of his writing process, and insights on how the social and political ideals of the time would have influenced him. Indeed, no one exists in a vacuum, not even Shakespeare — hence the conscious depiction of him in this book as a “will in the world,” rather than an isolated writer shut up in his own musty study.

If you're looking for more inspiring nonfiction, check out this list of 30 engaging self-help books , or this list of the last century's best memoirs !

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The Best Books of 2021

The best biographies: the 2021 nbcc shortlist, recommended by elizabeth taylor.

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley

Elizabeth Taylor , the author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics' Circle biography committee, discusses their 2021 shortlist for the title of the best biography—including a revelatory new book about the life of Malcolm X, a group biography of artists in the 1960s, and a book built from a cache of letters written in Japan's shogun era.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty

1 Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley

2 the price of peace: money, democracy, and the life of john maynard keynes by zachary d. carter, 3 the dead are arising: the life of malcolm x by les payne & tamara payne, 4 red comet: the short life and blazing art of sylvia plath by heather clark, 5 the equivalents: a story of art, female friendship, and liberation in the 1960s by maggie doherty.

W elcome back to Five Books! This is the third year in a row that we’ve come together to discuss the National Book Critics Circle finalists for biography. Before we look at the 2021 shortlist, could you reflect on the qualities that unite the best biographies?

Biographies have a special antenna for what’s happening in the world. This year, three excellent biographies about living men dealt directly with politics that provided a bit of a refuge from current personalities but, at the same time, elucidated the present day: His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser and Man of Tomorrow: The Restless Life of Jerry Brown by James Newton.

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The best biographies adapt form to subject—they come from an angle, tell the story of a group, focus on a moment. They can do this because they inhabit the people and times about which they are writing. Most of all, readers respond to a special alchemy of subject and biographer, and while I think Janet Malcolm is brilliant, I don’t quite endorse her idea that the biographer at work “is like the professional burglar.”

Biographies often have to contend with or respond to how their subject or subjects have been defined by previous works of biography. Of the books we’re looking at here, that’s certainly true of the Plath and Malcolm X biographies. Keynes too.

To some extent, with the exception of Amy Stanley, each biography finalist wrestles with the interpretations of previous biographies. Heather Clark responds more deliberately in Red Comet because she is contending not only with Plath, but the myth of Plath. Les Payne challenges interpretations of biographies about Malcolm X, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Manning Marable. As an investigative reporter, Payne not only challenges interpretations but also corrects the historic record and Malcom X’s own autobiography. Biographers live with their subjects, and the shadows of their subjects.

Shall we start off by discussing the first of your 2021 finalists for the title of best biography? This is Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World. It’s very much a life-and-times book, as it uses the story of a single woman to offer a sweep of 19th-century Japanese society.

You have that just right: Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo through the life of Tsuneno, daughter of a Buddhist priest in a rural province at a moment that Japan ’s transformation is taking root.

Just to be clear for those who don’t know: the city we call Tokyo was known as ‘Edo’ until 1869. 

Tsuneno attends school, learns to sew and dreams of the big city. At age 12, she is married off and dispatched to an even more remote province. Three failed marriages later, she literally walks for weeks on a horrific journey to reach Edo where, impoverished and degraded, she proves to be a skilful survivor, finding a form of independence to which she clings, even after she marries a louche of a samurai . She dies in 1853, just before Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan.

She was remarkably resilient and tenacious, but Tsuneno was also rebellious, troublesome and not entirely likeable. And her death brought me to tears. Stanley renders Tsuneno’s messy life, unique struggles and the quotidian particulars of her world so richly that this Japanese woman from another era becomes achingly human and resonant. Tsuneno emerges as a sort of everywoman who transcends time and is more than a vessel to represent Edo’s transformation into Tokyo and Japan’s path to power.

“It’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city”

Stanley, an historian of early and modern Japan, happened to find a letter from Tsuneno hidden in an archive online which led her to Japan and the discovery of a rich archive of letters written by Tsuneno which had been saved by her family, along with a trove of documents. Stanley is quite understated about this dedication and accomplishment. As she explains in the book, she reads and speaks Japanese, but the brushstrokes of 200 years ago posed quite a challenge. Stanley photographed everything from the archive, and painstakingly translated it all to create a narrative of Tsuneno’s life through her very detailed and personal letters.

Stanley has recovered a lost world. Drawing on her knowledge of the history, Stanley contextualizes the letters, which enhances their power. So, it’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city and its evolving culture.

I’m really interested in the decision Stanley has made to focus on a subject who is herself not famous or historically significant. I guess by its nature the book gives us insight into what it was like to be a ‘normal’ person during that period, in that society.

This biography is such a sharp reminder of the importance of archives. I fear that we will soon face a future in which we will have to rely on redacted government documents. The victors will dominate the narrative, and the stories of the powerless will vanish unless we work to preserve them. With email replacing letters and so much news disappearing online, we need a coordinated effort to create new archives, especially for those who may not have reached a moment of fame, or infamy.

Do you think this would have been a difficult book to find a publisher for, because of Stanley’s low-key choice of subject?

I try not to look at the publishing history of books as they come up for awards and, instead, focus on the book itself. So I don’t know the particulars here, but kudos to Scribner on this one. My sense, though, is that there’s increasing enthusiasm to recover forgotten, overlooked figures and histories and that Stanley’s book could find a wide audience.

Finding that universality in specificity. Well, let’s move on to Zachary Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes . This is much closer to the ‘great man’ style of biography that you alluded to earlier. How one person impacts the world, rather than how the world impacts upon the person. The Guardian called this “a solid, sombre intellectual biography”—does that sound right to you? Why is it one of the best biographies of 2021?

I’m not sure that the ‘Bloomsberries,’ as Virginia Woolf named them, were sombre in Carter’s vivid depictions! The Price of Peace is a biography of an eminent, visionary economist, the story of how John Maynard Keynes came to his revolutionary ideas, refined and advanced them through his life and how they came to dominate economic thought.

Carter makes a bold move as a biographer: Keynes dies in 1946 on page 390, but Carter gallops on for a good 250 more pages, tracing the battles over Keynesianism as they evolved through the New Deal, McCarthyism and the 2008 financial crisis. Carter captures the ideological warfare between luminary intellectuals like James K. Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and even extends to the monumental 2015 National Book Critics Circle finalist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century .

We spoke to Thomas Piketty quite recently.

Carter begins his book with Keynes in midlife, as he’s falling in love with the Russian ballerina who became his wife, a critical turning point that informed his philosophy—and illustrates Keynes as a tangle of paradox. He was a pacifist who advocated for war. He was married to a woman but had serious amorous relationships with men. He’s so interesting, and was, at that time, quite radical. People are still debating his ideas, he was really ahead of his time.

Clearly Keynes is comfortable with contradiction and his ideas are often counterintuitive—the notion, as Paul Krugman put it: “Your income is my expense and my income is your expense.” Spending more to get out of a financial depression continues to be debated. Back to your question about intellectual biography, Carter’s book illustrates that ideas originate in lived experience, and he illuminates Keynes’s experience and shows how it took root.

One may think of Keynes as an economist, but Keynesianism is much more than that—he has views on war, art, culture and a vision of fairness. Keynes had a dream of a fairer and more fulfilling life for all. Carter’s writing about economic theory is so lucid, so colourful, and such a pleasant surprise for me.

The afterlife of Keynesian thinking is interesting, how it continues to thread through contemporary economics .

Indeed, that is right. We can see the drama playing out today in America with the intense battles over President Joe Biden’s Covid stimulus and relief bill. Carter seems to suggest that Keynes would have been frustrated by growing inequality and that his radical vision withered, leaving us with the question of whether good ideas can triumph on their own. The question Carter poses was: did Keynes believe that good ideas would triumph on their own? One comes away from this book thinking that Keynesianism is not a school of thought as much as a spirit of radical optimism.

And how about the Bloomsbury Group? I’m sorry, I’ll always be interested in this. Does it goes into salacious detail?

Perhaps not salacious but absolutely interesting to read about. At Cambridge Lytton Strachey was impressed by Keynes’s “active brain” and recruited him to the group although he was just a freshman. Keynes and Strachey were lovers but it was a rivalrous friendship, and Keynes made a habit of poaching Strachey’s lovers. He wasn’t an artist, as others were in Bloomsbury; Keynes expressed feelings of inferiority and Strachey and Clive Bell sneered at his aesthetic judgement.

Keynes’s time with the Bloomsbury set, Carter argues, was a formative experience in which Keynes became skeptical of rules of conduct and edicts from the ruling elite and developed political sympathies and keen interest in the Liberal Party. His relations with the Bloomsbury crowd seemed to provide him with a keen understanding of the post- World War One world.

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Let’s talk about the Payne book next. This is The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, which is third on our shortlist for the 2021 title of best biography. It’s the result of three decades of research by Les Payne and his daughter Tamara, who completed it after his death. It’s won the National Book Award, and was one of the New York Times’s ‘notable books’ of last year. So a landmark piece of work.

Landmark indeed, and brave. It follows Malcolm Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2012 and The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm which was published in 1965 to great acclaim.

The Payne biography is a rebuke to those who insist that if a subject has won the attention of one biographer, it is off the market to others. New evidence can be unearthed, existing evidence can be challenged or lead to other inquiries. Perspective, structure, and expression matter. Payne has elevated oral history and narrative to an art form and excavates Malcolm X’s origin story, from his birth as Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska to his assassination in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City’s Washington Heights. Payne captures the winding arc of Malcom’s life through the death of his father—which Malcolm believed to be nefarious, and Payne disproves—and the confinement of his mother in a psychiatric hospital. As a troubled adolescent, he landed in prison while his brothers, who Payne interviewed, found their way to the Nation of Islam. Malcolm joined them, and transformed into an evangelist for Black self-respect and a fierce critic of white America.

“The Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive”

It is remarkable that the Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive through thousands of eyewitness reports and personal documents. They went way beyond the declassified FBI files and secondhand stories of the legend of Malcolm’s transformation. Payne may have drawn on his journalistic skills to build this biography on firsthand accounts and oral history, but he also worked as a historian to contextualize these contradicting accounts and synthesize them into an extraordinary narrative.

Payne writes the 20th-century American history of the Nation of Islam and situates Malcom in these ideological battles— through his parents, who adhered to Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of self-reliance, Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism; through activist intellectuals like W E B Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. Payne explains Malcolm X’s route to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, including his break from them which led to his assassination. Payne shows his experience as an investigative reporter, especially regarding the recovery of details involving the plot to kill Malcolm.

This book is often discussed as a counterpoint to that explosive biography by Marable, but it offers its own revelations. The current leader of the Nation of Islam admits in an interview that he might have been complicit in the murder, for one.

Indeed. Payne confirms that the assassination order came directly from Muhammad’s headquarters in Chicago to the gunmen. We also learn that Malcolm, on the direction of Elijah Muhammad, met with Ku Klux Klan leaders in 1961 about a land deal. It turned out that the Klansmen were really set on the assassination of Martin Luther King, which led to Malcolm’s break with the Nation of Islam.

And this must be one of the benefits of working on something for so long. Let’s turn to the next book on our 2021 shortlist of the best biographies. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. I’m excited about this book, but I suppose that’s because I know a lot about Sylvia Plath already. Her life is relatively well-trodden ground, not only thanks to previous biographies but the writing of Plath herself. Is there room for a new Plath biography? What can this book add?

Personally, I share your enthusiasm about all matters Plath. As a critic, let me say that Clark not only unearths new evidence about Plath’s life but also brings a fresh, subtle and nuanced critical perspective to her work. Plath is mythologised and pathologised; she has come to be seen as an icon or a victim, a “high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death,” as Clark writes. What Clark does here is recover Sylvia Plath as an aesthetically accomplished, important poet.

Clark discovered letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist, delved into the Plath family history (including her father’s FBI file and grandmother’s institutionalization), found a portion of Plath’s last novel, and used her unpublished diaries and creative work as well as police, hospital and court records. She also drew from an archive that opened in 2020 which contained scores of interviews with Plath’s contemporaries in the 1970s for an uncompleted biography.

From the start, Clark is clear in her intention to reposition Plath as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. I was skeptical initially, because the biography weighs in at 1118 pages. Well, 937 pages without notes.

But after the prologue, I was hooked. Clark nestles details so deftly in flowing narrative prose and successfully positions Plath in the era. It’s literally a heavy book, but Clark writes with a light touch, evoking Plath’s psychological and poetic landscape as well as her social milieu. Well known now as the wife of Ted Hughes, Plath emerges so clearly in her other relationships. Clark vivifies Plath not only as a mother, but also a daughter who was just eight years old when her father died, leaving her to be raised by her single mother.

Plath grew up at a harrowing and difficult time for German immigrants in America, during and before the Second World War . Plath’s father Otto was repeatedly investigated and eventually detained by the FBI but, as Clark shows, he renounced his German citizenship in 1926 and watched Hitler’s rise with trepidation.

It seems unfair that he’s likened to a Nazi soldier in her famous poem ‘Daddy’, then?

‘Daddy’ runs through the biography and Clark tracks interpretations and it’s almost as if those reveal more about the perceiver than the poem. For some, ‘Daddy’ is a rallying cry for feminists, others believe it reflects Plath’s youth and others damn it for appropriating the Holocaust . Clark makes clear that Plath’s father was a committed pacifist. In addition to his German heritage, Clark suggests that as a professor and scientist, he embodied patriarchal authority and a kind of imperial aggression just as resentment of her husband was boiling. There’s also an argument that the poem is based on an entirely different person, her friend’s father who abandoned his family to join the fascist Blackshirts.

Clark reveals Plath wrestling with ‘Daddy’ in successive drafts, with one reading like an elegy, and others more resilient and forgiving. The poem’s placement in Ariel , published posthumously and out of her control, possibly shifted its meaning.

I could talk about ‘Daddy’ all day but would much rather read about it in Clark’s biography! Clark argues that Plath’s aesthetic impulse was more surrealist than confessional and that ‘Daddy’ illustrated that Plath had her finger on the pulse of contemporary poetry.

The thing I find most interesting about Plath is the way she embodies that pressure-cooker atmosphere of girlhood and early womanhood—the twin pressures to be feminine, and yet to strive intellectually. They are not quite opposites, but one interferes with the action of the other. I think that’s why Plath became a cultural phenomenon, a figurehead for troubled young women.

As a reader, I could hear Plath’s mother preaching: “excel, but conform.” While Sylvia Plath is known for her death, Clark shows how hard she worked, how many poems she sent out before she found success. Clark reads Plath’s juvenile short stories and poetry really seriously, and asks questions: how did she get to be who she was? Clark recognizes Plath’s incredible ambition and dedication to her work.

So does Clark succeed in her stated aim of repositioning Plath as one of the most important writers of the 20th century?

Some of the social pressures that Plath was contending with will be common to those faced by some of the women in the final book on our list of the best biographies of 2021. This is The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s , by Maggie Doherty. It’s a group biography, and there’s an excerpt available on the New York Times website for those who want to try before they buy.

First, that sly, smart title. Radcliffe College President Mary Bunting had the brilliant idea to support “intellectually displaced women.” By that, she meant women whose ambitions as artists and intellectuals had been thwarted by gender expectations and the demands of domesticity, marriage and motherhood. The College’s Institute for Independent Study would provide hefty stipends, private offices and its resources to a group of women who had “either a doctorate or its equivalent” in creative achievement. Bunting described it as her “messy experiment.”

In The Equivalents , Maggie Doherty captures that glorious mess. She focuses on five women artists: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, sculptor Marianna Pineda, painter Barbara Swann from the East Coast and fiction writer Tillie Olsen, mother of four from San Francisco who had been a community organizer and aspired to write the great proletarian novel. None of them had PhDs; they nicknamed themselves ‘the Equivalents’.

The Equivalents is magnificent social history, a collective snapshot of an overlooked moment in American feminism; we meet these women crossing the bridge between first and second wave feminism. The institute provided them with the rooms of their own to which Virginia Woolf had aspired, but it turned out they needed more of E M Forster’s edict to “only connect.”

With insight and subtlety, Doherty explains the alchemy of solitude and community as “ideal conditions for artistic growth.” They read one another’s work and collaborated on projects. The deep creative bond between the charismatic poets—Sexton and Kumin—provides a narrative backbone. Their friendships revealed the importance of the collective, and how they really did give and draw strength from one another. The idea of five women artists being freed—receiving money and office space and affiliation from Radcliffe was really radical and groundbreaking.

Olsen was, in many ways, the outlier of the group. In a crowd of upper-class Boston and New England women, Olsen was from the West Coast, not at all part of the eastern intelligentsia. While others used stipends to pay for nannies and domestic help, Olsen often had to borrow money. She was sort of a Marxist and emphasized that women—and all people—could be creative and fulfil their promise.

How refreshing. It’s tiring to constantly see histories or biographies in which women apparently have no inner lives—or develop only in relation to, or thanks to, men. A group biography which examines not only the intellectual concerns of women, but their interaction with one another, feels an important corrective.

A very important corrective.

I wonder if we should institute some form of the Bechdel test for books. Do you know that term? To pass the test, a film simply has to contain a scene in which women talk to each other about something, anything, except a man.

I suspect that the women of The Equivalents found Radcliffe a turning point where they could do that. But, knowing that Betty Friedan was an early visitor, they also talked about equity – and the “problem that had no name.” This was a space where a woman could discover that the wandering, absent husband, or the imperious male colleague was not her problem alone. As Doherty writes, these shared confidences could lead a woman to realize that “there was nothing wrong with her, but there might be something wrong with the world.”

I would just raise the ante on the Bechdel test and suggest that a book must contain a scene in which mothers talk to one another about anything other than their children!

Doherty captures so well the intensity and vicissitudes of these relationships. One can feel moments when Sexton’s needs are too much for Kumin, for instance. Then there’s the electricity of collaboration between mediums, for instance Swann’s artwork appears on the poets’ book covers. The Equivalents arrived as “well-behaved women” and may not have thought of themselves as feminists, but their determined efforts at self-expression radiated out into the world and laid the groundwork for revolution. In closing her sublime book, Doherty relates that when Bunting was asked why her “messy experiment” was so successful, she modestly responded: “We spoke to their condition.”

Doherty closes her marvellous book with a call to arms: “Women today live under new conditions. It is time for another messy experiment and for a new group of women to speak.”

March 19, 2021

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.

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Best Biographies

Discover the lives of remarkable individuals through the best biographies, chosen from a wide array of reputable literary sources and biography enthusiasts. these compelling reads offer intimate portraits and have earned accolades across numerous literary discussions..

50 Must-Read Biographies

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

The best biographies give us a satisfying glimpse into a great person’s life, while also teaching us about the context in which that person lived. Through biography, we can also learn history, psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy, and more. Reading a great biography is both fun and educational. What’s not to love?

Below I’ve listed 50 of the best biographies out there. You will find a mix of subjects, including important figures in literature, science, politics, history, art, and more. I’ve tried to keep this list focused on biography only, so there is little in the way of memoir or autobiography. In a couple cases, authors have written about their family members, but for the most part, these are books where the focus is on the biographical subject, not the author.

The first handful are group biographies, and after that, I’ve arranged them alphabetically by subject. Book descriptions come from Goodreads.

Take a look and let me know about your favorite biography in the comments!

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

“In  All We Know , Lisa Cohen describes their [Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland’s] glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. At once a series of intimate portraits and a startling investigation into style, celebrity, sexuality, and the genre of biography itself,  All We Know  explores a hidden history of modernism and pays tribute to three compelling lives.”

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

“Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers,’ calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women.”

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

“In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them – in works that readers of all kinds could admire.  The Life You Save May Be Your Own  is their story – a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.”

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

“As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.”

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

“In a sweeping narrative, Fraser traces the cultural, familial and political roots of each of Henry’s queens, pushes aside the stereotypes that have long defined them, and illuminates the complex character of each.”

John Adams by David McCullough

“In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot — ‘the colossus of independence,’ as Thomas Jefferson called him.”

A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee’s Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival by Melissa Fleming

“Emotionally riveting and eye-opening,  A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea  is the incredible story of a young woman, an international crisis, and the triumph of the human spirit. Melissa Fleming shares the harrowing journey of Doaa Al Zamel, a young Syrian refugee in search of a better life.”

At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England by Walter Dean Myers

“One terrifying night in 1848, a young African princess’s village is raided by warriors. The invaders kill her mother and father, the King and Queen, and take her captive. Two years later, a British naval captain rescues her and takes her to England where she is presented to Queen Victoria, and becomes a loved and respected member of the royal court.”

John Brown by W.E.B. Du Bois

“ John Brown is W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking political biography that paved the way for his transition from academia to a lifelong career in social activism. This biography is unlike Du Bois’s earlier work; it is intended as a work of consciousness-raising on the politics of race.”

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen L. Carter

“[Eunice Hunton Carter] was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s ― and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted.”

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

“An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members.”

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

“Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.”

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

“Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.”

Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother by Sonia Nazario

“In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.”

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

“After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve ‘the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century’: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett & his quest for the Lost City of Z?”

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

“Amanda Foreman draws on a wealth of fresh research and writes colorfully and penetratingly about the fascinating Georgiana, whose struggle against her own weaknesses, whose great beauty and flamboyance, and whose determination to play a part in the affairs of the world make her a vibrant, astonishingly contemporary figure.”

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik Ping Zhu

“Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg never asked for fame she was just trying to make the world a little better and a little freer. But along the way, the feminist pioneer’s searing dissents and steely strength have inspired millions. [This book], created by the young lawyer who began the Internet sensation and an award-winning journalist, takes you behind the myth for an intimate, irreverent look at the justice’s life and work.”

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd

“A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother.”

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

“ Shirley Jackson  reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as ‘The Lottery’ and  The Haunting of Hill House .”

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro

“This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart.”

The Life of Samuel Johnson   by James Boswell

“Poet, lexicographer, critic, moralist and Great Cham, Dr. Johnson had in his friend Boswell the ideal biographer. Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail.”

Barbara Jordan: American Hero by Mary Beth Rogers

“Barbara Jordan was the first African American to serve in the Texas Senate since Reconstruction, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, and the first to deliver the keynote address at a national party convention. Yet Jordan herself remained a mystery.”

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

“This engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children.”

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical by Sherie M. Randolph

“Often photographed in a cowboy hat with her middle finger held defiantly in the air, Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy (1916–2000) left a vibrant legacy as a leader of the Black Power and feminist movements. In the first biography of Kennedy, Sherie M. Randolph traces the life and political influence of this strikingly bold and controversial radical activist.”

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

“In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food.”

The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma by Peter Popham

“Peter Popham … draws upon previously untapped testimony and fresh revelations to tell the story of a woman whose bravery and determination have captivated people around the globe. Celebrated today as one of the world’s greatest exponents of non-violent political defiance since Mahatma Gandhi, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize only four years after her first experience of politics.”

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”   by Zora Neale Hurston

“In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

“Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine.”

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

“Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.”

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

“A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro — the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.”

Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux

“Drawing from the private archives of the poet’s estate and numerous interviews, Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde’s iconic status, charting her conservative childhood in Harlem; her early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian; and her canonization as a seminal poet of American literature.”

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams

“Thurgood Marshall stands today as the great architect of American race relations, having expanded the foundation of individual rights for all Americans. His victory in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the landmark Supreme Court case outlawing school segregation, would have him a historic figure even if he had not gone on to become the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

“In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself.”

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts

“ The Mayor of Castro Street  is Shilts’s acclaimed story of Harvey Milk, the man whose personal life, public career, and tragic assassination mirrored the dramatic and unprecedented emergence of the gay community in America during the 1970s.”

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

“The most famous poet of the Jazz Age, Millay captivated the nation: She smoked in public, took many lovers (men and women, single and married), flouted convention sensationally, and became the embodiment of the New Woman.”

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell

This book is “a vivid portrait of Montaigne, showing how his ideas gave birth to our modern sense of our inner selves, from Shakespeare’s plays to the dilemmas we face today.”

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

“From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies.”

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley   by Peter Guralnick

“Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, [this book] traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world.

Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale

“Kate Summerscale brilliantly recreates the Victorian world, chronicling in exquisite and compelling detail the life of Isabella Robinson, wherein the longings of a frustrated wife collided with a society clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of marriage, and female sexuality.”

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

“A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained?”

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan by Claire Tomalin

“When Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857, she was 18: a professional actress performing in his production of  The Frozen Deep . He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure, married with ten children. This meeting sparked a love affair that lasted over a decade, destroying Dickens’s marriage and ending with Nelly’s near-disappearance from the public record.”

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter

“Slowly, but surely, Sojourner climbed from beneath the weight of slavery, secured respect for herself, and utilized the distinction of her race to become not only a symbol for black women, but for the feminist movement as a whole.”

The Black Rose by Tananarive Due

“Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America’s first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful beauty company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes.”

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

“With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life, [Chernow] carries the reader through Washington’s troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian Wars, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention and his magnificent performance as America’s first president.”

Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

“ Ida: A Sword Among Lions  is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching: a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.”

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

“But the true saga of [Wilder’s] life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser—the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series—masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography.”

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

“Although mother and daughter, these two brilliant women never knew one another – Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other.”

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

“Subscribing to Virginia Woolf’s own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact.”

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

“Of the great figures in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins’ bullets at age thirty-nine.”

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

“On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.”

Want to read more about great biographies? Check out this post on presidential biographies , this list of biographies and memoirs about remarkable women , and this list of 100 must-read musician biographies and memoirs .

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Readers' Corner

Must Read Biography Books and Memoirs

Table of contents, hidden figures by margot lee shetterly, the professor and the madman: a tale of murder, insanity and the making of the oxford english dictionary by simon winchester, the wives of henry viii by antonia fraser, john adams by david mccullough, american prometheus by kai bird and martin j. sherwin, wild swans: three daughters of china, cleopatra: a life by stacy schiff, einstein: his life and universe by walter isaacson, becoming by michelle obama, enrique’s journey: the story of a boy’s dangerous odyssey to reunite with his mother by sonia nazario, the lost city of z: a tale of deadly obsession in the amazon by david grann, georgiana: duchess of devonshire by amanda foreman, notorious rbg: the life and times of ruth bader ginsburg by irin carmon, frida: a biography of frida kahlo by hayden herrera, into the wild by jon krakauer, washington: a life by ron chernow, malcolm x: a life of reinvention by manning marable, unbroken: a world war ii story of survival, resilience and redemption by laura hillenbrand, the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot, steve jobs by walter isaacson, when breath becomes air by paul kalanithi, into thin air: a personal account of the mount everest disaster by jon krakauer, red notice: a true story of high finance, murder, and one man’s fight for justice by bill browder, the boys in the boat: nine americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 berlin olympics by daniel james brown, a walk in the woods: rediscovering america on the appalachian trail by bill bryson, just mercy: a story of justice and redemption by bryan stevenson, the autobiography of benjamin franklin by benjamin franklin, my experiments with truth by mahatma gandhi, elon musk: tesla, spacex, and the quest for a fantastic future by ashlee vance, bossypants by tina fey, a beautiful mind by sylvia nasar, the man who knew infinity: a life of the genius ramanujan by robert kanigel, alexander hamilton by ron chernow, long walk to freedom by nelson mandela, educated by tara westover, “surely you’re joking, mr. feynman”: adventures of a curious character by richard p. feynman.

The best biography books give us a satisfying glimpse into a great person’s life, while also teaching us about the context in which that person lived. Nothing tells us more about how to be alive now than learning from those who have gone before. And nothing captures their triumphs and disasters better than a book. Ask any entrepreneur or a rock star employee. They have one thing in common. They read biographies of people who have walked before us and were kind enough to share their lives through books.

But why read biographies?

Because all the lessons you can’t learn only by your life experience. You need to get some experience second-hand. And these people who have written/helped writing these books on their lives want to share what they have learned along the way. Our job is to pick up the lessons and apply them. These are the books you need to read when you feel lost in your life and want guidance.

Through biography, we can also learn history, psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy, and more. Reading a great biography is both fun and educational. What’s not to love?

Below I’ve listed 50 of the best biography books you must read. You will find a mix of subjects, including important figures in literature, science, politics, history, art, and more.

Hidden Figures : The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly is a book not only about strong women but more. It is a book about society, struggles, overcoming prejudices, spirit, strong will, and brains. This is a history lesson for all of us not to repeat mistakes. This book follows a handful of smart and tough women as they work their way through a society rigged against them in every way until they get a small break and they let their brilliance shine.

The book starts at the time of WWII, continues with the cold war, space race, civil rights movement, and brings the untold stories of everyday heroes into daylight. I didn’t know about Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who carried US to new fronts and heights, until I read the book. I recommend this book to everyone, especially young girls, so that they can understand their importance and acclaim their own power.

The subtitle of The Professor and the Madman is all the synopsis you need: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

James Murray is the professor, a learned man who became the editor of the OED. Dr William C Minor is the madman, an American Civil-War veteran and surgeon. His paranoid delusions caused him to commit murder; and resulted in his life-long commitment to an asylum for the criminally insane.

Simon Winchester crafts a compelling non-fiction narrative. This is a much shorter book compared to other biography books. Though it’s clear that Winchester did significant research and he includes details of how the OED was conceived; and the laborious efforts to get volunteers to submit citations to support word usage definitions. He never lost the story arc of these two remarkable men. He captured my attention on page one and held it throughout.

Antonia Fraser is one of the most well-known historical biographers out there, and this is another of her thoroughly researched books. Each wife is given attention, but especially Catherine of Aragon, who was married to Henry for 24 years before he tossed her aside for Anne Boleyn.

Fraser goes into each of the women’s rise and fall from affection of Henry VIII, and how the women related to one another. Catherine of Aragon is portrayed as the most sympathetic of the wives, a woman who was devoted to Henry and could never understand what happened to make his feelings for her change. Anne Boleyn was well-educated and ambitious, giving birth to the future Queen Elizabeth I before losing her head. Jane Seymour was mild and giving, and birthed Henry’s only surviving son.

Anne of Cleves managed to avoid following in the footsteps of Anne Boleyn, but Katherine Howard, rather naive to the ways of Henry’s court (but not to the bedroom), went the way of Anne Boleyn. Catherine Parr was plotted against, but luckily managed to outlive her king.

McCullough’s biography deserves all the accolades. It is written with depth and with passion. More than just a history, this is a penetrating look into the minds of Adams, Jefferson, family, friends and enemies that brings them and their times to life for us. This remarkable accounting of the birth of a country and how it found its early footing foreshadows the civil war and debates that still rage in America.

Contrasting the beliefs, politics and personalities of Adams and Jefferson, McCullough exquisitely illustrates the divisions and binding forces of early America that persist to this day. That the deaths of Jefferson and Adams, the pen and the voice of the Declaration of Independence, occurred only five hours apart on July 4, 1826 exactly fifty years after its proclamation is simply astonishing. One of the best biography books for every American and anyone who wants to understand America, past and present.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a thorough account of the life and career of J. Robert Oppenheimer written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The book follows Oppenheimer’s pivotal role as director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bombs used in World War II. It covers Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking theoretical work on nuclear fission, his assembly of the scientific team that engineered the first atomic bomb, and his controversial collaboration with government officials during the Manhattan Project years. After the war, Oppenheimer became a vocal advocate for nuclear arms control, putting him at odds with officials and ultimately leading to the revocation of his security clearance in the famous 1954 hearings. The book, which took the authors almost 20 years to complete based on extensive research, provides unique insight into Oppenheimer as a scientist, visionary and complex human wrestling with the consequences of scientific progress. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, highlighting its importance and literary merit.

I’ve never felt so sad to reach the end of a book in all my life. This book is amazing and is well and truly one of the best biography books I’ve ever read! Wild Swans follows the journey of three generations of women, from the same family, through the tragic history of twentieth century China.

Wild Swans is a whirlwind story, focusing around the tragedy of China throughout much of the last century through three generations of women. The greatest havoc is wrought by Mao Zedong and his wife, particularly through his Cultural Revolution in which young people are pitched against teachers, intellectuals and artists in a highly successful attempt to divide and rule. It’s like Lord of the Flies meets real life. Read this book, especially if you don’t know much about China – it’s an education.

Stacy Schiff has crafted, somehow, a new angle on one of the world’s oldest great stories. By focusing on the first degree sources we have from the period (mostly from Roman scholars & historians, since Alexandria was destroyed by earthquakes), Schiff at once claims expertise but only in a context that is also accessible to the reader. At times Schiff’s explanation of the sources and the perceived motivations of their authors feels plodding, but the framing of these sources is essential to Schiff’s project.

Even with thin sourcing and scrubbed of the Orientalism and oversexualized mythologies, Cleopatra’s life story is incredible. The last quarter of the book dedicated to Rome’s war on Egypt and Cleopatra’s eventual suicide is taut storytelling, not just “classicism for amateurs.”

Reading about Einstein is felt like reading the whole universe. He was phenomenal in his studies and researches. His story is a little different than people usually imagine about him. He was pretty much involved in politics of power in the 1930s.

As we all know Walter Isaacson is a tremendous storyteller. He has done a pretty good job to provides us with depth knowledge of Einstein’s life and about his researches. His paper on the theory of relativity has paved the way for modern physics. Though the things he said are still mysterious but provided him with bigger applaud around the world.

Becoming is a memoir of a famous person, Michelle Obama, the first black First Lady in the United States who lived with her husband, President Barack Obama, and their two daughters, Malia and Sacha in the White House for eight years. During that time, alongside taking care of her family, Michelle Obama managed to accomplish four major initiatives as First Lady to help improve people’s lives and well-being.

Michelle does not pretend living in the White House was not a privilege or shy away from the associated perks. She doesn’t pretend it was always amazing and wonderful either. There were plenty of tough days with the various events happening around the world.

The pressure and scrutiny of trying to raise 2 daughters with some semblance of normalcy could also be taxing on the family of 4. Through it all, Michelle always remained committed to being the best mom to Sasha and Malia.

Sonia Nazario presents the story of a mother who leaves her family in Honduras to enter the US illegally in order to make money for them to go to school and eat. She thinks she will only be gone a year. After many years, her son, Enrique, now 15, decides to make the extremely dangerous journey to find his mother. After several attempts and near death experiences (he was very lucky to not die), he finally is reunited with his mom. However, reunification is fraught with difficulties.

Nazario is a reporter and is extremely fair and honest in her portrayal of illegal immigrant families and the consequences that surround their decisions. She actually went to Mexico and retraced Enrique’s (and tens of thousands of other children’s) journey. Nazario treats everyone in this book with dignity and fairness, and it really made me think.

The author sets out to do try to find the legendary Colonel Fawcett and possibly the latters mysterious city of “Z” as well. “Z” being a lost, ancient city in the heart of the Amazon. Fawcett, his son Jack and a third man were lost in the mid 1920’s on an expedition into the Amazon. Fawcett had endured trips to the jungle many times before and was legendary in this respect. When he did not return, many set out to find him and were lost.

The book details Fawcetts life, some expeditions to find him and also the author’s search for answers. It does not entice one to seek out the Amazon – the details of insects, disease, snakes, hostile Indians and starvation paint a picture that would easily do as the 8th circle of Dante’s hell. It is highly informative, very interesting and one of the best biography books.

Georgiana was the great British political hostess (on the Whig side) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the reigning superstar of high society in England during that era. She was also a complex and fascinating character, brilliant, loving, gay, miserable, bold, and insecure. She made a strong impression on everyone she met, and wielded enormous power from a position of powerlessness. She is therefore a fascinating subject for biography.

Amanda Foreman does a good job of meeting the challenge, though occasionally Georgiana Cavendish’s complexities feel a bit more cataloged than understood. It surely didn’t help the biographer that subsequent hands censored or outright destroyed much of Georgiana’s written legacy, primarily in the form of letters.

This is one of the most inspiring and the best biography books about feminism in practice that I’ve ever read. RBG is an inspiration on many levels, but a few things really stuck with me. While she remains committed to feminist ideals, she truly embodies what feminism is all about – equality of the sexes. To that end, she has worked tirelessly to confront sexism against men, and to help break down the embedded cultural barriers that often prevent men from being able to serve as equal partners in marriage and parenting. Of course, she has also weighed in on sexism against women, calling it out even today when confronted by sexism at the highest levels of our judicial system.

RBG’s marriage and partnership with her beloved husband of 56 years also provide a compelling example of what an equal partnership can look like in a marriage. Marty and RBG both made sacrifices for the sake of one another’s careers, and contributed to the running of house and family.

What a wonderful personality Frida is. The big desire to live no matter what. It is amazing how painful and otherwise full of joy and passion her life is. I’m just inspired from story about one of most famous women of the 20th century.

The book itself is so informative and full of references which give more information about story. Also, so many people shared their memories about Frida in one place. Like a puzzle of her life through other people lips. That’s just amazing!

In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer makes the basic facts of Christopher McCandless’s trek into the Alaskan wilderness and his death nearly 4 months later clear from the outset. Even though I’d heard a lot about this case, that’s just the beginning of the story. His motivations, especially since graduating college a year earlier, are what make this story interesting.

As some of McCandless’s ideas about living a new kind of life off the map come into focus, Krakauer continues to highlight the harsh realities McCandless chose to face. While what McCandless was trying to do might be appealing to some, Krakauer reminds readers that McCandless was ill-prepared for the dangers.

The life of George Washington is not the stoic, myth-laden journey most people have fixed in their minds. As revealed in Ron Chernow’s excellent biography, the stoic man in paintings hid an emotional complex man who went from being a loyal British subject for the first two-thirds of his life to the individual who brought a new nation into being over nearly a quarter century.

Chernow beings by putting Washington not only into the context of his times, colonial Virginia, but also into the family dynamic he grew up and developed in. The first son of his father’s second marriage, Washington’s father died young like many of his forbearers leaving a void in his life that he filled with his oldest half-brother Lawrence. It was his brother’s service in the Royal Naval that would direct Washington to desire military success when he was a young man. However, Washington would lose his brother at an early age in a string of emotionally sting but ultimately fortuitous deaths that shaped his life.

Malcolm X was a complex and extraordinary man. Reading this one of the best biography books took me longer to read than most books and I found myself having to take breaks and read other things during the process. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the book but that it was so heavy with information and detail about the evolution of this man that I couldn’t absorb it without pausing.

What I found remarkable was learning about Malcolm’s place on the world stage. Had he chosen to stay abroad (and remained alive)I believe he would have made a big difference in the Pan African Movement. He was though a tragic character in the true Shakespearean sense and the strengths and weaknesses that made him so remarkable marked him for his assassination.

This is a inspiring and educational read. It’s one of those books that you gasp out load while reading it as the horrors of war really come to the forefront in this book. This is a story of five parts and I really enjoyed the first three parts. Part one deals with the protagonist Louis Zamperini’s childhood and running career and I really enjoyed this introduction to Louis as I felt I really understood this man and knew how he survived the horrors of war and the physiological and physical pain he endured.

This is a book where you really see the full horrors of war on all sides and what these soldiers and their families went through and the strength and courage they showed. A tale of unbelievable endurance, hardship and heroism this book is not only an education but a wonderful read and one of the best biography books that you ponder long after you have read it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a very powerful and informative story. Also, with the history of personal freedoms, civil rights, and right to privacy/requiring consent, this is a very important and one of the best biography books.

Henrietta Lacks is a woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. The cells cut from her body, because of their aptitude for growth and replication, still play a significant role in treating disease and other medical tests. She did not know her cells were being used, and her family did not benefit financially. The author writes extensively about her family, as they were a crucial source for the book. Because of so many trust relationships violated over the years, she had to first work to build trust and prove herself reliable. She went on to establish a trust for the family.

This book discusses science, both the present state of medicine while Henrietta was being treated for cervical cancer (nothing short of radium tube inserts and lead!) and how science has grown in its understandings and treatments because of her cells.

I have been strangely and inexplicably fascinated with Steve Jobs for many years. Fascinated enough to make this book the only biography I have ever re-read. 2004 it was when Steve Jobs asked Water Isaacson to go on a walk with him. He later found out that this was his preferred way of having a serious conversation – a conversation about putting his life into words. And so this became the only authorized biography of the co-founder and visionary of Apple.

And still Isaacson didn’t sugar-coat Jobs’ personality. He did have proper rude-moments and definitely wasn’t modest or humble in his nature. He could be cruel to friends and foes alike and often didn’t give his peers enough credit. He wasn’t perfect and Isaacson doesn’t make him seem like he was, which made this a really engaging and fast-paced and one of the best biography books everyone must read.

When Breath Becomes Air is one of the most beautifully written, heartbreaking, affecting and best biography books I have ever read. Even though the book is incredibly sad, it is ultimately life affirming and worth the emotional investment.

At the age of thirty-six, Paul Kalanthi, a doctor nearing the completion of his neurosurgeon training, is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. This revelation becomes a dividing line in his life, something of a reversal of fortune. Paul goes from being a healthy physician with limitless possibility ahead of him to a sick patient with an uncertain future.

This is probably the best biography books about climbing I have read despite the controversy surrounding some aspects. It was as enthralling as books like Endurance and as readable. I was with the author on the mountain and felt the terrible pain of the losses they endured, the guilt of the survivors and the many “what ifs” after the event.

The author relays his personal experiences climbing Everest in 1996 with a number of groups. This was the tragic year when many of the participants didn’t make it off the mountain due to a catalog of errors and an untimely snow storm. He also documents a lot of the history of other climbs and delves into the personalities and characters of some of the great climbers.

This stunningly good book is authored by a world-class trader who, when he loses a friend to imprisonment, torture, and death from Putin’s regime, goes all-out–slowly, deliberately–to avenge his friend. The trader is Bill Browder, the friend is Sergei Magnitsky , and the story is a true one. This makes the book more compelling than even the best fictional thriller. Putin’s lack of conscience is no act, yet Browder describes a president and a now-secretary of state who naively want to pursue a reset with this coldest of killers.

Red Notice is a story of brave men and women acting honorably in a shifting, lawless country. It provides phenomenal insight into current-day Russia.

This is a bit more than the story of the 1936 Olympic crew challenge by the team from the University of Washington. Using one of the crew members as the focus, it combines his personal experience against the backdrop of the important historical events of that era (the 1929 stock market crash and resultant depression, the dust bowls, the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, etc.). It made for a richer story with the added context.

While the backgrounds and histories of the other members of the 9-man crew team were also provided, Joe Rantz’s story was the main focus. His was symbolic of the boys who became men even before they started college given the challenges of that time. By the time I got to the actual Olympic race, I felt these men had already reached heroic heights, especially Joe.

Edward Herrmann was fantastic as the narrator. He brought each character to life and his calling of the Olympic race was just outstanding and made this one of the best biography books.

Bryson tells the story of his hiking up the Appalachian Trail (AT for short) with his friend, Stephen Katz. His friend is quite a character, and I sort of wonder if he is a real person, or if he is “invented”. But–Katz is such a wonderful character, he is probably real, because “inventing” him would be nearly impossible. He is a recovering alcoholic, overweight sort of slob who throws out his irreplaceable supplies when the going gets tough. It seemed like a disaster in the making, but somehow Bryson and Katz survived.

Bryson’s prose is just a delight. He interleaves humorous anecdotes with tangents about history, the environment, bears, wildlife, and other interesting tidbits.

With all the recent protests across the nation, sparked by the high-profile deaths of several unarmed men, this is an incredibly timely read and one of the best biography books.

This book is an account of the author, Bryan Stevenson, and his life calling. Stevenson first began helping death row prisoners, mostly black, who had had no legal defense of any kind. He discovered there were thousands who were completely innocent. This led him to start an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) which is still going strong to this day. Throughout this book, the focus is on race and property, children in prison, mass incarceration, and the death penalty.

People do not fall into the category of ‘great’ by chance or triviality. Ben Franklin worked to improve himself, his community, and the lives of those with whom he shared his existence. He set an example of honesty, hard work, sobriety, fair dealing, and generosity that has been a light on the path of millions. His example seems to me exactly what is needed today.

Reading this book was a joy. This is one of the best biography books, interesting to read about those times Benjamin Franklin was grown.

There are many books written on Gandhiji , but this one is self-revealing and fascinating to read and one of the best biography books ever written. The autobiography is full of surprises: At one point in his youth, Gandhiji became convinced that India was behind the times because of vegetarianism, so he vowed to convert all of his homeland to carnivorous wisdom. Perhaps the only vow he did not keep.

Would that his teachings on non-violent resistance (satyagraha) were more widely applied. Detractors argue, however, that this strategy could really work only in India, where it appeals to such deeply ingrained cultural foundations as Patanjali’s ahimsa (non-violence), itself a Hindu appropriation of a Jainist principle.

If, for a just cause, one goes on a hunger strike in India, one is appealing to a long tradition of fasting associated with saintliness and right action. In some other cultures, where those associations do not exist, nobody would much notice or care.

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance is one of my all-time favorite biographies of an engineering genius. This is a brilliantly written and one of the best biography books that masterfully captures the genius behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. Award-winning feature writer, Ashlee Vance provides the public with a certifiable gem.

A well-done business biography with direct access to Musk that depicts him as a “force of nature” maniacally focused on solving acute energy resource problems and making the human species interplanetary. The incredible success of Musk, however, has not come without ongoing personal sacrifice, and the book is not simple hagiography – it touches on the cost of this focus to work relations and personal relations (his marriages and children). What makes Musk unique as a human being, and such a fascinating subject, is the level of pain he is willing absorb in order to achieve his goals.

This is obviously a very hilarious book with Tina Fey’s sense of humour hidden between the lines. Sometimes it can be hard to translate humour into written form, but that’s not the case with this book.

Tina Fey’s stories about growing up as the lucky daughter of the always stylish Don Fey, made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. Her adventures in dating are both entertaining and sad at the same time. I can’t believe someone as awesome as Tina Fey ever had a hard time attracting the opposite sex.

In A beautiful mind it tells a story about Mr. Nash. He is like all of the other kids when he was younger. The book is a time line of his life. As the story proceeds, you will get pulled into his world. There are some of problems in his life that he will have to face or go through. He also, triumphs his old fears of his school and his friends.

Towards the middle of the story; Like everyone in the story, Mr.Nash goes through some changes. He also,meets some new people that shares his interest in his studying; which is mathematics. Mr.Nash works in a ivy-league school as a teacher. Through his teaching years, he becomes accustomed to working all the time. Which leads to this “gift” he receives later in the story.

This is the best biography books I have ever read. The author’s writing was brilliant. He evoked the characters of Ramanujan and Hardy, and the feeling of India and England and their relationship at that time. He provided a sense of World War I, and some of the importance of Ramanujan for India and the rest of the world during his lifetime as well as after his death.

The depth he achieved in this biography is an uncommon accomplishment. In addition, it is difficult to provide a sense of the mathematics involved without the reader being a mathematician, and yet again this was provided. Finally, Mr. Kanigel’s analysis at the end was a step above most writers, if not several steps. Very nicely done. I highly recommend this work; it is a gem.

This is a very well researched and wonderfully written biography of two great mathematicians S.Ramanujan and G.H.Hardy. The author goes into a lot of details about Ramanujan’s early life and his struggles in south India and after his “discovery” by hardy, the author goes into the aspects of his life in Cambridge.

Alexander Hamilton had a way with words, as does Ron Chernow. While Hamilton is a brick of a book, it was an interesting, thorough look at the life of a Founding Father: his upbringing, his challenges – both personal and professional, his accomplishments, of course, his fatal duel with Aaron Burr, and his lasting impact on the foundation of today’s nation.

This is one of the best biography books and it chronicles Mandela’s life, first as the son of a tribal chief, then as an educated Black man under Apartheid–a dangerous thing to be–and then the journey, both outward and inward, from attorney to the leader of a revolution. You will read about his time on Riecher’s Island, the notorious prison, and the various experiences he had in the courtroom and in captivity.

He tells of the cunning ways those who were jailed for political reasons created to communicate and to an extent, continue to lead from inside prison. And he breaks up the horror with an occasional vignette of a surprisingly kindly jailor or other authority figure who does small, decent things when no one is looking.

Tara Westover is the child of a religious fanatic, someone who sees the government as pure evil. And by government, he means schools, hospitals, vaccines, seat belts, car insurance, etc. Everything we think of as civilization. His family awaits the Days of Abomination. There is a similarity here to The Glass Castle . Once again, we see how a mentally unbalanced father holds sway over an entire family. He thinks he speaks for God. Tara struggles with the knowledge that for her to go to school will mean a total separation from her father because he will never acknowledge that his ideas are not the correct ones.

The title of this collection comes from a tale that took place early in Feynman’s career where he was invited for an afternoon tea with the dean of his university. The dean’s wife is serving and asks him the above question. Richard never drinks tea and never moves in the same society that does, little own the society that has lemon OR cream with it.

A big theme of these stories and indeed a running theme in Feynman’s life is that he had no time for formalisms, rituals or societal views. He does attribute a lot of this to his upbringing. His father was a uniform maker and often dealt with clients of all types of notoriety and he knew that underneath all those uniforms were just another naked ape. He passed on his views to his children and Richard went so far as to nearly not accept his Nobel Prize.

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20 Best Biography Books Ever Written

By: Author Willow Heath

Posted on Last updated: 15th September 2023

There’s a lot that goes into writing a successful and poignant biography: honesty, detailed research, clear context, empathetic writing, and so much more.

Biographies hold a unique place in the world of nonfiction. The best biography books often appeal to people who may not even explicitly care about the book’s subject.

It’s all about human connection. Learning the historical, cultural, religious, political, economic and social contexts behind a person’s life is satisfying, but connection is what sells it.

For some of us, we read biography books to become intimate with historical figures we admire. For others, it’s simply about the act of connecting with someone through their story.

The Best Biography Books to Read Now

With all of that in mind, you’ll find here a wide range of the best biography books.

These are biographies about writers, artists, musicians, political figures, scientists, and more.

When composing a list of the best biography books, variety is essential. Variety of work, ethnicity, gender, and class.

And, with variety at the forefront, here is a selection of the best biography books of all time.

Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a huge name in the world of nonfiction, having written celebrated history books and biography books about British history.

Ackroyd has written an entire history of England, and another of London. And here, he dedicated five hundred pages to The Bard himself: William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is widely considered the most influential writer in history .

His plays are studied in schools around the world, and people make full careers out of being Shakespearean scholars, actors, directors, and more.

A legacy like The Bard’s inevitably leads to speculation, conspiracy, and more. Against all of that is Peter Ackroyd’s biography: a full and immersive journey through Shakespeare’s life.

Ackroyd has spent time researching and detailing the period in which Shakespeare lived.

London’s religious and political dynamics, Shakespeare’s own family and education, and the world of English theatre at the time. All of this and so much more is laid bare here.

While nobody will ever know every detail of Shakespeare’s life, Ackroyd has done his due diligence when it comes to piecing together a vivid picture of who The Bard was.

An incredible feat of biography writing from one of England’s best-loved historians, and one of the best biography books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of Shakespeare: The Biography here!

Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith

So much has been written about Vincent Van Gogh, and deservedly so.

Multiple documentaries have been made; museums, galleries, and interactive exhibitions have been built; songs have been sung; and books have been written.

The 19th century Dutch painter was a revolutionary of the craft, a legend of post-impressionism, and his life was a truly fascinating one.

His life is well-known, and remembered with as much intrigue as his art. Van Gogh was the original struggling artist, the one who began the toxic trend of seeing depression as a mark of genius.

Deeply troubled, Van Gogh lived a life of tragedy as much as one of beauty. And all of that is masterfully captured in Van Gogh: The Life .

Working alongside Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have brought us nearly a thousand pages of incredible research and writing.

Van Gogh: The Life is the definitive work of biography on the genius Dutch painter. A truly remarkable book, and one of the very best biography books ever written.

Buy a copy of Van Gogh: The Life here!

Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

Ida B. Wells was a hero. Born in 1862, she was a great feminist and a leader of the Black civil rights movement.

Wells dedicated her entire life to the fight for equality within the USA; part of that fight was being a founding member of the NAAPC.

As a teacher and journalist, Wells used every skill available to advance the movement for racial equality forward. And all of that (and more) is explored in this immense biography.

Focussing less on the personal and more on the political, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is as much a history of American racial politics and change as it is a biography.

This is because the changes we can trace were made by Wells and her comrades, and those comrades — including her husband Ferdinand L. Barnett — are also given their due.

This is an inspiring work of nonfiction that throws into sharp relief the importance of community effort, of always fighting for change, justice, and equality.

It’s impossible to imagine what 20th century USA would have looked like without Ida B. Wells, but the changes she made were goliath, and the world should forever be grateful.

We are reminded of that over and again as we read this book and marvel at what she accomplished.

Paula J. Giddings has done Wells justice in a way that nobody else could have, and in doing so she has written one of the best biography books in American history.

Buy a copy of Ida: A Sword Among Lions here!

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

You’ll find that many of the best biography books ever written have also inspired a huge number of great cinematic biopics, and this is one of them.

American Prometheus is the biography on which writer/director Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Oppenheimer was based.

And while that is an excellent piece of filmmaking, it took a huge number of liberties that make American Prometheus required reading for fans of the film.

Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led the USA’s Manhattan Project during World War II, which led to the invention and production of the first atomic bombs.

All of this led to two of the darkest days in world history: the bombing of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

American Prometheus tells the full story of Oppenheimer’s life and the Manhattan Project.

This is a biography that offers readers so much; so much more than just a life. This is a book about the USA, about war, science, politics, and more.

An astonishing work of nonfiction that stands alongside many of the best biography books ever written.

Buy a copy of American Prometheus here!

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

Shirley Jackson is a legendary figure within the world of gothic fiction, and of American literature in general.

A dark figure and an author of beloved gothic masterpieces such as The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle , and the iconic short story The Lottery .

Jackson is one of many great authors and artists whose own life was as strange, dynamic, and interesting as the art she created.

And that is all proven here in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life — one of the best biography books about an author you’ll ever read.

If you happen to have seen Josephine Decker’s excellent 2020 film Shirley , a biopic about Jackson starring Elizabeth Moss, that film was in fact not based on this biography.

Jackson saw a lot of professional success in her life, and her legacy has been fully cemented, but her personal life was far more rocky and inconsistent.

This biography goes into why that was, exactly, and how her turbulent home and family life, relationships, and mental health inspired her great works.

Biographies of authors are often as compelling as what those authors created, but that goes double for this book; one of the best biography books you should read right now.

Buy a copy of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life here!

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

One of the most celebrated and beloved painters of the 20th century, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo left behind an enormous legacy.

Anecdotes about her life are liberally shared by those who love her work. Her disability, her love affairs, her communist sympathies. These are all well-known facts

But in this incredible biography of her life, author Hayden Herrera has expanded on these details, stitching them into the rich and dramatic tapestry of her varied life.

This is a book that celebrates her artistic genius and her creative mind, and one that also takes time to explore the love and romances of her life.

Kahlo’s tempestuous relationship with Diego Rivera is the stuff of legends, and it is given room to breathe in this biography, which paints them both in honest light.

Kahlo was a great feminist, a revolutionary, a proud communist, and a champion of the working class. All of that is explored and expanded upon here.

A wonderful exploration of the life and loves of one of the 20th century’s greatest painters, and one of the best biography books of our time.

Buy a copy of Frida here!

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross

Few individuals from across the history of rock & roll — and modern music in general — have been as memorialised as Kurt Cobain.

There are many reasons for this: the ways in which he pushed and defined genres; his outspoken aggression towards sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry.

But the most obvious reason is his mind. Cobain battled depression for all of his twenty-seven years, until it finally won and he took his own life.

And so began an enormous legacy that has been explored across multiple books and documentaries, but this one is easily the most impressive.

Heavier Than Heaven is an unapologetically honest book that peels back the layers and exposes the truth behind so many myths about the infamous grunge rock star.

You’ll unlearn things that were never true, learn things you never would have known otherwise, and come close to understanding the mind behind the art.

Through some impressive sleuthing, analysis, and good old-fashioned journalism, Charles R. Cross has given us access to the man behind the myth.

A truly wonderful book, Heavier Than Heaven should be celebrated by Nirvana fans the world over. One of the best biography books the music world has ever been gifted.

Buy a copy of Heavier Than Heaven here!

The Brontes by Juliet Barker

The Bronte sisters were three of a kind. As Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel Glass Town explored, they were creative giants right from childhood.

Penning some of the finest works of romantic and gothic fiction in the history of British literature, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are celebrated the world over.

And then there’s Branwell, a tragic young man who quite literally painted himself out of their lives.

This family was unique, exceptional, and strange. And all of that is captured in Juliet Barker’s The Brontes , an enormous thousand-page biography of the literary sisters.

When the world of art and literature has so many enigmatic figures, it’s hard to call any one work of nonfiction a “definitive” history or biography, but this might be it for the Brontes.

Juliet Barker spent more than a decade gathering every scrap of evidence and information about these sisters and their works, in order to paint this vivid tapestry of their lives.

The ways in which Charlotte controlled and oppressed the others; the unsung beauty of Branwell’s mind; the anxiety and depression that Emily struggled with.

All of this and so much more is put on display here in one of the very best biography books you’ll ever read.

Buy a copy of The Brontes here!

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang & Jon Halliday

Chairman Mao Zedong was one of the great villains of recent world history, and there might be nobody better to tell his story than Wild Swans author Jung Chang.

Chang has dedicated so much of her life to telling the political stories of 20th century China, including her dynamic work Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Siste r .

But while that book and Wild Swans are both sweeping epic works of nonfiction that focus on multiple people, Mao is a dedicated biography of one man.

Mao’s monstrous political decisions as chairman of China were legendary, but what are far less well-known are the tactics and decisions behind them.

Mao Zedong’s laws and policies led to the most widespread and destructive famine in recorded history. But why? Questions like this are rarely asked, and even more rarely answered.

Jung Chang spent ten years of investigation to answer this, and so many even more pressing questions about Chairman Mao’s life, actions, and relationships.

Jung Chang wowed the world with Wild Swans , and then did it all over again with Mao: The Unknown Story , one of the best biography books anyone has ever written.

Buy a copy of Mao here!

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

Bad Gays is a remarkable anthology of miniature biographies, each focussing on an infamous person from world history who also happened to be queer.

From the Roman emperor Hadrian to the London gangster Ronnie Kray, Bad Gays offers up a selection of detailed short biographies of histories most unlovable gays.

Excellently researched and presented with real charm and wit, this is one of those rare biography books that blends the informative with the entertaining.

Amongst even the very best biography books, Bad Gays stands as something very important: a work that humanises the queer community by showing readers its darkest sides.

The breadth of subjects here is also satisfying and diverse. King James VI and I of Scotland and England, Lawrence of Arabia, and Japanese author Yukio Mishima are all explored here.

Bad Gays is a fantastic work of nonfiction, one of the most unique and best biography books of the past several years.

Buy a copy of Bad Gays here!

Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography by Walter Isaacson

Leonardo da Vinci’s legacy has cemented him as a unique mind within the realms of both art and science; an inventor and artist of unparalleled genius.

Placing someone on a podium that high can be dangerous and even beggar belief, but as Walter Isaacson’s biography proves, it is certainly deserved where da Vinci was concerned.

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian renaissance polymath who painted two of the best-known works of art the world has ever seen: the Mona Lisa, and the Last Supper.

But he was also someone with an unquenchable curiosity and an eye for discovery. His passions were spread across the sciences, from biology to geology.

All of this is captured and presented in this remarkable biography. This book explores how da Vinci studied all there was to study, and sought to understand the world on every level.

da Vinci was a man of curiosity and creativity, but he was also human. And this book is what really reminds us of that. It humanises this giant of art and science in a way that few books have.

Whether you’re a lover of Leonardo da Vinci or all you know about him is that he painted the Mona Lisa, this biography book has so much to offer you either way.

Buy a copy of Leonardo da Vinci here!

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

As was the case with American Prometheus and Oppenheimer (above), The Enigma is a biography that served as the inspiration for Morten Tyldum’s biopic The Imitation Game .

Unsurprisingly, however, Alan Turing: The Enigma is less concerned with drama and tension, and more with laying bare the extraordinary mind and the tragic life of Alan Turing.

Turning is best known for cracking the “Enigma Code” used by the Nazis during World War II, an act which turned the tide of war for the entire world.

Beyond that act, however, Turing was also a pioneer of computer design and technology, most simply expressed by his infamous “Turing Test”.

But the tragedy of his life was that Turning happened to be gay at a time in British history and culture where that simple fact led to social and political prejudice.

Turning didn’t commit suicide because he was gay; he was killed by a bigoted and unjust political system that ruined the life of a genius and a hero of war.

All of this is explored in great detail in a biography that does Turning’s life justice, which is the least he deserved.

Buy a copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma here!

Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art by Susan Napier

Hayao Miyazaki will forever be known as one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers. A master of multiple disciplines, including art, writing, and directing.

His films, most of which have dark and intense anti-war, anti-industrial, anti-capitalistic underpinnings, are some of the 20th and 21st century’s greatest works of art.

Born during World War II, raised in a turbulent post-war Japan, his life shaped his art and his expression. And all of that is explored in wonderful detail in Susan Napier’s Miyazakiworld .

It’s no secret that Miyazaki was always a workaholic and a perfectionist, but this book demonstrates that wonderfully, as it strips back all the purpose and meaning behind the smallest choices when it comes to his art.

Every tiny nuance, every word, every detail; Miyazaki’s films were meticulously designed, and we see the cogs turning in this biography.

Miyazakiworld contextualises Japan’s animation industry for a non-Japanese audience, gives us a personal background to Miyazaki’s work and writing, and so much more.

A really amazing biography that focuses on the art of a great filmmaker, how it exists, and why it exists. One of the best biography books for film and animation fans.

Buy a copy of Miyazakiworld here!

Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley

After the enormous success of her Jane Austen biography (below), historian and TV personality Lucy Worsley turns her attention to another great woman of English literature.

Agatha Christie was, and will forever be remembered as, an astonishing force of creativit y within the world of literature.

Across a career longer than many human lives, Christie wrote timeless tales of murder and mystery, and brought us characters that remain beloved to this day.

But when it came to her personal life, Christie presented an image of meekness and good behaviour, which Worsley reveals was far from the truth.

There are so many facts and titbits about Christie’s life, career, and work ethic that fascinate her fans, but this brilliant biography goes so far beyond all of that.

Agatha Christie wrote many of the greatest thrillers and crime novels of all time, but she also had a wonderfully active and adventurous modern life.

All of that is explored with enthusiasm and wit by Worsley, who has clearly relished the challenge of unpacking the truth about Christie and bringing that truth to us.

Worsley is a charismatic writer and speaker, and that charisma shows in this book; one of the most humorous and best biography books of recent years.

Buy a copy of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman here!

Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix by Charles R. Cross

Charles R. Cross has written two of the best biography books about members of the “27 Club” — musicians whom we lost at the cursed age of 27.

One was the biography of Kurt Cobain (above) and the other is this: Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix .

Hendrix was a rare example of a kind of reverse British invasion; an American prodigy who found fame and fandom in London’s rock ‘n’ roll era.

With The Jimi Hendrix Experience, he wrote and recorded three albums, and he made a name for himself as a revolutionary guitarist.

But there is so much more to his life behind the scenes. While his struggles with fame and addiction are well-documented, this biography dives so much deeper.

We learn about his tumultuous youth in Seattle and the things he truly wanted from life but rarely ever dared to mention.

Charles R. Cross has proven himself a fantastic biographer of great musicians, and the proof is here in Room Full of Mirrors .

Buy a copy of Room Full of Mirrors here!

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Another great biography that was given the Hollywood treatment; Sylvia Nasar’s excellent book on renowned mathematician John Nash adapted to the big screen by Ron Howard.

While that film won Howard an Academy Award for best director, it remains an adaptation and, as such, glosses over so much about Nash’s life that is important to know.

A Beautiful Mind tells the full story of John Nash, an eccentric mathematician whose chance to win a Nobel Prize was dashed because of how the world treated his schizophrenia.

As a mathematician, Nash had an enormous effect on the world of American economics, and the onset of his schizophrenia made him a compelling and fascinating person.

Nasar’s biography frames Nash’s schizophrenia in an honest light without vilifying or romanticising it, but it also doesn’t shy away from the more cruel of Nash’s actions.

For example, Nash was abusive towards his wife, unfaithful to her, and even pushed her down the stairs when she was pregnant. The film neatly glosses over these facts.

When creating a biography about a genius and a tragic figure, it’s important to humanise them and reveal the darker sides, even if they may be uncomfortable facts.

This is what makes Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind one of the best biography books of the past several decades.

Buy a copy of A Beautiful Mind here!

Jane Austen at Home: A Biography by Lucy Worsley

Several years before writing her biography on Agatha Christie (above), historian Lucy Worsley dazzled Jane Austen fans with the fantastic Jane Austen at Home .

Jane Austen remains one of the most celebrated classic authors in the history of the English language. Her wit and social commentary is legendary .

The stories and characters of novels like Pride and Prejudice, Emma , Persuasion are beloved by bookworms, and likely always will be.

But who was the woman behind the wit? What in Austen’s life inspired such fantastic tales of family life, romance, sisterhood, class disparity, and more?

Lucy Worsley answers all of those questions, and many more, in this amazing biography that paints a vivid picture of Austen’s home life.

Here, we learn about her youth, her family, her home, her habits, her loves, and more.

This is a must-read for any Austen fan, and when it comes to literary figures, this is also one of the best biography books that exists.

Side note: I read this book before visiting Jane Austen’s house , and it wonderfully enhanced the experience.

Buy a copy of Jane Austen at Home here!

Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones

Completely peerless, Jim Henson was one of the most unique creative minds that 20th century TV and film ever had.

Often overshadowed by his creations — The Muppets, Sesame Street, Labyrinth , and his work on Star Wars — Henson was one-of-a-kind.

It’s thanks to his work that puppets remain a part of mainstream television, for children and adults alike, and here you can learn all about his life in this excellent biography.

Henson died tragically young, at age 53, from a bacterial infection, but he accomplished so much in his life, and those accomplishments brought so much joy to the world.

The characters and worlds that he created have gone on to resonate with people of all ages for decades. The impact that his films and TV shows have had is immeasurable.

With the generous support of Henson’s family, Brian Jay Jones has been able to present us with the full life story of Jim Henson and all that he did.

Buy a copy of Jim Henson: The Biography here!

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

Few infamous public figures of American history have ever been as talked-about and obsessed over as Malcolm X.

A civil rights activist who joined the Nation of Islam while in prison as a young man, Malcolm X has fascinated many kinds of people for many reasons for several decades.

Beginning in 1990, renowned investigative journalist Les Payne worked to gather more than a hundred hours worth of interviews surrounding Malcolm X.

However, Payne died before the book was completed, and so his daughter and research partner Tamara finished their work and had it published in 2020.

The Dead Are Arising went on to win the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

A remarkable work of investigative journalism that reveals to its readers an equally remarkable life.

Given the magnitude of Malcolm X’s life and legacy, and that of Les Payne’s own work and renown, The Dead Are Arising is a uniquely powerful biography.

When it comes to biographies built from tremendous hard work of investigative journalism, few compare to The Dead Are Arising .

Buy a copy of The Dead Are Arising here!

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields

Author Charles J. Shields is a well-renowned biographer of American writers, and Mockingbird is his most celebrated work.

Two years after its publication, Shields even adapted Mockingbird into a version more palatable for younger readers, titled I Am Scout .

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee tells the story of one of 20th century USA’s best-known and best-loved authors.

One of the most unique and intriguing things about Lee was that she only ever wrote the one novel, and that novel is rightly considered a great American classic.

To Kill A Mockingbird is taught in schools across the US and UK to this day; it received a celebrated film adaptation; it has even been adapted to the stage with amazing results.

But who was the woman behind this true American masterpiece of a novel? Charles J. Shields answers that question with appreciation and attentiveness.

Buy a copy of Mockingbird here!

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Home / Book Writing / The Best Biography Books of All Time: My 10 Personal Favorites

The Best Biography Books of All Time: My 10 Personal Favorites

I love great biography books. Whether it's about a hero, celebrity, business mogul, or dastardly villain, biographies give an amazing insight into the mindset of success and hard work.

And while biographies aren't necessarily white-knuckle page-turners or complex Lit-RPG , they're sure to provide an interesting read.

In this article, you will learn:

• The importance of a biography – both as a writer and a reader
• Our top picks for the best biographies of all time

Table of contents

• Our Best Biography Books
• Biographies for Readers
• Biographies for Writers
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
• Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
• Bohemian Rhapsody: The Definitive Biography of Freddie Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones
• The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr
• The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller
• Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• The Stan Lee Story by Roy Thomas
• What Do You Think Of Our Best Biography Books List?

Mind you, this is a highly subjective article. If you don't see your favorite biography on this list, let us know in the comments below what you believe deserves to be on this list and why. And with that, let's jump right into some good lessons and even better titles.

• Titan: The Life of John D Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
• Bohemian Rhapsody: The Definitive Biography of Freddie Mercury by Leslie-Ann Jones
• The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr.

Why Are Biographies Important?

Often glossed over, a biography holds much more than just the story of someone's life. While the stories can be entertaining, there is another value to reading and writing biography books.

When looking at what can be gained by readers through biographies, three main points come to mind.

• Biographies provide real-life lessons.

There's an old piece of advice that I'm sure everybody has heard before, “Learn from others' mistakes.” And while we might not necessarily follow that as we should, it's sound advice. By reading biographies, you can see where other people made their mistakes and learn from them in the process. Biography subjects can be mentors if you'll let them.

• Biographies are inspiring.

Most of the time, biographies focus on great people accomplishing great deeds. Reading about them will surely light a fire underneath you and provide the inspiration you need to conquer whatever obstacles stand in your way.

• Biographies allow you to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.

Sometimes it's necessary to see things from a different perspective. Doing so can be truly enlightening. Biographies shine a light into why someone acted the way they did, giving you fresh insight.

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Readers of biographies aren't the only people to benefit from them. Those who write biographies go through the learning process themselves. Here are a few benefits authors of biographies might glean.

• They come with their own subject matter.

While careful research must be done to write a good biography, it can be helpful to have a life's worth of adventures to work with. If you're struggling to come up with a new story for a book, consider telling someone else's story.

• They will humble and humanize you.

A biography humbles its author. You may be one of the most successful writers ever; but when writing a biography, you're writing about somebody else's success and their life. It kind of puts things into perspective. You get an outside look at how life operates and how people react to ups and downs. You'll see that you're a part of something much bigger than yourself. This will allow you to learn from your subject's trials and tribulations.

I recommend sharing what you personally learned from your research in the preface part of your book. Let readers know how writing the biography has made you a better person and more aware. That will make readers excited to potentially experience a similar transformation.

Our Top Picks for the Best Biography Books of All Time

Here are our picks for the best biographies of all time. These are listed in no particular order, as it was already hard enough to narrow them down this much.

About the Biography:  This biography focuses on the life of Henrietta Lacks. A simple tobacco farmer, Henrietta unwittingly became one of the largest contributors to modern medical science. Back in 1951, Henrietta visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital where a large cancerous tumor was found on her cervix. Samples of these cancer cells ended up being collected and, unbeknownst to her, sent to a nearby tissue lab for experimentation. Her cells (now called HeLa cells) were very special compared to everyone else's. Instead of dying under stressful conditions, hers would double in number! Further experimentation led to many scientific breakthroughs, including the polio vaccine. It was only 20 years later–and after Henrietta's passing–that her family actually found out what happened.

About the Author: Rebecca Skloot has a very interesting writing background. She's been a professor for both creative writing and science journalism at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Memphis, and New York University. And she's got a rather prolific writing portfolio. She's published over 200 short stories and essays, but nothing quite took off like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Why We Chose This Biography: When this book came out in 2010, it was one for the record books. It was not only selected as a notable book by the New York Times — 60 different major publications named it as the best book of the year! This biography has garnered so much attention over the past decade, with Oprah Winfrey even producing an HBO film on it.

About the Biography: When Lincoln won the presidency, his rivals were shocked and dismayed. Lincoln became the victor due to his high capacity to relate to the common folk and his overwhelming sense of poise and decency. That ability allowed him to develop one of the most unusual presidential cabinets in history. One made up of his politically experienced and headstrong rivals.

About the Author:  Doris Kearns Goodwin is an American political biographer. She has written biographies for several other American presidents including Lyndon B Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. In 2005, she won the Lincoln Award (Best Book about The Civil War) for Team of Rivals  and parts of it were used for the basis of the 2012 Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln .

Why We Chose This Biography:  Many people would say that Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest United States Presidents to hold the office. Though his life was shortened by assassination, he made a huge impact on the American Union and history itself. One of the ways he was able to do so was by bringing the people together–friends and enemies alike. And the masterful writing from Goodwin only accentuates how much impact Lincoln actually had.

About the Biography:  Titan explores the life of the world's first billionaire — oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. This biography talks about Rockefeller's humble beginnings and how he rose through the corporate ladder to become one of the most powerful men in history. The biography has cameos from major players such as Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and many more. This has been touted as one of America's great biographies by Time Magazine .

About the Author: Beginning his career in freelance journalism, Ron Chernow quickly evolved into one of the foremost biographical writers in the United States. Although he pursues writing full time now, he still contributes articles to publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal .

Why We Chose This Biography:  Even long after his death, Rockefeller is one of the greatest business inspirations for any budding entrepreneur. He truly defined and set the term “industry titan,” and there's still so much that we can learn from his practices.

About the Biography:  This 2008 Audie Award winner tells the story of how an awkward, impatient patent clerk became one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. The book covers the entirety of Einstein's life, from the common misconception that he wasn't good at math to his involvement in World War I and II. Isaacson also covers Einstein's Physics achievements and his formulation of the General Theory of Relativity. This is one of the best biography books for anyone interested in politics, physics, or personal achievement.

About the Author:  Walter Isaacson has quite the resume. He's been the managing editor at Time , CEO of CNN, and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He's made a household name for himself through his biographies of Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Henry Kissinger.

Why We Chose This Biography:  Albert Einstein has become synonymous with the word ‘genius.' If you were to create a top 10 list of the most influential minds in history, there's a good chance he'd be on it. And when you have his life presented to you by the legendary biographical author Walter Isaacson…You're in for one heck of a read.

About the Biography:  Warren Buffett is one of the richest men in America and one of the most respected. Known for showing great humility, he has been shrouded in enigma as he lives a very private life (until this biography anyway). Entrusting his life story to Alice Schroeder, Alice writes the book that Buffett claims he never could.

About the Author:  Alice is an American former insurance analyst and writer. She caught the attention of Warren Buffett through her writing skills and was entrusted to tell his story. After her success with The Snowball , you'll catch more of her writing in columns for T he Bloomberg News .

Why We Chose This Biography:  Warren Buffett is a wildly successful businessman who's made some of the best decisions when it comes to investing in the stock market. And at the same time, he does it with the utmost degree of modesty. He's a huge role model for just about anybody trying to make it in life. So when he finally decided to sit down with someone to tell his story…I'm gonna listen. Or read it.

About the Biography:  Bohemian Rhapsody is the Freddie Mercury biography that you never knew you needed. This book primarily focuses on the period in the 1980s where Queen began to fragment–namely before Live Aid. It's been described as an emotional roller coaster, taking the reader through Freddie's childhood in India and Zanzibar to his wilder years in the '70s and '80s.

About the Author:  Lesley-Ann Jones is an English author and journalist. Most of her works revolve around rock and roll and pop superstars. She's a top-notch writer and captured Freddie at his most real in this biography.

Why We Chose This Biography: Many would agree that Freddie Mercury had one of the most electrifying voices in the history of rock and roll. However, it wasn't just Freddie's four-plus octave range that made him so controversial. His battles with societal norms, his sexuality, and AIDS keep him in the public light to this day. If you're a fan of Queen or of music in general, this is an amazing look into the life of an even more amazing artist (and one of the best biography books).

About the Biography:  Ted Williams is a Boston Red Sox legend. And one of the greatest (if not the GOAT) hitters to ever play the game. He put up numbers so awe-inspiring that players today are still struggling to reach them. Not only that, he served as a US Marine pilot in the Korean War for five years. Ted had a rather volatile domestic life. This biography explores the peaks and valleys of this baseball legend both on and off the field.

About the Author:  As the son of the famous Watergate reporter, Ben Bradlee Sr., Bradlee Jr. has made an enormous name for himself through his own writing. Spending most of his career as an editor at The Boston Globe , Bradlee helped see the paper to a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. His biography on Ted Williams became a New York Times Bestseller. Slated to become a TV miniseries, this is a story you'll definitely want to read.

Why We Chose This Biography:  For those of you who don't know, I'm an avid Red Sox fan. Seriously, there's nothing like being at Fenway staring down the Green Monster. I chose this biography because you get to see this idolized baseball legend for everything he was. Most people never think about what their sports heroes are like off the field. This one had me reading late into the night as I couldn't put it down.

My Ted Williams signed baseball. You can see it on the white shelves behind me in my videos.

I respect a lot of things about Ted Williams. He was a jet pilot in WWII and Korea. Even when he was at his prime, he still willingly went to war. And really fought…not just signed autographs and paraded around for War Bonds. Even when shot down behind enemy lines in Korea, Ted Williams made his way back to safety and ultimately back to baseball.

This book humanizes Ted and shows every facet of his life–the rough and the polished.

About the Biography:  This biography tells the story of prolific Sci-Fi writer Ray Bradbury, from his beginnings in a small town in Illinois to his feuds on the silver screen with various film and television personalities. After hundreds of hours spent with Ray, the author and he became close friends. This adulation can be detected throughout the book in Weller's writing style.

About the Author:  Sam Weller has made his career as an accomplished journalist through reporting on the life of Ray Bradbury. He is an LA Times Bestseller and is the recipient of the 2005 Society of Midland Authors Award for Best Biography for The Bradbury Chronicles .

Why We Chose This Biography:  As a Sci-Fi enthusiast, I understand the impact that Ray Bradbury made on the genre–even on short stories in general. Influenced by his environment, this biography provides a unique angle into Bradbury's work.

About the Biography: The best Biography books aren't always about the heroes in life. This biography is about one of the most fierce villains of all time: Joseph Stalin. This book primarily focuses on after his rise to absolute power. It goes into excruciating detail about the actions of the madman and his court. Due to the emotionally disturbing scenes littered throughout this book, I recommend this for mature readers only.

About the Author:  Simon Sebag Montefiore has a very accomplished and varied resume. Writing fiction and non-fiction books for both children and adults, his career as a British historian spreads across a vast audience. His biography on Stalin, though, received the Best History Book of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards.

Why We Chose This Biography: There's an old adage that says, “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. ” And while this does sound very cliché… clichés exist for a reason. This book is a tough read — not necessarily because of the language, but because of the subject matter. It's somewhat difficult to imagine one man was capable of so many monstrosities. It's important to understand so we as a society can stop similar events from happening again.

About the Biography:  The story of Stanley Leiber–or Stan Lee–is a must-read for every comic lover. This full-feature biography goes through the steps of how Stan Lee and Jack Kirby became the Kings of Comics and beloved worldwide. Co-creator of some of Marvel's (and Earth's) mightiest heroes, Stan Lee helped build the legends of Wolverine, Ultron, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Carol Danvers–aka Captain Marvel–and so many more! This physically over-sized book portrays just how gigantic Lee was. It comes complete with full-sized illustrations and even a note from Stan the Man himself. Excelsior!

About the Author: Roy Thomas is a comic book writer and editor. Among his other achievements, he is also the first successor to Marvel Comics after Stan Lee himself. He is one of the writers responsible for ushering in the Golden Age of Comics.

Why We Chose This Biography:  If you're a comic book nut like me, this has got to be on your reading bucket list. Without a doubt, Lee sculpted the modern comic book industry. From blockbuster movies, games, and new weekly comic issues, fans feel Stan Lee's influence in each universe–Marvel, DC, or independent.

Out of all the available stories out there, these are the top ten best biography books I've chosen. However, this list is completely subjective. And I'd love to hear from you. What are your favorites?

Let me know which ones I've missed on social media. I'm always looking for new books to add to my reading list!

Dave Chesson

When I’m not sipping tea with princesses or lightsaber dueling with little Jedi, I’m a book marketing nut. Having consulted multiple publishing companies and NYT best-selling authors, I created Kindlepreneur to help authors sell more books. I’ve even been called “The Kindlepreneur” by Amazon publicly, and I’m here to help you with your author journey.

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76 thoughts on “ The Best Biography Books of All Time: My 10 Personal Favorites ”

Great idea and great list Dave. I LOVE biographies, they are a wonderful and personal access to history through the life of a leader.My shortlist:1. William Manchester, “The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill,” in 3 volumes, so that counts as 3 ;-)4. Michael Lewis, “The Undoing Project,” about the partnership between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky who single-handedly disrupted economic wisdom and invented the field of behavioral economics.5. Barbara Tuchman, “Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945,” about General Stillwell who was at least as brilliant as Patton or Marshall.6. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Eleanor Roosevelt”, a 2-volume series about FDR`s first lady who created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That again counts for 2 books ;-)8. Shlomo Avneri, “Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State,” about the visionary who dreamed up and laid the foundation for modern Israel.9. Taylor Branch, “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63,” a compelling biography of the civil rights leader.10. Walter Isaacson, “Steve Jobs” (I also loved Isaacson`s Einstein: His Life and Universe, but since you list that already, I recommend his Jobs biography, which shows the path-breaking entrepreneur, warts ‘n’ all).Enjoy.Thomas D. Zweifel Author of 8 books, including the award-winning “Strategy-In-Action” and “The Rabbi and the CEO”that became bestsellers thanks to Dave Chesson`s insight

Hi Dave,Great list of biographies and good insights into the value of reading bios.May I suggest a biography in the occult genre, Brother XII: The Strange Odyssey of a 20th-century Prophet, the story of Edward Arthur Wilson, mystic, visionary, prophet and prototypical cult leader.The details of this fascinating story are at my website brotherxii.com , which you might like to check out, as it gives a good illustrated synopsis of this strange saga.Josh Gates did an episode on Brother XII recently, œSecrets of Brother XII,  though the book itself has far more detail, and is based on interviews with former disciples and Brother XII ‘s private papers.Thanks for all the great work you do for authors.

Thanks and looks great!

Dave… Great list of Biographies! When you said, “Those who write biographies go through the learning process themselves” you were right on. However, there is a special learning process that authors who write their own autobiographies go through. The power of the story depends a lot on if you are writing about happy memories or ones permeated in pain, suffering and abuse. Five years ago as an unknown, first-time, self-published author, I decided to write my true-life story. As you start writing, you remember (and relive) what really happened and not the way you would have liked things to happen. One is factual and the other enters the realm of fiction.If your story is harrowing, as mine is, it is not only difficult to write, edit, and rewrite, but narrating your own audiobook can be an unimaginably disturbing experience. There were many times I broke down and could not continue for days just having to relive what I was subjected to for the first 16 years of my life.However, writing your autobiography is a tremendously healing process and allows you to see that what happened did not happen “to you” but happened “for you” in the end. Insight into Life is the reward for any author who is bold enough to write their pain and for any reader who is brave enough to experience it with them. – Linda Deir, author of “GUIDED” – Winner of the Int’l Body-Mind-Spirit Book Award.

Oh, That is some really good points. have not written an autobiography…not quite there yet but I’ll keep this in mind!

Hi Dave, thank you for an excellent idea, and some Interesting titles. I actually have four in my Audible library or wish list. And I will be keen to get the Ray Bradbury one. My list of 10 are below. Clearly subjective, but by its very nature that is always the case. ERIC`s 10 FAVOURITE BIOGRAPHIES / AUTOBIOGRAPHIESSurname / First Name / Title / Subject Albom Mitch TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE Morrie Schwartz Esterhaus Joe HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL Joe Esterhaus Eyman Scott JOHN WAYNE, The Life and Legend John Wayne Granger Stewart SPARKS FLY UPWARDS Stewart Granger Hotchner A E PAPPA HEMINGWAY Ernest Hemingway Jenkins Roy WINSTON CHURCHILL Winston Churchill McCourt Frank ANGELA`s ASHES Frank Mc Court McCullough Colleen RODEN CUTLER, VC Roden Cutler Parini Jay JOHN STEINBECK, A Biography John Steinbeck Sandburg Carl LINCOLN Abraham Lincoln 6 Volumes Footnotes: Pulitzer Prize for ANGELA`s ASHES and LINCOLN. Roy Jenkins CHURCHILL is arguably the best single volume bio of WSC Great title by Stewart Granger, taken from Job – 5:7 “Man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upwards.”

Nice – yeah the Churchill one is on my list right now!

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The New York Times Best Sellers - April 14, 2024

Authoritatively ranked lists of books sold in the united states, sorted by format and genre..

This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.

• Combined Print & E-Book Fiction

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DEVLINS

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Seeking to turn around a troubled past, TJ Devlin joins his family’s law firm as an investigator and learns that his brother murdered a client.

THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

by Cixin Liu

Different groups form to help or fight a crumbling alien civilization coming to invade Earth; the basis of the streaming series. Translated by Ken Liu.

• Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION

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A co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind” looks at the mental health impacts that a phone-based life has on children.

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The CNN host draws out lessons for the present polarized era from the 17th-century Netherlands, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

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THE #1 LAWYER

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The Best 10 Biographies by Women to Add to Your Reading List

From former first ladies to famous actors and standup comedians.

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The books on this list include incredible true stories about remarkable women who overcame great adversity, from Hollywood heavyweights sharing their personal stories for the first time to women journeying through grief, love, heartbreak, and hardship. While some of these books explore what it means to move forward after a violent crime, others explain the influence a person's upbringing had on their identity. Here, we round up 10 of the best biographies of women to add to your reading list in 2024.

'Becoming' by Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama needs no introduction following her eight-year tenure as first lady in the White House, but that doesn't make her story any less remarkable. Becoming covers everything from Michelle's youth in Chicago to her relationship with husband and former president Barack Obama and the way she's learned to juggle working on a world stage alongside raising her family. Rather than shying away from her mistakes, Michelle reflects on her life to date, offering every ounce of wisdom she's gathered, making her memoir an essential read.

'I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban' by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb

When Malala Yousafzai was just 15 years old, she was shot in the head after standing up to the Taliban regarding her right to an education. Seemingly against all odds, Yousafzai survived the attack, and was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her advocacy on behalf of children and young people. Since then, she has continued her activism by supporting young women to receive an education, while opposing extremism. I Am Malala is Yousafzai's incredible story , told in her own words.

'Inside Out: A Memoir' by Demi Moore

As an award-winning actor and the ex-wife of Bruce Willis , Demi Moore is no stranger to the spotlight. In Inside Out: A Memoir, Moore uses her wit and candor to discuss her unlikely rise to fame, the difficulties she encountered as a Hollywood star, and aspects of her personal life even the most dedicated fan wouldn't know. From her very real battles with sexism to the disintegration of multiple relationships, Moore doesn't hold anything back in her emotional autobiography.

'Know My Name' by Chanel Miller

With Know My Name, Chanel Miller gave up her anonymity as Emily Doe to tell her story. In 2016, Brock Turner was found guilty of three counts of felony sexual assault, for which he was sentenced to six months in county jail, although he would only serve three. Following the trial, Miller's victim impact statement went viral online, in which she revealed the devastating impact the crime had on every aspect of her life. Know My Name is an intimate portrayal of what it's like to survive a life-changing event and find a new forward.

'Finding Me' by Viola Davis

Viola Davis' biography , Finding Me, elevated the actor to EGOT status when she took home a Grammy for her performance of the audiobook, and it's easy to see why. Discussing her humble upbringing on Rhode Island and her quest to forge a career as an actor, Davis encourages honesty and self-reflection when readers look back on their own stories. While Davis' talent is undeniable, her journey to stardom has been anything but simple, making Finding Me an important and timeless read.

'Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology' by Leah Remini: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

After leaving Scientology in July 2013, Leah Remini was forced to rebuild her life from the ground up. Despite being a famous actor, Remini was seemingly adrift in the world without her former religion and allegedly faced harassment and stalking by the organization for fleeing. Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology tracks Remini's upbringing in the church, the reasons she finally decided to leave, and the ways in which her life changed after she walked away.

'Survival of the Thickest' by Michelle Buteau

Comedian Michelle Buteau has continually proven herself with roles in Netflix movies, such as Someone Great and Always Be My Maybe, and on TV shows like Russian Doll and First Wives Club. In Survival of the Thickest, Buteau provides readers with an insight into her life growing up in New Jersey with Caribbean parents and why she made the move to Miami for college. Both hilarious and intimate, Buteau gets candid about her chaotic life as a standup comedian, starting a family with her Dutch husband, and the difficult decisions she faced when becoming a mother.

'Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail' by Cheryl Strayed

Brought to the big screen in a movie starring Reese Witherspoon , Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is a story of resilience, heartbreak, grief, and an 1100-mile solo hike. Leaving behind a difficult romantic relationship and personal demons and still reeling from the death of her mother, Strayed navigates the challenging walk with very little hiking experience. In spite of her shortcomings, the journey changes the course of her life forever.

'Crying in H Mart' by Michelle Zauner in H Mart: A Memoir

Known as the lead singer of Japanese Breakfast , Michelle Zauner's biography is an exploration of family, food, identity, loss, and the journey to discovering oneself. From her childhood in Oregon to her experiences staying in Seoul, South Korea, with her grandmother, Zauner examines the strands that form her identity as a Korean American. In addition to tracking her career as a rock musician, Zauner opens up about the devastating family diagnosis that changed her outlook on life and heritage.

'I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home' by Jami Attenberg

Author Jami Attenberg is known for her novels The Middlesteins and The Melting Season, and for short story collections such as Instant Love . In I Came All This Way to Meet You, Attenberg shares the experiences that shaped her worldview, including following her father's occupation as a traveling salesman. As Attenberg discovered her own creative identity, she also found the less glamorous aspects of writing, such as the cross-country book tours and the lack of stable housing. Despite the challenges, Attenberg's memoir provides the encouragement needed to never quit, whatever the project.

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• Biographies & Memoirs
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The Complete Book of US Presidents, Fourth Edition: Updated for 2021 Hardcover – March 2, 2021

• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crestline Books
• Publication date March 2, 2021
• Dimensions 9.55 x 1 x 11.15 inches
• ISBN-10 0785839232
• ISBN-13 978-0785839231
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

About the author.

Bill Yenne is the author of more than three dozen nonfiction books on historical topics. His books on aviation and military history have included Area 51 Black Jets —which T. D. Barmes, formerly with NASA High Range and Area 51 Special Projects, described as “not a book that the reader will lay down and not finish. It holds one’s interest from front to back.” Yenne has also contributed to encyclopedias of World War I and World War II and has been featured in several documentaries that have aired on the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Smithsonian Channel, and ARD German Television. The Wall Street Journal notes that Yenne writes “with a cinematic vividness.” Yenne has also authored ten novels and has penned several books on beer and brewing history.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crestline Books; 4th edition (March 2, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0785839232
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0785839231
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.55 x 1 x 11.15 inches
• #116 in United States Executive Government
• #247 in US Presidents
• #1,720 in United States History (Books)

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Customer Review: This is a good coffee table read that provides a quick synopsis of each president

DaveSincere

About the author

Bill Yenne is the San Francisco–based author of more than three dozen non-fiction books on a range of topics, as well as several novels. The Wall Street Journal notes that he writes “with a cinematic vividness,” while Walter J. Boyne, the former head of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, has recommended Mr. Yenne’s work, writing, “I can guarantee that you will be engaged by his master storytelling from his opening words to the very last page.”

Mr. Yenne’s work has been selected for the official Chief of Staff of the US Air Force Reading List, and he is the recipient of the Air Force Association’s prestigious Gill Robb Wilson Award for his “most outstanding contribution in the field of arts and letters”

He has contributed to encyclopedias of both world wars, and has been featured in several documentaries which have aired on the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Smithsonian Channel, NHK Japanese Television, and ARD German Television.

General Wesley Clark, US Army (Ret), former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, called Yenne’s biography of Alexander the Great, the “best yet.” The New Yorker wrote of Mr. Yenne’s biography of the Sitting Bull, that it “excels as a study in leadership.” This book was named to the number 14 spot in Amazon’s “100 Best Books of the Year” when it was released. His dual biography of Dick Bong and Tommy McGuire, Aces High: The Heroic Story of the Two Top-Scoring American Aces of World War II was described by pilot and best-selling author Dan Roam as “the greatest flying story of all time.”

Mr. Yenne has also written extensively about the history of beer and brewing. His book Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint, was listed among the top business books of the year by Condé Nast Portfolio Magazine, while the same publication rated the book as its top pick for “Cocktail Conversation.”

Mr. Yenne’s novels have included the Gideon Safford and Bladen Cole Western series, as well as the best-selling an alternate history about General George Patton entitled A Damned Fine War.

He can be found on the web at www.BillYenne.com

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