best easy read biography

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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Best Biographies

The best of biography: the 2020 nbcc shortlist, recommended by elizabeth taylor.

The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin

How do you find the perfect subject for a biography? “Pick a real bitch, or real bastard, and make sure they're dead,” a famous biographer once told Elizabeth Taylor . The author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics' Circle biography committee talks us through the books that made their 2020 shortlist.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King

L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "Female Byron" by Lucasta Miller

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purcell

1 Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King

2 the queen: the forgotten life behind an american myth by josh levin, 3 l.e.l.: the lost life and scandalous death of letitia elizabeth landon, the celebrated "female byron" by lucasta miller, 4 our man: richard holbrooke and the end of the american century by george packer, 5 a woman of no importance: the untold story of the american spy who helped win world war ii by sonia purcell.

T his is the second year that we’ve come together to discuss the National Book Critics’ Circle (NBCC) shortlist of the best new biographies . Have you noticed any trends or themes among the 2020 intake?

There seem to be fewer dutiful biographies of great men revered for their prominence rather than accomplishments. As the great historian and biographer Barbara Tuchman—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45 —once told me about a presidential candidate: “Titles on the door don’t fill an empty head.”

Biographers are increasingly pushing the form’s boundaries. As Emily Dickinson wrote: “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” Last year, for example, Mark Braude’s excellent The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Exile to Escape focused on Napoleon ’s period of powerlessness and revealed a new perspective on a much-examined life. We are seeing more books that transcend category. One of my favourite books this year is Christopher Benfey’s If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years which blends literary criticism and history into an original narrative about Rudyard Kipling, whom George Orwell described as a “jingo imperialist.” This book is not a cradle-to-grave biography, but rather zeroes in on Kipling’s time in Vermont when he reinvented himself as an American kind of writer. That slant rejects the traditional biographical form and illuminates Kipling’s life and legacy in a new and interesting way. Knowing that they were written in the wild kingdom of Vermont, perhaps some of us will be tempted to give those stories in The Jungle Book another try!

That’s interesting. I discussed the 2020 autobiography shortlist with Mark Athitakis recently, and he talked about how memoir has come to the fore, and that could be thought of as autobiography at a slant, as you say: pulling out a portion or theme from a life for close analysis. It’s interesting to hear that it’s also happening in biography in 2020.

Absolutely. The last time we spoke you introduced me to this concept of the group biography, which I hadn’t been familiar with before. And the first title we’re going to discuss today falls into this category. This is Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King. Perhaps you could tell us about it.

Yes. At the centre of King’s fascinating book is Columbia University’s Franz Boas (1858–1942), the father of cultural anthropology, who challenged his era’s prevailing wisdom that race, gender and sexuality were destiny. He argued against eugenics and contemporary theories of racial distinction between humans. His work culminated with his theory of relativism, which discredited the prevailing conviction that Western civilization was superior to simpler societies.

While Boas championed cultural diversity and scientific discovery, he also created an environment that inspired a circle of visionary women researchers who were pathbreaking. The book is kaleidoscopic, and its title comes from Zora Neale Hurston, one of Boas’s students whose fieldwork work led to her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God . Margaret Mead’s fieldwork with adolescent girls led to her seminal work of anthropology, Coming of Age in Samoa . From her work on post-World War II Japan and Pueblo culture, Ruth Benedict shaped approaches to history and death. Ella Cara Deloria focused on Sioux folklore and legends.

“Boas championed cultural diversity and scientific discovery, and created an environment that inspired a circle of visionary women researchers”

At a time when women were beginning to chafe at the patriarchal social order, Boas encouraged them to find their work and share it with an audience. Together, they broke new ground and acknowledged differences of colour, gender, custom and ability, yet set forth an expansive vision of normalcy and humanity in a multicultural world. The pioneering work of Boas and his students is particularly interesting to consider in an increasingly tribal America.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote about her own cultural group, as did Ella Cara Deloria—so this was academic anthropology, with the benefit of insider perspectives. But why do you think it’s important to look at the lives of these particular individuals, as opposed to the evolution of ideas more generally?

That sounds right up my street. But let’s move on. Next we have The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin. Tell us a little bit about its subject, and why you admire it.

We need to look back to the ‘welfare queen’ meme that took root in Ronald Reagan ’s failed 1976 presidential campaign. As the author of The Queen explains, the phrase was taken from the headlines of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s Chicago Tribune investigation of Linda Taylor, a Cadillac-driving, fur-clad woman who scammed the system and was code for a lazy con artist. The myth took hold and fuelled public hysteria about cadging money that honest folks had worked hard to earn. She became the poster person for welfare abuse.

Because Five Books has a very international audience, I should quickly clarify that ‘welfare’ in this context refers to state benefit payments.

Yes, thank you. In The Queen , Levin sets out to find the real Linda Taylor, but it turns out that in this case, the reality really is more interesting than the story of a self-interested politician campaigning on fake news. There really was a Cadillac-driving scam artist called Linda Taylor, and in a feat of investigative reporting Josh Levin subverts the myth and reconstructs her life. It turns out that welfare fraud was the least of her problems. Through her many aliases, Levin found that she served time in prison, and may have murdered someone.

She was both victim and victimizer; Linda Taylor was abused as a child growing up in the Jim Crow South. She abandoned her own children and is accused of selling others on the black market.

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Perhaps this is also a cautionary tale about daily journalism, because Linda Taylor became known to reporters after she called the Chicago police to report a burglary. Her complicated story eluded journalists of the day who wrote her off as a welfare cheat, but Levin relentlessly digs into court transcripts, old property deeds and police records story to find a troubled, complicated woman, making clear in his footnotes how he documented her elusive story. Levin’s stamina and creative search for evidence in this book is extraordinary, especially considering how elusive she was and how many identities she assumed.

Perhaps I should note how important a sympathetic imagination is for the writing of biography. In The Queen , Levin shows how the newspaper headline became a campaign issue, but that her story is far more interesting than the myth.

This is a book that operates on so many different levels. It’s about American myth-making, and it’s also a hugely revealing social and psychological story about race, segregation, identity and a damaged person who went on to damage others.

And does Levin tackle the folly of building policy off the back of singular cases like this?

The Queen is not a policy book, but the implications of the single narrative are clear. Linda Taylor came to prominence during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign; his slogan at this moment when history coalesced was “Let’s make America great again.” And of course, Trump’s MAGA theme was on the horizon.

In Britain too, there are echoes of it in the ‘benefit scrounger’ narrative.

Well, the third book shortlisted for the title of best biography—speaking of scandalous lives—is L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’ by Lucasta Miller. This is a biography of the poet, literary celebrity and—I think it would it be fair to call her—a provocateur.

Yes, provocateur is fair! Of this year’s National Book Critics Circle biography finalists, one could argue that L.E.L is probably the most traditional, in the sense that it’s a chronological narrative about an overlooked artist from the past. As a group of literary critics, I think we at the NBCC have a soft spot for literary biographies, or perhaps we give them their due because we fully appreciate the intellectual dexterity required to segue between the life of a writer and what she writes.

Over the years, we’ve honored quite a few of these. Recent winners have included Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser and Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, both of which set a very high standard.

In L.E.L. , which was the semi-anonymous nom de plume of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Lucasta Miller sets out to reclaim Landon’s literary accomplishments and establish her as a bridge between Romanticism and Victorianism . Miller contends that Landon’s work has been overlooked and perhaps made invisible because she was regarded as popular writer whose feminine poetry was dismissed, and that she should be considered from a contemporary perspective as ‘proto-postmodern,’ sort of postmodernist in training.

Structurally, Miller does something very smart with her biography of Landon. She begins with Landon’s mysterious death—was it murder? Suicide? Accident? She turns the adage ‘chronology is your friend’ upside down and begins with the end. In suspenseful way, Miller recounts how this innocent ingenue and sex siren controlled her public image. She had three children, kept a secret from her public, who thought she was a virgin. She has sexual relations with her mentor who also promoted her career, and, as you said, she wrote scandalous poetry. Defying the norms of the day, L.E.L.’s poetry was risky, bold, flirtatious and sly.

The Atlantic described L.E.L. as “a female artist forced to earn attention by reshaping her exploitation into glamour, knowing all the while that eventually titillation will become condemnation.” This sounds still very current, to me: this question of being a sexual female in the public eye. Do you think that this is a timely book?

Very well put by The Atlantic . Some might say that men and the public used her, but I think she used them right back. Landon was a woman making a living by her pen at a time when that was frowned upon. She was this upwardly-mobile woman whose provocations distracted others from noticing her self-sufficiency.

You mentioned her upward mobility. Just before we move on I want to read a short bit of her verse, which I thought was just so funny and self-aware:

He must be rich whom I could love, His fortune clear must be, Whether in land or in the funds, ‘Tis all the same to me.

So next we’ve got Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer. It’s a biography of the American diplomat. Tell me, why does this count among the best biographies of the year?

Within the first few chapters of Our Man , I was reminded of one of my favorite biographies ever: Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Lippmann (1889–1974) was a reporter and commentator who was also involved in government. For six decades Lippmann was at the center of American political life—where the striving, almost great diplomat Richard Holbrooke yearned to be. As different as Walter Lippmann and Richard Holbrooke may have been, biographers Steel and Packer place them within the rich context of the quarrels, triumphs, friendships and alliances of the American century.

And excuse me for my ignorance, but ‘the American century’ means when, exactly—the 20th century? Or does it start later than that?

The American century is a shorthand for roughly the 20th century, when the American empire was born, flourished, matured, and finally began to diminish by about 2000, although it could be argued that the war in Vietnam marked the decline of American influence in the world.

Steel’s Lippmann and Packer’s Holbrooke were outsized men on the world stage who separately mirrored the waxing and waning of the American empire. In Our Man , Packer does the impossible. He takes Holbrooke’s story—a mid-level ‘almost great’ diplomat who was an idealist, but also an egotist, whose insatiable need for influence mirrored America’s anxious place in the world. From Vietnam to Afghanistan  and the Balkans, Holbrooke yearned for recognition, and ultimately failed in his quest to become Secretary of State.

“You just can’t help rooting for this deeply flawed man”

Packer builds a trust by breaking down the fourth wall and speaking directly to readers. “Do you mind if we hurry through the early years?” he asks. Scrupulously documented, at times Packer seems like he is channeling Holbrooke.

This is from the beginning:

Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head. I still hear it saying, “You haven’t read that book? You really need to read it.” Saying, “I feel, and I hope this doesn’t sound too self-satisfied, that in a very difficult situation where nobody has the answer, I at least know what the overall questions and moving parts are.” Saying, “Gotta go, Hillary’s on the line.”

After Holbrooke’s death, his widow Kati Marton gave Packer her husband’s papers, journals and files. Holbrooke kept great track of his friends and foes and Packer had a truckload of his archives. I should note that although Holbrooke’s widow provided Packer access to her husband’s archives, he does not refrain from disclosing her extra-marital affairs or Holbrooke and Marton’s excessive spending.

Packer presents Holbrooke as a contradictory figure. While he craved approval by the elite, he also wanted to be a man of the people. He was very covetous of others and desperately wanted to be Secretary of State, yet alienated even his ardent supporters. He was enthralled with celebrity and money. Holbrooke’s social climbing and gross behavior are unseemly, yet Packer approaches him with such an empathic imagination, you just can’t help rooting for this deeply flawed man. He really becomes ‘Our Man’ in its best sense.

The New York Times made an interesting comment about this book: “It clocks in at more than 500 pages without the courtesy of an index. This isn’t a book you’re supposed to dip into piecemeal, but best appreciated like a novel, consumed whole.” This caught me off guard. I have never thought of reading a biography any other way. Have I been doing it wrong? Are most biographies intended to be dip-in-and-out sorts of books, reference books?

You’re not wrong! Those who read by index are really missing out, and in a whole different category are those just who look for themselves in the index, or the footnotes to see if they have been quoted.

Footnotes, though—they’re dynamite. I’m seeing more biographies with footnotes as mini-essays. It enhances my reading experience when grasp the range of sources for a biography.

Fantastic. I think that brings us to our last biography in the 2020 list. Sonia Purnell’s A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II . I know Sonia as the author of a biography of Boris Johnson, before he became prime minister: Just Boris: A Tale of Blonde Ambition .

What a great title! I’ll have to read it. I did read Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill which was excellent. As I recall, it was prodigiously researched and written in a lively style.

Tell me about this new book.

During these challenging times, tales of resistance in World War II have found a receptive audience. In the case of Sonia Purnell’s biography, Americans are keen to read about our own countryman’s heroism.

At the center of Purnell’s biography is socialite Virginia Hall of Baltimore, Maryland who had been shut out of the American diplomatic corps in the 1930s and stuck as a clerk in the State Department. Raised in affluence, she had learned to ride a horse, shoot, sail and cycle. An adventurous sort, she lost her leg below the knee in a hunting accident in Turkey. (True story: she shot herself in the foot.)

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After the Nazis invaded France, Hall got herself there to drive ambulances which she did with her prosthetic leg, known then as a ‘peg leg’ which she named Cuthbert. Fluent in French and knowledgeable about the terrain, Hall talked her way into the Office of Strategic Services, and eventually ran spy networks and supervised air drops of weapons. She was known as ‘Madonna of the Mountains.’

Purnell recounts Hall’s spy operations so vividly that it feels like one is reading a spy novel . As Purnell’s title suggests, Hall was often underestimated and overlooked. In rescuing Virginia Hall from obscurity, the book also tells a great story about the Resistance.

It’s so interesting to me that right now there is a spate of books about women in the Resistance: for example, there’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War by Lynne Olson and then there’s The Resistance Quartet series by Caroline Moorehead.

She sounds like a fascinating character. And actually, that’s a point I want to pick up on. As a biographer yourself, you’re in a good position to comment on what makes a person a good subject to begin with.

Great question. I grew up reading biographies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city which takes its history and historical figures very seriously, so that was my initial lens, I suppose. I toggled between history and journalism , but was always drawn to biography and went to graduate school in history where it turned out that biography was not in vogue.

The great C. Vann Woodward had retired but I had loved his books Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel and The Strange Career of Jim Crow and Mary Chesnut’s Civil War , so I visited him for tea and peppered him with questions about biography. Once I asked how I would know if I had found the perfect subject for a biography. And he said, in his amazing Southern accent: “Pick a real bitch, or real bastard, and make sure they’re dead.”

Ha! Brilliant.

Just so brilliant. I mean, what he was saying to me is: No hagiography or rescue mission, and you need to have the full measure of a life. I don’t really consider books about living people to be real biographies, because it’s not the full, measurable life. Also, I’d like to be able to trust my sources and all sources have agendas. So that’s how I think of biography.

That brings me to one more question I wanted to run by you. Coming back to the Packer book: I believe Packer was a friend of Holbrooke. Do you think a biographer writing about somebody they actually knew in real life is at an advantage or a disadvantage?

It probably works multiple ways. I personally prefer the subject to be dead and not someone I know. Packer did a New Yorker profile of Holbrooke and he was the one chosen to receive his papers. Maybe it’s just an individual case, but I feel that Packer is so honest in the book. He puts himself in it, and talks to the readers, so I don’t see it as a problem. I see it as: he has empathy, an understanding of Holbrooke, but it’s not like they were best friends. They just knew each other, I think.

It gets us to another interesting question, which is about access. Many people say access is really important in a biography. Access to interviewees, or access to the source. My friend Adam Cohen and I wrote a biography , and our character, Mayor Richard J. Daley, was dead. Then we tried to talk to his family, and we had a few sit downs—little brief ones—but they really cut us off. I was worried about that, but then I realized that I kind of knew what they were going to say anyway.

“Time reveals. I guess that’s why you can’t really rush a biography”

Right now I’m working on the 19th century, where nobody can talk back. I’m trying to read between the lines; it’s not just what a character’s writing in a letter, but also to whom they’re writing it. That says something intangible about a person. I mean, you wouldn’t put it in a biography, but it informs your sensibility. A friend of mine said that the process of not getting an interview with the Daley family was its own education. And, yes, in being repeatedly rebuffed, and how that was done, so much was revealed in the process.

Time reveals. I guess that’s why you can’t really rush a biography, because time has to reveal itself about a person.

You must have quite a wide perspective of the field at the moment. Do you feel optimistic about the state of biography in 2020?

Oh yes. Yes, I really do. I think that we’ve gotten past the cradle-to-grave biography. I mean, they’ll always been popping up, the dutiful ones, but increasingly these biographies are at a slant, or more episodic, or and I think that has brought a new energy to the genre.

So I feel optimistic about that, but I am worried about the problem of email and archives. I can’t even convey the joy of going into an archive, and finding these handwritten, impossible-to-read letters. They’re so good. I have to hand-type them, fantastic. Without letters , diaries and documents, I am so worried that so much great history is going to be lost.

Yes, I worry about this too. There’s an ephemerality to a lot of written discourse these days. So much of our own personal archives can be lost if one loses a password. We live our lives online, and then it disappears down the drain.

I mean, journalism was fantastically helpful when I wrote my book about Mayor Richard J. Daley and the making of modern Chicago, but so much of what appears now is on Twitter. It doesn’t even make it into the papers. The other thing I’ll say is that if you pick a day in history, say . . . August 23rd, 1968. It was during the Democratic Convention and I have a folder several feet wide of different newspaper articles covering the day’s events from wildly different perspectives. That doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve talked about the local news crisis, and I think we will see in a generation that books are really suffering, definitely. So I am so optimistic, but I’m worried at the same time.

Part of our best books of 2020  series.

March 1, 2020

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 of All Time: Top 20 Most Interesting Reads

Kathy Edens

Have you ever read a biography that was gripping enough to keep you turning pages long after you should’ve been asleep? If not, then maybe you’re not reading the right books.

We culled the best of the best from over a half dozen sources, and still can’t capture all the great biographies worth reading.

Here, in no particular order, are the best biographies that read as good as, if not better than, fiction.

Final Thoughts

1. unbroken: a world war ii story of survival, resilience and redemption by laura hillenbrand.

At once devastating and uplifting, Unbroken is the story of Louis Zamperini, from his incorrigible boyhood actions to the sport that turned him around and led him to the Olympics.

But then WWII came calling, changing Louis and testing his endurance and ingenuity. The story comes full circle when, decades later, Zamperini returns to Japan, not as a POW, but as an honored guest at the Olympics.

2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta herself didn’t lead a glamorous life, but her cells, taken without her knowledge, have led to such ground-breaking accomplishments as the polio vaccine.

These cells, known as HeLa, are one of the most important tools in medicine and have been bought and sold by the billions. They are still alive today, over sixty years after Henrietta’s death.

3. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Fiction couldn’t be as suspenseful and seductive as this real story about a death in one of Savannah’s grandest mansions in 1981. Was it murder or self-defense?

Peeling the curtain back on well-bred society ladies, gigolos, and a Southern belle who epitomizes "the soul of pampered self-absorption," this book has everything from drag queens to a voodoo priestess. You can’t make this stuff up.

4. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Imagine a young, well-to-do man who gave away all his money, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, then hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the wilderness.

Four months later, hunters found his decomposed remains. This book tells the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless and his death in the wild.

5. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil by Rüdiger Safranski

Heidegger, a great philosopher without whom there would be no Sartre or Foucault, also had many failures and flaws.

He made a pact with the devil, Adolf Hitler, and teetered between good and evil, brilliance and blindness. This book chronicles his ideas and his personal commitments and betrayals.

6. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Based on over forty interviews with Jobs and hundreds with family, friends, colleagues, competitors, and adversaries, Walter Isaacson’s biography reads like a roller coaster ride.

This is the unvarnished truth: Jobs cooperated, but had no control over what Isaacson wrote or even the right to read it before publication. Nothing was off-limits.

7. John Adams by David McCullough

John Adams was not just one of the founding fathers; he was a brilliant, fiercely independent, and always honest patriot totally committed to the American Revolution. McCullough intertwines politics, war, and social issues with love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, and betrayal to create one book you can’t put down.

8. Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. She lived a flamboyant life in the Jazz Age alongside other literary heroes like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Milford goes underneath the dazzling performance Edna puts on for the crowds and uncovers a rich and deep family connection between the three Millay sisters and their mother. One reviewer described it as a little bit Little Women with a touch of Mommy Dearest .

9. The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was a thoroughly ambitious project that collected definitions from around the world.

There was one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, who contributed over 10,000, but the overseeing committee was stunned when they tracked him down to honor him. Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

10. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Another vivid story about a brilliant man teetering between genius and madness, this book reads like a suspense novel but is the true story of John Nash, a mathematical genius who slipped into madness.

Thanks to the support and loyalty of Nash’s admirers, he eventually won a Nobel Prize for triggering the game theory revolution.

11. Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt

An interesting insight into how a young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the 1500s and becomes the greatest playwright of all time.

Showing Shakespeare as an acutely sensitive and talented boy, Greenblatt helps you see, hear, and feel how he became the world-renowned playwright against the rich backdrop of Elizabethan life.

12. Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

Author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston tells the gripping and horrifying story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade.

This is the story of Cudjo Lewis, abducted from Africa and put on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. Lewis was captured and put in bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.

13. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel

In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, a pre-eminent English mathematician, with several ideas about numbers.

Hardy realized the boy’s genius and arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. From the temples and slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, the story of their journey together is inspiring and magical.

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

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was a woman of extreme magnetism and originality thanks to her childhood experiences near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution.

From a devastating accident that left her crippled and unable to bear children to her tempestuous marriage and intermittent love affairs, this is an extraordinary story of a 20th century woman who has become a legend.

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

During the Civil Rights Movement, no one knew the story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians and their role in the space program.

Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, this group, called the "Human Computers," calculated the flight paths that would lead to historic achievements.

16. John Brown by W.E.B. Du Bois

A groundbreaking political biography, John Brown moved Du Bois from his comfortable life as an academic to a lifelong career in social activism.

John Brown was the first Caucasian man willing to die for the rights of black people. The narrative Du Bois presents is compelling and one that is rarely presented in our history books.

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

Award-winning journalist Nazario tells the vivid and engaging story of a Honduran boy’s unforgettable odyssey to reach his mother in the United States.

He has no money and only a slip of paper with his mother’s US telephone number. Enrique makes the hard and dangerous journey from Mexico the only way he knows how—clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains.

18. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

In an interesting twist to the usual depiction of bloodthirsty pillagers, Weatherford shows how Genghis Khan introduced many progressive advancements to the societies he conquered.

Khan abolished torture, brought universal religious freedom, and destroyed feudal systems wherever he went. This is an engaging story of how he helped form the Mongol empire.

19. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram

Boyd was a world-class fighter pilot whose machinations changed warfare and strategy not only in the air but on the ground and at sea.

He is the founder of our modern concept of maneuver warfare, and his way of analyzing and solving problems is used today in corporate boardrooms.

20. Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Most first ladies didn’t do much beyond party planning, but Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to get things done.

Cook brings Roosevelt to life and shines a light on her political and social acumen in turning a meaningless position into one of power to influence and make change.

We didn’t want to stop here; there are so many more you should read. Let’s get a comprehensive list going in the comments below. What other unforgettable biographies did we miss?

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Kathy Edens is a blogger, a ghost writer, and content master who loves writing about anything and everything. Check out her books The Novel-Writing Training Plan: 17 Steps to Get Your Ideas in Shape for the Marathon of Writing and Creating Legends: How to Craft Characters Readers Adore... or Despise.

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The 50 Best Biographies of All Time

Think you know the full and complete story about George Washington, Steve Jobs, or Joan of Arc? Think again.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

Biographies have always been controversial. On his deathbed, the novelist Henry James told his nephew that his “sole wish” was to “frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter” by destroying his personal letters and journals. And one of our greatest living writers, Hermione Lee, once compared biographies to autopsies that add “a new terror to death”—the potential muddying of someone’s legacy when their life is held up to the scrutiny of investigation.

Why do we read so many books about the lives and deaths of strangers, as told by second-hand and third-hand sources? Is it merely our love for gossip, or are we trying to understand ourselves through the triumphs and failures of others?

To keep this list from blossoming into hundreds of titles, we only included books currently in print and translated into English. We also limited it to one book per author, and one book per subject. In ranked order, here are the best biographies of all time.

Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss

You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo , the 1844 revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013, and it’s only a matter of time before a filmmaker turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown

Few biographies are as genuinely fun to read as this barnburner from the irreverent English critic Craig Brown. Princess Margaret may have been everyone’s favorite character from Netflix’s The Crown , but Brown’s eye for ostentatious details and revelatory insights will help you see why everyone in the 1950s—from Pablo Picasso and Gore Vidal to Peter Sellers and Andy Warhol—was obsessed with her. When book critic Parul Sehgal says that she “ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice,” you know you’re in for a treat.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, by Alec Nevala-Lee

If you want to feel optimistic about the future again, look no further than this brilliant biography of Buckminster Fuller, the “modern Leonardo da Vinci” of the 1960s and 1970s who came up with the idea of a “Spaceship Earth” and inspired Silicon Valley’s belief that technology could be a global force for good (while earning plenty of critics who found his ideas impractical). Alec Nevala-Lee’s writing is as serene and precise as one of Fuller’s geodesic domes, and his research into never-before-seen documents makes this a genuinely groundbreaking book full of surprises.

Free Press Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D.G. Kelley

The late American jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk has been so heavily mythologized that it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. But Robin D. G. Kelley’s biography is an essential book for jazz fans looking to understand the man behind the myths. Monk’s family provided Kelley with full access to their archives, resulting in chapter after chapter of fascinating details, from his birth in small-town North Carolina to his death across the Hudson from Manhattan.

University of Chicago Press Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest

There are dozens of books about America’s most celebrated architect, but Secrest’s 1998 biography is still the most fun to read. For one, she doesn’t shy away from the fact that Wright could be an absolute monster, even to his own friends and family. Secondly, her research into more than 100,000 letters, as well as interviews with nearly every surviving person who knew Wright, makes this book a one-of-a-kind look at how Wright’s personal life influenced his architecture.

Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad

Ralph Ellison’s landmark novel, Invisible Man , is about a Black man who faced systemic racism in the Deep South during his youth, then migrated to New York, only to find oppression of a slightly different kind. What makes Arnold Rampersand’s honest and insightful biography of Ellison so compelling is how he connects the dots between Invisible Man and Ellison’s own journey from small-town Oklahoma to New York’s literary scene during the Harlem Renaissance.

Oscar Wilde: A Life, by Matthew Sturgis

Now remembered for his 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde was one of the most fascinating men of the fin-de-siècle thanks to his poems, plays, and some of the earliest reported “celebrity trials.” Sturgis’s scintillating biography is the most encyclopedic chronicle of Wilde’s life to date, thanks to new research into his personal notebooks and a full transcript of his libel trial.

Beacon Press A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, by Angela Jackson

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1950, but because she spent most of her life in Chicago instead of New York, she hasn’t been studied or celebrated as often as her peers in the Harlem Renaissance. Luckily, Angela Jackson’s biography is full of new details about Brooks’s personal life, and how it influenced her poetry across five decades.

Atria Books Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, by Dana Stevens

Was Buster Keaton the most influential filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century? Dana Stevens makes a compelling case in this dazzling mix of biography, essays, and cultural history. Much like Keaton’s filmography, Stevens playfully jumps from genre to genre in an endlessly entertaining way, while illuminating how Keaton’s influence on film and television continues to this day.

Algonquin Books Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation, by Dean Jobb

Dean Jobb is a master of narrative nonfiction on par with Erik Larsen, author of The Devil in the White City . Jobb’s biography of Leo Koretz, the Bernie Madoff of the Jazz Age, is among the few great biographies that read like a thriller. Set in Chicago during the 1880s through the 1920s, it’s also filled with sumptuous period details, from lakeside mansions to streets choked with Model Ts.

Vintage Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee’s biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton could easily have made this list. But her book about a less famous person—Penelope Fitzgerald, the English novelist who wrote The Bookshop, The Blue Flower , and The Beginning of Spring —might be her best yet. At just over 500 pages, it’s considerably shorter than those other biographies, partially because Fitzgerald’s life wasn’t nearly as well documented. But Lee’s conciseness is exactly what makes this book a more enjoyable read, along with the thrilling feeling that she’s uncovering a new story literary historians haven’t already explored.

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

Many biographers have written about Sylvia Plath, often drawing parallels between her poetry and her death by suicide at the age of thirty. But in this startling book, Plath isn’t wholly defined by her tragedy, and Heather Clark’s craftsmanship as a writer makes it a joy to read. It’s also the most comprehensive account of Plath’s final year yet put to paper, with new information that will change the way you think of her life, poetry, and death.

Pontius Pilate, by Ann Wroe

Compared to most biography subjects, there isn’t much surviving documentation about the life of Pontius Pilate, the Judaean governor who ordered the execution of the historical Jesus in the first century AD. But Ann Wroe leans into all that uncertainty in her groundbreaking book, making for a fascinating mix of research and informed speculation that often feels like reading a really good historical novel.

Brand: History Book Club Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana

In the early nineteenth century, Simón Bolívar led six modern countries—Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela—to independence from the Spanish Empire. In this rousing work of biography and geopolitical history, Marie Arana deftly chronicles his epic life with propulsive prose, including a killer first sentence: “They heard him before they saw him: the sound of hooves striking the earth, steady as a heartbeat, urgent as a revolution.”

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, by Yunte Huang

Ever read a biography of a fictional character? In the 1930s and 1940s, Charlie Chan came to popularity as a Chinese American police detective in Earl Derr Biggers’s mystery novels and their big-screen adaptations. In writing this book, Yunte Huang became something of a detective himself to track down the real-life inspiration for the character, a Hawaiian cop named Chang Apana born shortly after the Civil War. The result is an astute blend between biography and cultural criticism as Huang analyzes how Chan served as a crucial counterpoint to stereotypical Chinese villains in early Hollywood.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most fascinating women of the twentieth century—an openly bisexual poet, playwright, and feminist icon who helped make Greenwich Village a cultural bohemia in the 1920s. With a knack for torrid details and creative insights, Nancy Milford successfully captures what made Millay so irresistible—right down to her voice, “an instrument of seduction” that captivated men and women alike.

Simon & Schuster Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Few people have the luxury of choosing their own biographers, but that’s exactly what the late co-founder of Apple did when he tapped Walter Isaacson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Adapted for the big screen by Aaron Sorkin in 2015, Steve Jobs is full of plot twists and suspense thanks to a mind-blowing amount of research on the part of Isaacson, who interviewed Jobs more than forty times and spoke with just about everyone who’d ever come into contact with him.

Brand: Random House Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff

The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Without my wife, I wouldn’t have written a single novel.” And while Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra could also easily make this list, her telling of Véra Nabokova’s life in Russia, Europe, and the United States is revolutionary for finally bringing Véra out of her husband’s shadow. It’s also one of the most romantic biographies you’ll ever read, with some truly unforgettable images, like Vera’s habit of carrying a handgun to protect Vladimir on butterfly-hunting excursions.

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

We know what you’re thinking. Who needs another book about Shakespeare?! But Greenblatt’s masterful biography is like traveling back in time to see firsthand how a small-town Englishman became the greatest writer of all time. Like Wroe’s biography of Pontius Pilate, there’s plenty of speculation here, as there are very few surviving records of Shakespeare’s daily life, but Greenblatt’s best trick is the way he pulls details from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets to construct a compelling narrative.

Crown Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

When Kiese Laymon calls a book a “literary miracle,” you pay attention. James Baldwin’s legacy has enjoyed something of a revival over the last few years thanks to films like I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk , as well as books like Glaude’s new biography. It’s genuinely a bit of a miracle how he manages to combine the story of Baldwin’s life with interpretations of Baldwin’s work—as well as Glaude’s own story of discovering, resisting, and rediscovering Baldwin’s books throughout his life.

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The 30 best biographies to add to your reading list

Some stories involve incredible, larger-than-life characters. these are the best biographies ever written..

Writing a great biography is no easy task. The author is charged with capturing some of the most iconic and influential people on the planet, folks that often have larger than life personas. To capture that in words is a genuine challenge that the best biographers relish.

The very best biographies don't just hold a mirror up to these remarkable characters. Instead, they show us a different side of them, or just how a certain approach of philosophy fueled their game-changing ways. Biographies inform, for certain, but they entertain and inspire to no end as well.

Below, we gathered a comprehensive list of the best biographies ever written. Some of these biographies were selected because of the subject matter and others were chosen because of the biographer. It’s often said that reading biographies is the best way to gain new knowledge, so we suggest you start with these great selections. If you love history, you’ll certainly want to include these best history books to your home library.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

The former parks commissioner of New York, Robert Moses was a man who got power, loved power, and was transformed by power. This 1,000-plus page biography could be the definitive study of power and legacy. It’s a great learning tool of mostly what not to be and who not to become.

Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi

Totto-Chan is a special figure in modern Japanese culture and is on the same celebrity status level as Oprah is to us here in the United States. The book describes the childhood in pre-World War II Japan of a misunderstood girl who suffered from attention disorders and excessive energy and who later was mentored by a very special school principal who truly understood her. The book has sold more than 5 million copies in Japan.

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Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith

The man who was responsible for winning World War II, twice prevented the use of nuclear weapons, and attempted to keep our soldiers out of Vietnam, all while making it look easy, is none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. This biography is a history lesson as well as an opportunity to get inside the mind of a brilliant man.

Edison: A Biography by Matthew Josephson

This particular biography dates back more than 50 years, which means it was written without the worry of being politically correct or controversial, but instead focused on providing a conclusive picture of the man. Modern enough to be historically accurate, this biography details a lot of the little-known facts about Mr. Edison in addition to his accomplishments, as well as his failures.

Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office by Zach O’Malley Greenburg

Empire State of Mind is both an unofficial biography of the rap mogul Jay-Z as well as a business book. It shows how the rapper hustled his way to the top of the music industry to become one of the most powerful and influential people in music.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer

The story of the professional football player who gave up a $3 million NFL contract to join the Army Rangers after 9/11, only to die under suspicious circumstances in the hills of Afghanistan, is a book about everything that is right and wrong with the U.S. military. Pat Tillman wasn’t perfect, but he was a man we could all learn something from. His incredible story is one of bravery and selflessness -- and will forever be tied to the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Titan: The Life of John. D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow has written some of the best biographies of our time. In this 832-page biography of John. D. Rockefeller, he shares the main lessons you would take away from someone like Rockefeller, a strangely stoic, incredibly resilient, and -- despite his reputation as a robber baron -- humble and compassionate man. Most successful people get worse as they age, but Rockefeller instead became more open-minded and more generous. The biography also details his wrongdoings and permits you the opportunity to make your own judgment on Rockefeller’s character.

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Another example of Chernow’s brilliance in biographical writing is given in his biography of George Washington. Today, we study Washington not only for his against-the-odds military victory over a superior British Army but also for his strategic vision, which is partially responsible for many of the most enduring American institutions and practices. It’s another long read of the type Chernow is famous for, but it's also a page-turner. Although it’s intimidating to look at, the reading time goes by quickly.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson has written some of the greatest biographies in contemporary literature. Our modern-day genius, Steve Jobs, will forever be remembered as the mastermind who brought us Apple. This biography shows Jobs at his best, which includes illustrations of his determination and creativity but also details the worst of him, including his tyrannical and vicious ways of running a business (and his family). From this book, you will learn to appreciate the man for the genius that he was, but it will most likely not inspire you to follow in his path.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

Most depictions show the Mongols as bloodthirsty pillagers, but in this biography, we are also shown how they introduced many progressive advances to their conquered nations. You will learn how Genghis Khan abolished torture, permitted universal religious freedom, and destroyed existing feudal systems.

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank

his five-volume retelling of the life and times of Russian literary giant Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered the best biography available on the subject. The mammoth exploration sheds light on Dostoevsky's works, ideology, and historical context. For those who are not specifically interested in the famous author, the also book paints a picture of 19th-century Russia.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man by Martin Kemp

Kemp’s account of da Vinci’s life and work is considered the go-to biography of the famous Renaissance figure. This incredible book sheds light on one of the most creative figures who ever lived, guiding readers through a fully integrated account of his scientific, artistic, and technological works, as well as the life events that helped form the man that made them.

Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury by Leslie-Ann Jones

After the massive success of the movie recently released about rock legend Freddie Mercury and his band, Queen, you might be interested in learning more about the frontman. This biography draws from hundreds of interviews with key figures in his life to create a revealing glimpse into Mercury’s life.

Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes by Donald Barlett

This is an epic biography of an epic man. It shows the heights of his incredible success as well as the depths of his inner struggles. Readers learn about the tough but eccentric figure in a story that details his incredible success as an aviator, film producer, and more.

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

The brilliant mathematician, cytologist, and computer pioneer Alan Turing is beautifully depicted in this biography. It covers his heroic code-breaking efforts during World War II , his computer designs and contributions to mathematical biology in the years following, and the vicious persecution that befell him in the 1950s when homosexual acts were still a crime and punishable by law.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Of course, we couldn’t highlight Ron Chernow’s best works without including his biography on Alexander Hamilton , which is not only the inspiration for a hit Broadway musical but also a work of creative genius itself. Another more than 800-page book (an ongoing theme for Chernow biographies), this book 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 affair with Maria Reynolds. If you’ve seen the musical, this book will help answer a lot of those burning questions that you may have.

Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

The focal point of this biography is not the suffering that was endured by Frida Kahlo, but instead, her artistic brilliance and her immense resolve to leave her mark on the world. Herrera’s 1983 biography of one of the most recognizable names in modern art has since become the definitive account of her life.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Recommended reading for any adventurer or explorer -- the story of Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, who hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the Denali wilderness in April 1992 only to have his remains discovered in his shelter five months later -- Into the Wild retraces his steps along the trek, attempting to discover what the young man was looking for on his journey. Krakauer delivers one of the best biography books in recent memory.

Prince: A Private View by Afshin Shahidi

Compiled after the superstar’s untimely death in 2016, this intimate snapshot into the life of Prince is largely visual. The author served as the musician’s private photographer from the early 2000s until his passing. You already know the expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and in this case, they are worth a lot more.

Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

The “Kennedy Curse” didn’t bring forth an assassination or a mysterious plane crash for Rosemary Kennedy, although her fate might have been the worst of them all. As if her 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. Penned by Kennedy scholar Kate Larson, the full truth of her post-lobotomy life is finally revealed.

Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is likely the most divisive U.S. president of modern times. The comprehensive biography of Trump is reported by a team of award-winning Washington Post journalists and co-authored by investigative political reporter Michael Kranish and senior editor Marc Fisher. The book gives the reader an insight into Trump, from his upbringing in Queens to his turbulent careers in real estate and entertainment to his astonishing rise as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang

Most are familiar with the revolutionary Mao Zedong. This carefully curated biography by Jung Chang digs deeper into the life of the "Red Emperor." You won't find these interviews and stories about the world leader in history books alone. This extensive account of the man known simply as Mao begins with a horrific statistic: He was responsible for the deaths of more than 70 million people during his regime.

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell 

Biographies often give us the stories of people we know and love, but they can also reveal new stories about people that may have been lost to history. In her bestseller, Sonia Purnell tells the story of Virginia Hall, a prolific and heroic spy from World War II who took down the Axis Powers on one leg. 

Black Boy by Richard Wright

A standard biography is usually given by a historian after years and years of research and writing, but sometimes it’s better to go straight to the source. In his memoir, Richard Wright details his life as he recalls it as a black American in the 20th century. Black Boy is a harsh, painful, beautiful, and revealing read about race in the United States -- and about a towering figure of literature. 

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Isaacson represents the gold standard for contemporary biographers, and his tome on Leonardo da Vinci was a bestseller for a reason. Isaacson is able to show a detailed, intimate portrait of the most famous painter of all time from centuries away.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Want to know how the biggest sports company of all time came to be? Hear it from the man himself. Phil Knight’s book takes you through how his little sneaker company in Oregon became the worldwide leader in sportswear. 

The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

One of the most famous biographies ever, The Autobiography of Malcolm X remains a classic and an important read. Malcolm X’s politics, though controversial at the time and today, is a valuable and provocative perspective that will make you reconsider how you think about America and the American Dream. 

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Long before becoming Jon Stewart’s successor on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah lived many, many lifetimes. Born to apartheid South Africa, Noah’s story is one of perseverance and triumph, and one that he manages to make funny by some sort of magic trick. 

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

Of course, today, you know Issa Rae as the writer, actor, and star of HBO’s Insecure, but before her hit show came her webseries and book of the same name, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Rae’s memoir wrestles with the idea of being an introvert in a world that considers Black people inherently cool.

Robin by Davie Itzkoff

One of the most beloved comedians and actors of all time, Robin Williams' passing in 2014 shook fans across generations. In his book, New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff covers the life, work, and emotions of one of the most complicated and misunderstood comedians ever. Oh captain, my captain...

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Mark Stock is a writer from Portland, Oregon. He fell into wine during the Recession and has been fixated on the stuff since. He spent years making, selling, and sipping Pinot Noir in the Dundee Hills before a full return to his journalistic roots in 2016. He's helplessly tied to European soccer, casting for trout, and grunge rock. In addition to The Manual, he writes for SevenFifty Daily , Sip Northwest , The Somm Journal , The Drake , Willamette Week , Travel Oregon , and more. He has a website and occasionally even updates it: markastock.com .

Send all editorial inquiries  HERE .

We're living in crazy times, especially since this whole pandemic mess started a few long years ago. With so much instability out there, it's easy to feel, well, a little uneasy. That's why it's not a bad idea to consider a few self-defense weapons to have at your disposal, just in case. You never know really know what lies ahead but you can be prepared if things do go very, very wrong.

There are many options out there, but the best of the bunch are packable, discreet, effective, and non-lethal (because you don't necessarily have to put somebody six feet under to "take them out"). Now, it's one thing to have one of these on your person and quite another to use it safely and properly. So make sure you know what you're dealing with beforehand and maybe even set up some training time with your new tool. Whether you're planing to get (intentionally) lost in the backcountry or just milling about in the city, it's not a bad idea to consider getting one of these. Here are the best self-defense weapons for protecting yourself in 2023.

We live among walking legends, from LeBron James and Steven Spielberg to Paul McCartney and Meryl Streep. In the category of writing, Stephen King is among the very best. The 76-year-old from Maine has written countless classics, with a signature ability to both instill fear and keep readers helplessly attached to the plot.

Dubbed the "king of horror," King is a living icon, still turning out quality material. Some of the scariest concepts that continue to creep you out — the clowns, the twins in the hallway, the buried pets — are the handy work of King. It's no wonder many consider him to be one of the greatest writers of all time.

Anytime you're wondering what's on TV, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new shows and movies at your disposal. Every weekend brings new debuts across a wide array of streaming services, and it can be hard to keep track of what's worth checking out and what you can skip. Thankfully, we've got you covered with recommendations for movies and TV shows across a wide array of different streaming services. This is what to watch this weekend.

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The best biographies to read in 2023

• Nik Rawlinson

Discover what inspired some of history’s most familiar names with these comprehensive biographies

The best biographies can be inspirational, can provide important life lessons – and can warn us off a dangerous path. They’re also a great way to learn more about important figures in history, politics, business and entertainment. That’s because the best biographies not only reveal what a person did with their life, but what effect it had and, perhaps most importantly, what inspired them to act as they did.

Where both a biography and an autobiography exist, you might be tempted to plump for the latter, assuming you’d get a more accurate and in-depth telling of the subject’s life story. While that may be true, it isn’t always the case. It’s human nature to be vain, and who could blame a celebrity or politician if they covered up their embarrassments and failures when committing their lives to paper? A biographer, so long as they have the proof to back up their claims, may have less incentive to spare their subject’s blushes, and thus produce a more honest account – warts and all.

That said, we’ve steered clear of the sensational in selecting the best biographies for you. Rather, we’ve focused on authoritative accounts of notable names, in each case written some time after their death, when a measured, sober assessment of their actions and impact can be given.

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Best biographies: At a glance

• Best literary biography: Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley | £20
• Best showbiz biography: Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood | £6.78
• Best political biography: Hitler by Ian Kershaw | £14

How to choose the best biography for you

There are so many biographies to choose from that it can be difficult knowing which to choose. This is especially true when there are several competing titles focused on the same subject. Try asking yourself these questions.

Is the author qualified?

Wikipedia contains potted biographies of every notable figure you could ever want to read about. So, if you’re going to spend several hours with a novel-sized profile it must go beyond the basics – and you want to be sure that the author knows what they’re talking about.

That doesn’t mean they need to have been personally acquainted with the subject, as Jasper Rees was with Victoria Wood. Ian Kershaw never met Adolf Hitler (he was, after all, just two years old when Hitler killed himself), but he published his first works on the subject in the late 1980s, has advised on BBC documentaries about the Second World War, and is an acknowledged expert on the Nazi era. It’s no surprise, then, that his biography of the dictator is extensive, comprehensive and acclaimed.

Is there anything new to say?

What inspires someone to write a biography – particularly of someone whose life has already been documented? Sometimes it can be the discovery of new facts, perhaps through the uncovering of previously lost material or the release of papers that had been suppressed on the grounds of national security. But equally, it may be because times have changed so much that the context of previous biographies is no longer relevant. Attitudes, in particular, evolve with time, and what might have been considered appropriate behaviour in the 1950s would today seem discriminatory or shocking. So, an up-to-date biography that places the subject’s actions and motivations within a modern context can make it a worthwhile read, even if you’ve read an earlier work already.

Does it look beyond the subject?

The most comprehensive biographies place their subject in context – and show how that context affected their outlook and actions or is reflected in their work. Lucy Worsley’s new biography of Agatha Christie is a case in point, referencing Christie’s works to show how real life influenced her fiction. Mathew Parker’s Goldeneye does the same for Bond author Ian Fleming – and in doing so, both books enlarge considerably on the biography’s core subject.

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1. Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees: Best showbiz biography

Price: £6.78 | Buy now from Amazon

It’s hardly surprising Victoria Wood never got around to writing her own autobiography. Originator of countless sketches, songs, comedy series, films, plays, documentaries and a sitcom, she kept pushing back the mammoth job of chronicling her life until it was too late. Wood’s death in 2016 came as a surprise to many, with the entertainer taking her final bow in private at the end of a battle with cancer she had fought away from the public eye.

In the wake of her death, her estate approached journalist Jasper Rees, who had interviewed her on many occasions, with the idea of writing the story that Wood had not got around to writing herself. With their backing, Rees’ own encounters with Wood, and the comic’s tape-recorded notes to go on, the result is a chunky, in-depth, authoritative account of her life. It seems unlikely that Wood could have written it more accurately – nor more fully – herself.

Looking back, it’s easy to forget that Wood wasn’t a constant feature on British TV screens, that whole years went by when her focus would be on writing or performing on stage, or even that her career had a surprisingly slow start after a lonely childhood in which television was a constant companion. This book reminds us of those facts – and that Wood wasn’t just a talented performer, but a hard worker, too, who put in the hours required to deliver the results.

Let’s Do It, which takes its title from a lyric in one of Wood’s best-known songs, The Ballad of Barry & Freda, is a timely reminder that there are two sides to every famous character: one public and one private. It introduces us to the person behind the personality, and shows how the character behind the characters for which she is best remembered came to be.

Key specs – Length: 592 pages; Publisher: Trapeze; ISBN: 978-1409184119

Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

2. the chief: the life of lord northcliffe, britain’s greatest press baron by andrew roberts: best business biography.

Lord Northcliffe wasn’t afraid of taking risks – many of which paid off handsomely. He founded a small paper called Answers to Correspondents, branched out into comics, and bought a handful of newspapers. Then he founded the Daily Mail, and applied what he’d learned in running his smaller papers on a far grander scale. The world of publishing – in Britain and beyond – was never the same again. The Daily Mail was a huge success, which led to the founding of the Daily Mirror, primarily for women, and his acquisition of the Observer, Times and Sunday Times.

By then, Northcliffe controlled almost half of Britain’s daily newspaper circulation. Nobody before him had ever enjoyed such reach – or such influence over the British public – as he did through his titles. This gave him sufficient political clout to sway the direction of government in such fundamental areas as the establishment of the Irish Free State and conscription in the run-up to the First World War. He was appointed to head up Britain’s propaganda operation during the conflict, and in this position he became a target for assassination, with a German warship shelling his home in Broadstairs. Beyond publishing, he was ahead of many contemporaries in understanding the potential of aviation as a force for good, as a result of which he funded several highly valuable prizes for pioneers in the field.

He achieved much in his 57 years, as evidenced by this biography, but suffered both physical and mental ill health towards the end. The empire that he built may have fragmented since his passing, with the Daily Mirror, Observer, Times and Sunday Times having left the group that he founded, but his influence can still be felt. For anyone who wants to understand how and why titles like the Daily Mail became so successful, The Chief is an essential read.

Key specs – Length: 556 pages; Publisher: Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 978-1398508712

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe Britain's Greatest Press Baron

3. goldeneye by matthew parker: best biography for cinema fans.

The name Goldeneye is synonymous with James Bond. It was the title of both a film and a video game, a fictional super weapon, a real-life Second World War plan devised by author Ian Fleming, and the name of the Jamaican estate where he wrote one Bond book every year between 1952 and his death in 1964. The Bond film makers acknowledged this in 2021’s No Time To Die, making that estate the home to which James Bond retired, just as his creator had done at the end of the war, 75 years earlier.

Fleming had often talked of his plan to write the spy novel to end all spy novels once the conflict was over, and it’s at Goldeneye that he fulfilled that ambition. Unsurprisingly, many of his experiences there found their way into his prose and the subsequent films, making this biography as much a history of Bond itself as it is a focused retelling of Fleming’s life in Jamaica. It’s here, we learn, that Fleming first drinks a Vesper at a neighbour’s house. Vesper later became a character in Casino Royale and, in the story, Bond devises a drink to fit the name. Fleming frequently ate Ackee fish while in residence; the phonetically identical Aki was an important character in You Only Live Twice.

Parker finds more subtle references, too, observing that anyone who kills a bird or owl in any of the Bond stories suffers the spy’s wrath. This could easily be overlooked, but it’s notable, and logical: Fleming had a love of birds, and Bond himself was named after the ornithologist James Bond, whose book was on Fleming’s shelves at Goldeneye.

So this is as much the biography of a famous fictional character as it is of an author, and of the house that he occupied for several weeks every year. So much of Fleming’s life at Goldeneye influenced his work that this is an essential read for any Bond fan – even if you’ve already read widely on the subject and consider yourself an aficionado. Parker’s approach is unusual, but hugely successful, and the result is an authoritative, wide-ranging biography about one of this country’s best-known authors, his central character, an iconic location and a country in the run-up to – and immediately following – its independence from Britain.

Key specs – Length: 416 pages; Publisher: Windmill Books; ISBN: 978-0099591740

Goldeneye: Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

4. hitler by ian kershaw: best political biography.

The latter portion of Adolf Hitler’s life, from his coming to power in 1933 to his suicide in 1945, is minutely documented, and known to a greater or lesser degree by anyone who has passed through secondary education. But what of his earlier years? How did this overlooked art student become one of the most powerful and destructive humans ever to have existed? What were his influences? What was he like?

Kershaw has the answers. This door stopper, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, is an abridged compilation of two earlier works: Hitler 1889 – 1936: Hubris, and Hitler 1936 – 1946: Nemesis. Yet, abridged though it may be, it remains extraordinarily detailed, and the research shines through. Kershaw spends no time warming his engines: Hitler is born by page three, to a social-climbing father who had changed the family name to something less rustic than it had been. As Kershaw points out, “Adolf can be believed when he said that nothing his father had done pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely rustic name of Schicklgruber. ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ would have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero.”

There’s no skimping on context, either, with each chapter given space to explore the political, economic and social influences on Hitler’s development and eventual emergence as leader. Kershaw pinpoints 1924 as the year that “can be seen as the time when, like a phoenix arising from the ashes, Hitler could begin his emergence from the ruins of the broken and fragmented volkisch movement to become eventually the absolute leader with total mastery over a reformed, organisationally far stronger, and internally more cohesive Nazi Party”. For much of 1924, Hitler was in jail, working on Mein Kampf and, by the point of his release, the movement to which he had attached himself had been marginalised. Few could have believed that it – and he – would rise again and take over first Germany, then much of Europe. Here, you’ll find out how it happened.

If you’re looking for an authoritative, in-depth biography of one of the most significant figures in modern world history, this is it. Don’t be put off by its length: it’s highly readable, and also available as an audiobook which, although it runs to 44 hours, can be sped up to trim the overall running time.

Key specs – Length: 1,072 pages; Publisher: Penguin; ISBN: 978-0141035888

5. Stalin’s Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow by Deyan Sudjic: Best historical biography

Boris Iofan died in 1976, but his influence can still be felt today – in particular, through the architectural influences evident in many mid-century buildings across Eastern Europe. Born in Odessa in 1891, he trained in architecture and, upon returning to Russia after time spent in Western Europe, gained notoriety for designing the House on the Embankment, a monumental block-wide building containing more than 500 flats, plus the shops and other facilities required to service them.

“Iofan’s early success was based on a sought-after combination of characteristics: he was a member of the Communist Party who was also an accomplished architect capable of winning international attention,” writes biographer Deyan Sudjic. “He occupied a unique position as a bridge between the pre-revolutionary academicians… and the constructivist radicals whom the party saw as bringing much-needed international attention and prestige but never entirely trusted. His biggest role was to give the party leadership a sense of what Soviet architecture could be – not in a theoretical sense or as a drawing, which they would be unlikely to understand, but as a range of built options that they could actually see.”

Having established himself, much of the rest of his life was spent working on his designs for the Palace of the Soviets, which became grander and less practical with every iteration. This wasn’t entirely Iofan’s fault. He had become a favourite of the party elite, and of Stalin himself, who added to the size and ambition of the intended building over the years. Eventually, the statue of Lenin that was destined to stand atop its central tower would have been over 300ft tall, and would have had an outstretched index finger 14ft long. There was a risk that this would freeze in the winter, and the icicles that dropped from it would have been a significant danger to those going into and out of the building below it.

Although construction work began, the Palace of the Soviets was never completed. Many of Iofan’s other buildings remain, though, and his pavilions for the World Expos in Paris and New York are well documented – in this book as well as elsewhere. Lavishly illustrated, it recounts Iofan’s life and examines his work in various stages, from rough outline, through technical drawing, to photographs of completed buildings – where they exist.

Key specs – Length: 320 pages; Publisher: Thames and Hudson; ISBN: 978-0500343555

Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow

6. agatha christie: a very elusive woman by lucy worsley: best literary biography.

Agatha Christie died in 1976 but, with more than 70 novels and 150 short stories to her name, she remains one of the best-selling authors of all time. A new biography from historian Lucy Worsley is therefore undoubtedly of interest. It’s comprehensive and highly readable – and opinionated – with short chapters that make it easy to dip into and out of on a break.

Worsley resists the temptation to skip straight to the books. Poirot doesn’t appear until chapter 11 with publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which Christie wrote while working in a Torquay hospital. Today, Poirot is so well known, not only from the books but from depictions in film and television, that it’s easy to overlook how groundbreaking the character was upon his arrival.

As Worsley explains, “by choosing to make Hercule Poirot a foreigner, and a refugee as well, Agatha created the perfect detective for an age when everyone was growing surfeited with soldiers and action heroes. He’s so physically unimpressive that no-one expects Poirot to steal the show. Rather like a stereotypical woman, Poirot cannot rely upon brawn to solve problems, for he has none. He has to use brains instead… There’s even a joke in his name. Hercules, of course, is a muscular classical hero, but Hercule Poirot has a name like himself: diminutive, fussy, camp, and Agatha would show Poirot working in a different way to [Sherlock] Holmes.” Indeed, where Holmes rolls around on the floor picking up cigar ash in his first published case, Poirot, explains Worsley, does not stoop to gather clues: he needs only his little grey cells. Worsley’s approach is thorough and opinionated, and has resulted not only in a biography of Christie herself, but also her greatest creations, which will appeal all the more to the author’s fans.

As with Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye, there’s great insight here into what influenced Christie’s work, and Worsley frequently draws parallels between real life events and episodes, characters or locations in her novels. As a result of her experiences as a medical volunteer during the First World War, for example, during which a rigid hierarchy persisted and the medics behaved shockingly, doctors became the most common culprit in her books; the names of real people found their way into her fiction; and on one occasion Christie assembled what today might be called a focus group to underpin a particular plot point.

Worsley is refreshingly opinionated and, where events in the author’s life take centre stage, doesn’t merely re-state the facts, but investigates Christie’s motivations to draw her own conclusions. This is particularly the case in the chapters examining Christie’s disappearance in 1926, which many previous biographers have portrayed as an attempt to frame her husband for murder. Worsley’s own investigation leads to alternative conclusions, which seem all the more plausible today, when society has a better understanding of – and is more sympathetic towards – the effects of psychological distress.

Key specs – Length: 432 pages; Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton; ISBN: 978-1529303889

Buy now from Waterstones

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ashley roby

Biographies & memoirs.

I'm Ashley Roby, a 21-year-old from India who finds solace in fictional characters' nuances and intricate details. I'm a science student pursuing a degree in Chemistry, and in the time that I make for myself, I read and read and read.

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Rachel Deeming

It's not easy to sum up who I am, enough to make me interesting anyway, so what's essential to know? I love to read. I love to review. I love to write and blog at scuffedgranny.com. Short stories and poems are my main writing successes, winning runner-up plaudits on Reedsy Prompts and Vocal.media.

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The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2022

Featuring buster keaton, jean rhys, bernardine evaristo, kate beaton, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Memoir and Biography .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright) 17 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span … it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us … O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust …

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase … But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.”

–Colum McCann ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (Milkweed)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Assured and affecting … A powerful and bracing memoir … This is a book that will make you see the world differently: it asks you to reconsider the animals and insects we often view as pests – the rat, for example, and the moth. It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are.”

–Lynn Enright ( The Irish Times )

3. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton’s] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant … Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment …

There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white … And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.”

–Rachel Cooke ( The Guardian )

4. Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

14 Rave • 3 Positive

“… quietly wrenching … To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity … This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion—all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life … Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

5.  Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove)

13 Rave • 4 Positive

“Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling … With ribald humour and admirable candour, Evaristo takes us on a tour of her sexual history … Characterized by the resilience of its author, it is replete with stories about the communities and connections Evaristo has cultivated over forty years … Invigoratingly disruptive as an artist, Evaristo is a bridge-builder as a human being.”

–Emily Bernard ( The Times Literary Supplement )

1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Rundell is right that Donne…must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called ‘felt thought’, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract … It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before … Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on … This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an ‘infinity merchant’ … To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness”

–Laura Feigel ( The Guardian )

2. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (Harper)

12 Rave • 3 Positive

“Compelling … We know about Auschwitz. We know what happened there. But Freedland, with his strong, clear prose and vivid details, makes us feel it, and the first half of this book is not an easy read. The chillingly efficient mass murder of thousands of people is harrowing enough, but Freedland tells us stories of individual evils as well that are almost harder to take … His matter-of-fact tone makes it bearable for us to continue to read … The Escape Artist is riveting history, eloquently written and scrupulously researched. Rosenberg’s brilliance, courage and fortitude are nothing short of amazing.”

–Laurie Hertzel ( The Star Tribune )

3. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (W. W. Norton & Company)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan

“…illuminating and meticulously researched … paints a deft portrait of a flawed, complex, yet endlessly fascinating woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken … Following dismal reviews of her fourth novel, Rhys drifted into obscurity. Ms. Seymour’s book could have lost momentum here. Instead, it compellingly charts turbulent, drink-fueled years of wild moods and reckless acts before building to a cathartic climax with Rhys’s rescue, renewed lease on life and late-career triumph … is at its most powerful when Ms. Seymour, clear-eyed but also with empathy, elaborates on Rhys’s woes …

Ms. Seymour is less convincing with her bold claim that Rhys was ‘perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.’ However, she does expertly demonstrate that Rhys led a challenging yet remarkable life and that her slim but substantial novels about beleaguered women were ahead of their time … This insightful biography brilliantly shows how her many battles were lost and won.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Wall Street Journal )

4. The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Grisly yet inspiring … Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable. The suspense of her narrative comes not from any interpersonal drama but from the formidable challenges posed by the physical world … The Facemaker is mostly a story of medical progress and extraordinary achievement, but as Gillies himself well knew—grappling daily with the unbearable suffering that people willingly inflicted on one another—failure was never far behind.”

5. Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis (Knopf)

8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Keaton fans have often complained that nearly all biographies of him suffer from a questionable slant or a cursory treatment of key events. With Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life —at more than 800 pages dense with research and facts—Mr. Curtis rectifies that situation, and how. He digs deep into Keaton’s process and shows how something like the brilliant two-reeler Cops went from a storyline conceived from necessity—construction on the movie lot encouraged shooting outdoors—to a masterpiece … This will doubtless be the primary reference on Keaton’s life for a long time to come … the worse Keaton’s life gets, the more engrossing Mr. Curtis’s book becomes.”

–Farran Smith Nehme ( The Wall Street Journal )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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We all love a good story.

Stories transport us to other times and places, they teach important lessons, they inspire us and show us what we have in common.

And while fiction is wonderful and valuable, stories are all the more compelling if they’re true.

It’s impossible to compile a definitive list of best biographies and autobiographies—you could probably spend a lifetime reading well-written tales of inspiring people—but here are a few we think are worth your time.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

The story of a German pastor and anti-Nazi who got involved with a plot to kill Hitler is interesting in and of itself, but Eric Metaxas broadens the story, showing the history of Hitler’s rise to power and weaving in Bonhoeffer’s writing and thoughts. The result is a fascinating narrative that is both informative and, in ways, devotional. While Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and The Cost of Discipleship have become classics, the thoughts behind them are even more rich in the context of the what the writer himself had to sacrifice. More than just a look into the mind of one of the great theologians of the 20th century, Bonhoeffer is a story of one man’s dedication to following Christ’s leading amid the changing morals of pre-WWII Germany.

Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis by George Sayer

With its insertions of personal conversations with the author and descriptions of his life and times from real memories, Jack: A Life may be the best “gateway biography” for any Lewis enthusiast. This is the most personal of Lewis’ biographies, with an intimate feel that cannot be emulated by Lewis’ other biographers who did not know him as a friend. Ask yourself who you would choose to write your own biography: a friend who knew you behind closed doors, or a scholar 30 years on, full of Freudian ideas of the subconscious, and working only on your books, correspondence, and others’ recollections and impressions of you. Granted, other biographies of Lewis are valuable because they are distant from him, but Sayer’s friendship with Lewis does not make him shy away from the controversial issues surrounding the author’s life. He faces them head on and judges fairly.

The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day

The Long Loneliness , Dorothy Day’s story of conversion and dedication to the Catholic Worker’s Movement, is a challenge to all Christians to love as Christ loved. Although her early adult life was spent as an iconoclast and a socialist, including stints in jail and an abortion, she began feeling the tug of the Holy Spirit. Upon the birth of her first child, Day joined the Catholic Church and eventually met Peter Maurin, with whom she would found the Catholic Worker Movement. Day’s approach to the faith was at once orthodox and unconventional, deeply influenced by the teachings of Christ about the poor and oppressed—those on the fringes of society Day felt the Church had become complacent toward. In spite of Day’s controversial character, The Long Loneliness is a must-read “spiritual autobiography” with broad appeal across religious denominations, political affiliations and social views.

John Adams by David McCullough

Along with being a fascinating story of one of our country’s founding fathers, John Adams is one of the few biographies on anyone to cross into the realm of beautiful writing and nearly perfect prose. It is not only a well-researched, well-paced biography, it is fine literature and can be as compelling and moving as any fiction. McCullough’s portraits of 18th century Philadelphia, London, Paris, New York and Washington and the personalities inhabiting those cities are just that, masterful portraits painted with a careful “brush.” What sets McCullough apart from other biographers is his impeccable choice of detail. He knows just when to describe a meal, a suit of clothes, or a weather forecast for a particular day. McCullough is to biography what Tolkien is to high fantasy—a towering genius unmatched by most of his imitators.

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

Although it’s an autobiography, Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place is really the story of a whole family and their dedication to serving Christ in Holland during WWII. The Ten Booms, a humble and simple family, risked their lives to hide Jews in their home. As a critical component of the Dutch resistance movement, the family is forced to make difficult and often morally ambiguous choices that ultimately land them in Dutch and German concentration camps. The Hiding Place is not an easy read—it plumbs the depths of despair, hopelessness and doubt. Yet there’s intense victory in the darkness, owing to a hidden Bible and the unwavering desire of Corrie and her sister to share Christ’s love with the other prisoners and their Nazi captors. This is a biography that resonates long after the final page is turned.

12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

Even if you’ve already seen Steve Mcqueen’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, this autobiography is well worth reading. The story of a free black man in the North who’s kidnapped and sold into slavery, 12 Years a Slave is a rare, heartbreaking look into what life was like for slaves in the South. Northup shows the cruelty and cowardice of the slave owners he witnessed with a fair hand, and keeps a hopeful tone even while depicting the horrors of slave life. While it’s not an easy read (you may want to keep a box of tissues nearby), it’s an important one.

Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge earns his place as the post-Chestertonian voice of Christian reason in Chronicles of Wasted Time —an autobiography cited by many as the single best of the 20th century. The work follows the journalist, intellectual, spy and onetime atheist and communist sympathizer from his early life through his conversion to Christianity. Chronicles is the rare work full of literary depth, social critique and brilliant humor in equal measure, with references to a variety of characters from Churchill to Chanel. What makes it essential reading, however, is Muggeridge’s life story, which spans nearly the entirety of the 20th century and captures the wholeness of his conversion: from Stalin sympathizer to fierce critic, from hedonist to ascetic, from lifelong agnostic to Christian in his sixties. It’s a thrilling adventure that proves, in Muggeridge’s own words, that “Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us—and the art of life is to get the message.”

Son of a Preacher Man: My Search for Grace in the Shadows by Jay Bakker

Sex, lies, drugs and greed: they sound like sketchy nouns reserved for scandalous TV shows or celebrity tabloids. But how does the narrative of those words change when they’re all intertwined with the family of a…preacher?

You may or may not have heard of Jim Bakker. A famous televangelist in the 80’s, Bakker would be convicted of defrauding loyal followers of his “PTL (Praise the Lord)” ministry. His family was ravaged by drug abuse, adultery and, tragically the unabashed condemnation of other famous Christian leaders at the time.

In this book, Jim Bakker’s son Jay does more than offer a glimpse into the Bakker family: he rips down the entire curtain to show all the flaws and tribulations of a pastor, his wife, and their children. Despite the pain and shame felt by all members of the Bakker family, Jay shares just how God’s love and grace redeemed him and his family.

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The Best New Biographies and Memoirs to Read in 2024

This year sees some riveting and remarkable lives—from artist ai weiwei to singer-songwriter joni mitchell—captured on the page..

A life story can be read for escapist pleasure. But at other times, reading a memoir or biography can be an expansive exercise, opening us up to broader truths about our world. Often, it’s an edifying experience that reminds us of our universal human vulnerability and the common quest for purpose in life.

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Biographies and memoirs charting remarkable lives—whether because of fame, fortune or simply fascination—have the power to inspire us for their depth, curiosity or challenges. This year sees a bumper calendar of personal histories enter bookshops, grappling with enigmatic public figures like singer Joni Mitchell and writer Ian Fleming , to nuanced analysis of how motherhood or sociopathy shape our lives—for better and for worse.

Here we compile some of the most rewarding biographies and memoirs out in 2024. There are stories of trauma and recovery, art as politics and politics as art, and sentences as single life lessons spread across books that will make you rethink much about personal life stories. After all, understanding the triumphs and trials of others can help us see how we can change our own lives to create something different or even better.

Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir by Ai Weiwei and illustrated by Gianluca Costantini

Ai Weiwei , the iconoclastic artist and fierce critic of his homeland China, mixes fairy tales with moral lessons to evocatively retrace the story of his life in graphic form. Illustrations are by Italian artist Gianluca Costantini . “Any artist who isn’t an activist is a dead artist,” Weiwei writes in Zodiac , as he embraces everything from animals found in the Chinese zodiac to mystical folklore tales with anamorphic animals to argue the necessity of art as politics incarnate. The meditative exercise uses pithy anecdotes alongside striking visuals to sketch out a remarkable life story marked by struggle. It’s one weaving political manifesto, philosophy and personal memoir to engage readers on the necessity of art and agitation against authority in a world where we sometimes must resist and fight back.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Already well-known for her experimental writings, Sheila Heti takes a decade of diary entries and maps sentences against the alphabet, from A to Z. The project is a subversive rethink of our relationship to introspection—which often asks for order and clarity, like in diary writing—that maps new patterns and themes in its disjointed form. Heti plays with both her confessionals and her sometimes formulaic writing style (like knowingly using “Of course” in entries) to retrace the changes made (and unmade) across ten years of her life. Alphabetical Diaries is a sometimes demanding book given the incoherence of its entries, but remains an illuminating project in thinking about efforts at self-documentation.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison

Unlike her previous work The Empathy Exams , which examined how we relate to one another and on human suffering, writer Leslie Jamison wrestles today with her own failed marriage and the grief of surviving single parenting. After the birth of her daughter, Jamison divorces her partner “C,” traverses the trials and tribulations of rebound relationships (including with “an ex-philosopher”) and confronts unresolved emotional pains born of her own life living under the divorce of her parents. In her intimate retelling—paired with her superb prose—Jamison charts a personal history that acknowledges the unending divide mothers (and others) face dividing themselves between partners, children and their own lives.

Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch

Whether dancing figures or a “radiant baby,” the recognizable cartoonish symbols in Keith Haring ’s art endure today as shorthand signs representing both his playfulness and politicking. Haring (1958-1990) is the subject of writer Brad Gooch ’s deft biography, Radiant , a book that mines new material from the archive along with interviews with contemporaries to reappraise the influential quasi-celebrity artist. From rough beginnings tagging graffiti on New York City walls to cavorting with Andy Warhol and Madonna on art pieces, Haring battled everything from claims of selling out to over-simplicity. But he persisted with work that leveraged catchy quotes and colorful imagery to advance unsavory political messages—from AIDS to crack cocaine. A life tragically cut short at 31 is one powerfully celebrated in this new noble portrait.

The House of Hidden Meanings by RuPaul Charles

In The House of Hidden Meaning , celebrated drag queen, RuPaul , reckons with a murky inner world that has shaped—and hindered—a lifetime of gender-bending theatricality. The figurative house at the center of the story is his “ego,” a plaguing barrier that apparently long inhibited the performer from realizing dreams of greatness. Now as the world’s most recognizable drag queen—having popularized the art form for mainstream audiences with the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race —RuPaul reflects on the power that drag and self-love have long offered across his difficult, and sometimes tortured, life. Readers expecting dishy stories may be disappointed, but the psychological self-assessment in the pages of this memoir is far more edifying than Hollywood gossip could ever be.

Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne

Patric Gagne is an unlikely subject for a memoir on sociopaths. Especially since she is a former therapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology. Still, Gagne makes the case that after a troubled childhood of antisocial behavior (like stealing trinkets and cursing teachers) and a difficult adulthood (now stealing credit cards and fighting authority figures), she receives a diagnosis of sociopathy. Her memoir recounts many episodes of bad behavior—deeds often marked by a lack of empathy, guilt or even common decency—where her great antipathy mars any ability for her to connect with others. Sociopath is a rewarding personal exposé that demystifies one vilified psychological condition so often seen as entirely untreatable or irreparable. Only now there’s a familiar face and a real story linked to the prognosis.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare

Nicholas Shakespeare is an acclaimed novelist and an astute biographer, delivering tales that wield a discerning eye to subjects and embrace a robust attention to detail. Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the legendary creator of James Bond, is the latest to receive Shakespeare’s treatment. With access to new family materials from the Fleming estate, the seemingly contradictory Fleming is seen anew as a totally “different person” from his popular image. Taking cues from Fleming’s life story—from a refined upbringing spent in expensive private schools to working for Reuters as a journalist in the Soviet Union—Shakespeare reveals how these experiences shaped the elusive world of espionage and intrigue created in Fleming’s novels. Other insights include how Bond was likely informed by Fleming’s cavalier father, a major who fought in WWI. A martini (shaken, not stirred) is best enjoyed with this bio.

Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie , while giving a rare public lecture in New York in August 2022, was violently stabbed by an assailant brandishing a knife . The attack saw Rushdie lose his left hand and his sight in one eye. Speaking to The New Yorker a year later , he confirmed a memoir was in the works that would confront this harrowing existential experience: “When somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.” Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder is promised to be his raw, revelatory and deeply psychological confrontation with the violent incident. Like the sword of Damocles, brutality has long stalked Rushdie ever since the 1989 fatwa issued against the author, following the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses . The answer to such barbarity, Rushdie is poised to argue, is by finding the strength to stand up again.

The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022 by Peter Schjeldahl (Release: May 14)

Peter Schjeldahl (1942-2022), longstanding art critic of The New Yorker , confronted his mortality when he was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer in 2019. The resulting essay collection he then penned, The Art of Dying , is a masterful meditation on one life preoccupied entirely with aesthetics and criticism. It’s a discursive tactic for a memoir that avoids discussing Schjeldahl’s coming demise while equally confirming its impending visit by avoiding it. Acknowledging that he finds himself “thinking about death less than I used to,” Schjeldahl spends most of the pages revisiting familiar art subjects—from Edward Hopper ’s output to Peter Saul ’s Pop Art—as vehicles to re-examine his own remarkable life. With a life that began in the humble Midwest, Schjeldahl says his birthplace was one that ultimately availed him to write so plainly and cogently on art throughout his career. Such posthumous musings prove illuminating lessons on the potency of American art, with whispered asides on the tragedy of death that will come for all of us.

Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers (Release: June 11)

Joni Mitchell has enjoyed a remarkable revival recently, even already being one of the most acclaimed and enduring singer/songwriters. After retiring from public appearances for health reasons in the 2010s, Mitchell, 80, has returned to the spotlight with a 2021 Kennedy Centers honor , an appearance accepting the 2023 Gershwin Prize and even a live performance at this year’s Grammy Awards . It’s against this backdrop of public celebration of Mitchell that NPR music critic Ann Powers retraces the life story and musical (re)evolution of the singer, from folk to jazz genres and rock to soul music, across five decades for the American songbook. “What you are about to read is not a standard account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell,” she writes in the introduction. Instead, Powers’ project is one showing how Mitchell’s many journeys—from literal road trips inspiring tracks like “All I Want” to inner probings of Mitchell’s psyche, such as the song “Both Sides Now”—have always inspired Mitchell’s enduring, emotive and palpable output. These travels hold the key, Powers says, to understanding an enigmatic artist.

• SEE ALSO : ‘Under the Bridge’ Review: A Miniseries That Interrogates the True Crime Genre

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Scholastic Easy Reader Biographies: 12 Biographies That Help Students Learn to Read and Comprehend Key Features of Nonfiction (Easy Reader Biographies) Paperback – Teacher's Edition, April 1, 2007

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scholastic Teaching Resources; Teachers Guide edition (April 1, 2007)
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Summer reading: the 30 best holiday reads – chosen by authors and critics

From an evocative story set in a Trinidad graveyard to a riveting exposé of the Sacklers… Novelists including Johny Pitts, Monica Ali and Nina Stibbe on their essential holiday books

• Summer reading: the 50 hottest new books for a great escape
• Summer reading: authors recommend their favourite recent reads

Authors’ picks…

Jennifer egan.

Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra (Hutchinson Heinemann )

This novel is a searing, deeply moving account of a young man’s rise from poverty into the hi-tech globalised prosperity of the new India. Opening as the protagonist, Arun, escapes the want and brutality of his childhood home for college, the novel follows him and his equally striving friends into varied and troubled adulthoods that reveal the hidden costs of “success”. Mishra is a superb journalist, and the sensory vitality of his second novel is a reminder that fiction is the ultimate information compressor. Unleashed in the realm of human feeling, Mishra’s keen observational powers are spectacularly alive.

Elizabeth Day

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador )

I first read Patrick Radden Keefe in the New Yorker , then graduated to his debut nonfiction book, Say Nothing : an extraordinary retelling of the Troubles. I grew up in Derry and that book gave me a whole new insight into what I experienced as a child. He has now become one of those authors I will always read, no matter what the subject matter, which is why I gobbled up Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty in spite of only having the vaguest notion of who the Sacklers were. In this book, Radden Keefe not only delves into a riveting (and dysfunctional) family history but also charts the course of the American opioid epidemic. He has this ability to pick out individual incidents that illuminate the whole story, like lighting a match in a cave. Although the subject matter is complex and unwieldy, it never feels like it. A masterclass in compelling narrative nonfiction.

Torrey Peters

The Queens of Sarmiento Park by Camila Sosa Villada (Virago )

This is a book both ferocious and magical, the story of a boarding house of trans sex workers who discover and raise a baby in Córdoba, Argentina. It’s a trans iteration in a long tradition of Latin American literature: stuffed with marvels, humour, political critique, and storytelling that moves from macro to micro in the course of a paragraph. And yet, for all its specificity of place and culture, it’s one of the books that best illustrates the themes that link together a growing movement of global trans literature, a book that unflinchingly asks, “how do we live?”

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World by Barry Lopez (Random House US)

Barry Lopez, one of America’s greatest nature writers, died in 2020. Embrace Fearlessly is a posthumous collection of essays, thus far published only in America, revisiting places and themes familiar to admirers of earlier books such as Crossing Open Ground and Arctic Dreams . Reading him – the steady, unshowy attentiveness to the everyday life of extraordinary places (and vice-versa) – is always a joy but here, at the end of his life, he forces himself to confront one of the reasons for his long-standing sense of the solace offered by the unpeopled world: the devastating experience, as a young boy, of falling prey to a family friend and serial paedophile.

Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser ( Atlantic )

Scary Monsters is a diptych-novel with a “reversible” format, meaning one half is printed the other way up, so you have to decide which half to read first: the one set in 1980s France, in which Lili, a young Australian, attempts to model herself on Simone de Beauvoir; or the one set in near-future Australia, in which Permanent Fire Zones have been declared as climate catastrophe edges ever closer. Whichever way you read it, this is a novel of luminous intelligence about racism, misogyny and ageism. De Kretser dissects the barely concealed misogyny and racism of then , to awaken our senses to now, unsettling and disturbing our sense of where we are headed, what kind of future we might be sleepwalking towards.

Mick Herron

A Killing in November by Simon Mason ( riverrun )

This is a tale of two Wilkinses, Ray and Ryan; both DIs in Oxford, the former an uptight Balliol graduate (is there any other kind?), the latter a working-class single parent with a chip on both shoulders, a hair-trigger temper and unerring instincts when it comes to detective work. The odd couple scenario is familiar enough, but Mason avoids the obvious tropes, and rather movingly focuses on Ryan’s relationship with his young son. Well plotted, too. It’s the first in a series: start now and avoid the rush.

Nina Stibbe

Fight Night by Miriam Toews (Faber )

A chaotic, spirited family of three (nearly four) prepare for great change in this touching, funny novel that sits somewhere between Lucy Ellmann and Patricia Lockwood . The narrator, 100-month-old Swiv, commentates on her life with a pregnant mother and grandmother via an ongoing stream-of-consciousness letter to her absent father. There is sharp dialogue, comic, tragic, and gloriously obscure detail (how to dig a grave in winter), beautiful meditations on life (somehow absurd and wise at the same time), world weariness, and the most sublime language but, overall, you’re faced with the immeasurable joy of family love at even the saddest times. Books as wonderful as this don’t come along very often. I adored it.

Charlotte Mendelson

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber)

I love fiction where tiny pressures build to derailment, for better or worse: a late start, a wrong turn. In this beautiful, fierce, humane nove l, coal-merchant Bill Furlong is a decent man in recession-pressed 1980s Ireland. He wants his daughters to go to the only good local girls’ school, run by the nuns on the hill, who also have a training college (or is it a laundry?), rarely spoken of. But Bill, conscientiously delivering fuel for Christmas, finds something in the convent coal-shed. He should ignore it, for everyone’s sake. But he can’t. And neither should we.

Ross Raisin

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)

It is no mean feat to create a novel of such subtlety and hope that opens with a body in a suitcase. The Bass Rock sidesteps through time to bring together the lives of three women in three different centuries, treading one another’s invisible paths of desire and persecution, male violence, family and the aspiration for a brighter future. The images of the Bass Rock on the news recently – amid concerns for its bird population – have brought the living spectacle of the rock back to my mind, serving as a poignant reminder of the novel’s themes of generational unity, precariousness, constancy.

Irenosen Okojie

Palmares by Gayl Jones (Virago)

This daring, multifaceted novel set in 17th century Brazil tells a sprawling tale about a community of Africans who escaped slavery. We follow its narrator, Almeyda, from childhood in the 1670s on a Brazilian plantation with her enslaved mother and witch-like, Arabic-speaking grandmother. Almeyda embraces her kaleidoscopic existence with vigour and imagination, mining and observing the movements of the various characters around to make sense of her world. I love the novel for its scope, its singular vision, its playfulness with form as well as the complexity of its female characters. It marks the return of a lesser-known literary giant. Discovered by Toni Morrison no less, Jones withdrew from the publishing world after a few acclaimed novels. I’m thrilled she’s returned with this bold, imaginative feat.

Johny Pitts

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (Hamish Hamilton)

A book set in a graveyard might not seem like much fun for a summer read, but Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds juggles many counterintuitive elements, and you want to spend time wherever it takes you. Written in a gentle vernacular, it is a haunting and evocative portrait of the heady streets of Trinidad, and the bardo that connects the everyday with the spiritual world. Because the darkness of the novel is textured and soulful, there is something strangely consoling about its tone, full as it is of murky sunsets, imperfect love affairs and struggling characters you are always rooting for.

Kamila Shamsie

The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahm ad ( Riverhead)

This is a stunning debut novel – a noir-inspired thriller that weaves in politics, family ties, corruption and murder, while also being sharp about different kinds of power, particularly as it relates to women. It starts in Lahore’s Old City with men coming to take a boy away from the world of courtesans into which he’s been born; it leaps forward within just a few pages to the boy grown into a police officer and sent by his powerful father back to the world of courtesans to investigate a murder. Aren’t you gripped already?

Maggie Shipstead

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin (Pan Mac millan )

Although it has plenty of suspense, Alexis Schaitkin’s novel Saint X is less about the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman than its consequent, devastating ripple effect. Narrator Claire is seven when her sister Alison disappears on a family vacation to the fictional Caribbean island of the book’s title. Two days later, Alison’s body washes up. Eighteen years later, Claire is living in New York when she encounters one of the men accused of Alison’s murder. I read Saint X in a night, captivated by its mystery but also by the smart, evocative way Schaitkin writes about race, loss and place.

Miriam Toews

He Held Radical Light by Christian Wiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux US)

This is a book I’ve kept close to me for the past few years by Christian Wiman, an American poet. His exploration of poetry, spirituality and mortality has given me so much solace and inspiration. The book’s subtitle – “the art of faith, the faith of art” – encapsulates it nicely. Poetry is the grace we strive for but fail to embody. Art is the true mediator between earth and sky, not any religious functionary. Faith is essential for any artist. But why do we want to make art? The book came to me from another poet, Matthew Tierney, who also lives in Toronto, and he has a line that is the beginning of an answer: “Freed from the desire to fly, I flew.”

Alex Wheatle

The Saint of Lost Things by Tish Delaney (Cornerstone)

I was eager to read the follow-up to Tish Delaney’s outstanding debut novel, Before My Actual Heart Breaks . Again, The Saint of Lost Things begins in rural Northern Ireland, and the narrative revolves around the lives, dramas and dark family secrets of an aunt and her niece living in a cottage near a small village. Delaney has an effortless skill to unlock the fabric and nuances of working-class family life. Thoroughly absorbing, it didn’t let me down.

Critics’ picks…

Rachel cooke.

The Real and the Romantic by Frances Spalding (Thames and Hudson)

It isn’t very packable, but I’m hopeful I will somehow manage to secrete in my luggage Frances Spalding’s big new history of English art between the wars. Turning its delectable pages, I know already that the joy and intense interest of this book will come courtesy of the attention given by its scholarly but always readable author to less well-known names, Gerald Brockhurst, Winifred Knights and Algernon Newton duly taking their place alongside the Nash brothers, Barbara Hepworth and Graham Sutherland. What could be better when lying by the pool than to gaze on a brooding etching by the inestimable FL Griggs? A crisp portrait by that master, Meredith Frampton?

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Picador)

Having grown up on campus novels – I am the child of a funny, frisky academic – I’m always in search of good new ones, even now. For this reason, I read this first novel by Julia May Jonas even before it was published in Britain (I ordered an American edition), and so exciting did I find it, I might just give it a second whirl before the summer is out. A quick summary: female professor whose husband, also a professor, is accused of Bad Things (think #MeToo crimes) does some pretty Bad Things herself as a po-faced and appalled campus looks on. Sexy and satirical and incredibly gripping, this somehow all too believable novel is impossible to put down.

Alison by Lizzy Stewart (Serpent’s Tail)

Graphic novels don’t usually last long enough to make for perfect holiday reading, but I’m determined to read this imminently forthcoming book while I’m away. I loved Stewart’s last book, a collection of stories called It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be , and I’m hopeful this full-length graphic novel will be as good (Tessa Hadley has already described it as “subtle and deliciously complicated”). Set in the late 70s, it tells the story of newly married Alison, who upends her life after an encounter with an older artist. But will bohemian romance lead to enduring love or only to patchouli-scented disappointment? Stewart is a considerable talent, and I can’t wait to find out what she does with this eternal story.

The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer (Canongate)

Geoff Dyer is the nearest thing I have to a literary crush; I get overexcited whenever I’m in his presence, book-wise. I gather that some of the reviews for his latest book, an exploration of the achievements of middle age, have been somewhat disobliging, but I honestly couldn’t give a damn. Pearls before swine, and all that. Dyer is a writer who can make anything interesting and funny, and for such singular reasons, too (it’s the sheer Geoff-ness of Geoff that we, his fans, adore). Friedrich Nietzsche, JMW Turner, John Coltrane, Jean Rhys: all appear in this uncommon treatise, though of course it also comes with trademark scenes from Dyer’s own, vastly less celebrated (though not by me) artistic life. An enormous treat in prospect.

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso (Picador)

In general, I’m suspicious of what I think of as “shard” books, by which I mean those slight, prickly little novels in which the narrative is broken into pieces, each paragraph floating on the page. But I will make an exception for Sarah Manguso’s first novel , reviews of which have made it sound – to put it mildly – right up my street. Set in Brahmin New England, it is narrated by Ruth, a child who is entirely surrounded, it would appear, by people whose battered, beleaguered hearts long froze hard against the world. From what I can gather, Manguso’s stop-start narrative builds to a gelid climate, which will also do nicely if my holiday should happen to coincide with another heatwave.

Alex Preston

The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury)

Without knowing it, I’d been looking for a book that gave me the same visceral, iconoclastic thrill I got from Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem . Ben Myers’s seventh novel, The Perfect Golden Circle , is it. A study in male friendship and British identity, this fictional retelling of the pranksters who fooled a nation with their crop circles is a warm, rollicking, heart-expanding read. You’ll never forget the time you spend in the company of Calvert and Redbone, the eccentrics at the heart of the novel.

Companion Piece by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)

The end of Smith’s seasonal quartet left a void in the literary world. I hadn’t realised how much I’d relied on these visionary, speed-published messages from the present to help shape my view of the political moment. True to form, Smith confounded expectations and has published a fifth book to go with her quartet, a book that thrums with the same rage and artistic energy as its predecessors. Here we have Sandy, an artist, who receives a mid-lockdown call from an old friend that sets off a wild series of events. Taking in Covid and the Black Death, gender identity and violence against women, it’s another superlative novel from one of our very best writers.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw (Pushkin Press)

A wonderful book whose joyful, riotous, interlaced stories combine to paint a picture of a group of women torn between the exigencies of their religion and the urges of their bodies. Philyaw finds beauty in unexpected places, lifting everyday experience into something almost sacred. It’s from an entirely different world, but I was reminded repeatedly of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – Philyaw’s great triumph is to permit her characters to inhabit fully their rich and particular interior lives. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies has been a surprise bestseller in the US; it ought to be equally successful this side of the Atlantic.

Fledgling by Hannah Bourne-Taylor (Aurum)

When Bourne-Taylor finds herself suddenly transplanted to Ghana – her husband takes a job at a sports academy there – she begins to question her place in the world. She’s alone, dependent and bored. Then something falls, almost literally, into her lap – a baby bird, which she rears and then releases. H Is for Hawk trailed a host of similar narratives behind it in which authors found solace in nature, but few of them are as intelligent, poetic and moving as this one.

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott (Cornerstone)

When Invisible Child won the Pulitzer prize, I punched the air. A work of devastating power , it tells the story of Dasani, a young woman growing up in abject poverty in New York. Dasani is a whirlwind of a young woman, roaring out of the projects that threaten to suck her back in. Elliott spent almost a decade following Dasani and her family and the book is a work of great moral and ethical power – there’s nothing voyeuristic here, just an extraordinary portrait of the human spirit under pressure.

Kadish Morris

The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (HarperCollins)

This 800-page book is a sweeping epic that journeys through the history of one African American family across several centuries. It jumps back and forth between eras, from slavery to the antebellum south to present times, and does so in a way that makes it as thrilling as a murder mystery. The book’s main protagonist, Ailey, is clever and perceptive and it’s rewarding watching her grow from an angsty kid to a gifted researcher. The stories of female characters such as Aggie, an enslaved woman intent on toppling the sadistic man who bought her from Africa, create a landscape of formidable women who show how resoluteness can change the course of history.

Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley (Faber)

This debut poetry collection is abundant with thoughtful storytelling. Each poem is ruminative and distills the intimacies of Black girl/womanhood with fascinating images, compelling observations and a nomadic sense of questioning, while honouring the concept of silence and the ways it plays out in one’s interior life. These delicate poems unpick encounters with loved ones, friends and animals (there’s a beautiful poem about snails) and also focus firmly on the wider world, with poems such as Pandemic vs Black Folk written with the sharpest of tongues.

Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone: Stories by John Edgar Wideman (Canongate)

These short stories are the kind that stay with you; Wideman deploys an experimental literary style that forces you to pause with each sentence. With emotional precision and bold storytelling, they largely cover the African American experience. There’s a letter addressed to the narrator’s son, who has been charged with murder. There’s another about two chickens crossing the road, pondering the meaning of captivity. Wideman’s stories are preoccupied with how lives are shaped by incarceration and the criminal justice system and how these experiences can warp time. His tales are not easy reads but they are extremely absorbing, with Wideman’s stream-of-consciousness style evoking raw emotion and empathy.

Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail)

Edugyan has written a remarkable set of essays unlike anything else . This is a deeply curious book that delves into the representations of Black people in western art, studying the fine details of paintings such as David Martin’s portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Johann Gottfried Haid’s painting of Viennese courtier Angelo Soliman. Edugyan oscillates between past and present, moving from the atrocities of the slave trade in Canada to recent debates around “transracialism”. She writes from a subjective, personal perspective, too, telling intriguing stories about how her parents met, her travels as a writer and her belief in ghosts.

A Brief History of Black British Art by Rianna Jade Parker (Tate Publishing)

This book by the brilliant critic and curator Rianna Jade Parker explores the pivotal contributions that African and Caribbean-descended artists have made to the landscape of art in Britain. Though a quick read, it’s bountiful in the number of artists and histories it discusses, which will be unknown to many. Concise biographies of Frank Bowling , Anthea Hamilton , Denzil Forrester and Maxine Walters offer insight into their lives and practices, and in her introduction, Parker touches on the social and political realities affecting Black cultural production. She also writes of how and why Black British artists “have long been relegated to the niche,” and notes that the under-historicised Caribbean Artists Movement of the 1960s was a genesis point of contemporary Black British art.

To explore all the books in the Guardian and Observer’s summer reading lists visit guardianbookshop.com Delivery charges may apply.

• The Observer
• Summer reading
• Crime fiction
• Society books
• Short stories

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Do You Know These Films Based on Great Biographies?

By J. D. Biersdorfer April 22, 2024

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Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about literature that has gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats. This week’s quiz highlights films that were adapted from the biographies or autobiographies of their notable subjects.

Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations.

“Oppenheimer,” a film about the man who was instrumental in developing the first nuclear weapons for the United States, won seven Academy Awards earlier this year. The film’s screenplay was adapted from a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. What was the main title of the book?

“American Prometheus”

“Burning the Sky”

“A Wing and a Prayer”

The 1972 film “Lady Sings the Blues” was loosely based on which singer’s 1956 autobiography?

Ella Fitzgerald

Bessie Smith

Billie Holiday

Mildred Bailey

“Alan Turing: The Enigma” is Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biography of the gay British mathematician who helped the Allies decipher encrypted Nazi messages during World War II, but was later punished for his sexuality. What was the name of the 2014 film based on the book?

“The Turing Test”

“The Code Breaker”

“The Imitation Game”

“Julie & Julia” is a 2009 film about the chef Julia Child and the blogger Julie Powell, who tried to make all the recipes from one of Child’s cookbooks years later. The screenplay was based on two different books, Powell’s 2005 memoir about the project (and source of the movie’s name) and Julia Child’s posthumously published 2006 autobiography. What was that book’s title?

“Blood, Bones and Butter”

“My Life in France”

“Kitchen Confidential”

“A Year in Provence”

After reading Louis Fischer’s 1950 biography of this global figure, the film director Richard Attenborough spent years trying to make a film about that person’s life. The picture was finally released in 1982 and won eight Academy Awards. Who was the subject of the movie?

Harriet Tubman

J. Edgar Hoover

Mahatma Gandhi

Frida Kahlo

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A new photo book reorients dusty notions of a classic American pastime with  a stunning visual celebration of black rodeo.

Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading . Here’s what made Lord Byron so great.

Harvard’s recent decision to remove the binding of a notorious volume  in its library has thrown fresh light on a shadowy corner of the rare book world.

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Best Personal Loans for Quick Funding

Lightstream personal loan, avant personal loan, best egg personal loan, lendingpoint personal loan, rocket loans personal loan, upstart personal loan, opploans personal loan.

• Why You Should Trust Us

The Best Fast Personal Loans for Quick Cash in May 2024

Affiliate links for the products on this page are from partners that compensate us (see our advertiser disclosure with our list of partners for more details). However, our opinions are our own. See how we rate personal loans to write unbiased product reviews.

Not every personal loan has funding available the same or next business day for quick cash, but some lenders offer this option. The best personal loans for quick access to cash can get you money as soon as the same day.

• LightStream Personal Loan : Best for low interest rates
• Avant Personal Loan : Best for fair credit
• Best Egg Personal Loan : Best for short-term loans
• LendingPoint Personal Loan : Best for poor credit
• Rocket Loans Personal Loan : Best for fast and easy application
• Upstart Personal Loan : Best for limited credit history
• OppLoans Personal Loan : Best for no fees

Compare the Top Personal Loans for Quick Funding

The best quick personal loan for you will get you funds as soon as the same day, with an easy application process and minimal fees. We chose the top picks for good and bad credit, for limited credit history, short term lengths, and more. You should also look at lenders' interest rates before deciding on a loan.

0.50% discount on regular rates with AutoPay

6.99% to 25.49% (with AutoPay discount, rates vary by loan purpose)

$5,000 to $100,000

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Competitive APR
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Approval decisions should come shortly after applying
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Loans can be funded the same day
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Wide range of borrowing amounts and terms
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. No fees
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Only available to people with good credit
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No pre-approval option

LightStream offers some of the lowest rates on personal loans out there, provided you have a great credit score. The lender also has loans of up to $100,000 and can supply you with funding on the same day you apply and are approved.

• Loan amounts range from $5,000 to $100,000
• Loan term lengths range from 2 to 12 years
• Apply online and you'll receive a response shortly during business hours.
• Receive your funds as soon as the same day
• Loans are made by Truist Bank, member FDIC

LightStream personal loans are a solid choice for both relatively low interest rates and same-day funding. This lender topped Personal Finance Insider's list of best personal loans  in 2022, and quick funding is yet another bonus.  

However, this lender won't be a good option for anyone with a poor credit score or little credit history. LightStream requires that applicants have a minimum credit score of 660.

For anyone who does qualify for a personal loan with LightStream, this is the most affordable option for fast cash. If your loan is verified and signed before 2:30 p.m. ET, same-day funding is available.

LightStream Personal Loan Review

Offers emergency, home improvement, and debt consolidation loans

9.95% to 35.99%

$2,000 to $35,000

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Funds generally deposited by the next business day
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. No prepayment penalty
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Multiple types of fees
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. High maximum APR
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Low maximum loan limit

Avant Personal Loan is a good personal loan provider, especially if you have a lower credit score and need to receive your loan money quickly. Just be prepared to pay a high APR if you do have a low score.

• Loan amounts range from $2,000 to $35,000
• Loan term lengths range between 2 to 5 years
• Administration fee of up to 4.75%, which will be deducted from your loan proceeds when the loan is funded, and late fee that varies by state
• Loans made by WebBank, member FDIC

Avant personal loans are the best fast-funding personal loan option for anyone with fair credit. This lender also made Personal Finance Insider's list of  best personal loans  of 2022. Avant doesn't have the lowest available starting APRs available, but the typical Avant borrower has a credit score between 600 and 700. This company will consider scores lower than what others will, and can provide funding the next business day if the loan is approved by 4:30 p.m. CT on a weekday. 

However, it's worth noting that this lender charges up to 4.75% in administration fees with an undisclosed late fee and returned payment fee. While it could be an option for anyone needing quick funding with fair credit, borrowers with better credit could find lower rates elsewhere.

Avant Personal Loan Review

8.99% to 35.99%

$2,000 to $50,000

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Fast access to funds
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. High customer satisfaction
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Origination fees
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Unavailable in a few states and DC
• Loan term lengths range between 3 to 5 years
• You may get your money by the next business day after your loan is reviewed and approved
• Loans made by Best Egg's lending partners
• Unavailable if you live in Iowa, Vermont, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, or U.S. Territories

Best Egg is a good choice for short loan terms and fast funding. Its minimum loan term is 36 months, while the maximum term is 60 months. Best Egg loans can be repaid at any time without an early payment penalty.

About half of Best Egg's customers get money the next day after a successful verification process, but it may take one to three business days to see money deposited in your account.

Best Egg Personal Loan Review

Offers debt consolidation loans. Low minimum credit score requirement.

7.99% - 35.99%

$2,000 to $36,500

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Low minimum credit score required
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. No prepayment penalties
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Restrictive loan amount range
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No loans in Nevada or West Virginia

LendingPoint is a solid option if you need to get a loan with bad credit or you don't qualify for a loan with another lender. However, the range of loan amounts is more limited than what other lenders offer, and if you have good credit, you can likely get a better rate elsewhere.

• Loan amount range $2,000 to $36,500
• Loan term lengths range from 24 to 60 months
• Loans made by FinWise Bank, member FDIC

LendingPoint is great for borrowers with poor credit, as its minimum credit score requirement is only 580. However, LendingPoint doesn't offer joint or cosigned loans, meaning you won't be able to enlist a cosigner to get a lower rate. 

The application process is fast with LendingPoint, and the company may approve you for a loan the same day you apply. You often get your funds the next business day after approval.  

LendingPoint Personal Loan Review

9.116% to 29.99% with AutoPay

$2,000 to $45,000

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Competitive minimum APR
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Same-day funding available
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Not available in all states
• Unavailable in Iowa, Nevada, and West Virginia

Rocket Loans is one of the only lenders on our list to offer same-day funding, but it comes with a lot of fees. You'll pay when your loan is funded, which will be deducted from your overall loan proceeds. Additionally, you'll pay a $15 fee for any payments not made within 10 days of the due date and a $15 fee for a returned check. 

Rocket Loans also has a quick application process, and you can complete it within several minutes. 

Rocket Personal Loans Review

You can prepay your loan at any time with no fee or penalty

6.40% - 35.99% fixed

$1,000 to $50,000 (borrowers in four states are subject to higher minimum loan amounts: Massachusetts: $7,000, Ohio: $6,000, New Mexico: $5,100, Georgia: $3,100)

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Small minimum loan amounts
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Quick loan fund disbursement
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Only three and five year terms
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Potential for high origination fees

Upstart could be the right lender if you have a strong work and education history, but you have a low credit score or limited credit history. The best personal loan for you depends on your credit score, which will determine what you qualify for and can lower your rate.

• Loan amounts range from $1,000 to $50,000. However, borrowers in four states are subject to higher minimum loan amounts: Massachusetts: $7,000, Ohio: $6,000, New Mexico: $5,100, Georgia: $3,100
• Loan term lengths are either 3 or 5 years
• Can have origination fees up to 8%
• Considers employment and education history when making loan approval decisions
• Loans are made through one of several Upstart-powered bank partners

Upstart is a good option for quick funding if your credit score is between 600 and 660. However, the lender includes other pieces of information in its approval decisions — such as where you went to school and your area of study — making it good for borrowers who may not qualify for a loan solely based on their credit score alone. Upstart offers only three-year and five-year loans. While the platform has no prepayment penalties, there's less flexibility in terms than for loans offered by other lenders. Next-business-day funding is available as long as the personal loan is accepted by 5 p.m. ET. 

Upstart Personal Loans Review

$500 to $4,000

Undisclosed

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. OppLoans doesn't charge an origination fee, late fee, or prepayment penalty. 
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Depending on when your loan is approved, you can get your money as soon as the next business day. 
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Many other personal loan companies and financial institutions will turn away people with poor credit, but OppLoans offers options for those who have bad credit standing.
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. OppLoans' APR range is substantially higher than most other personal loan companies.
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. You'll only be able to take out a loan for up to $4,000, though the highest amount of money you're qualified to borrow depends on your state, creditworthiness, income, and ability to repay.
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. OppLoans is only available in 35 states and Washington, DC. If you don't live in one of those states, you won't be able to take out a loan with the company.

OppLoans is good for borrowers with poor credit because there is no minimum credit score required to qualify, which is different from other personal loan companies.

Additionally, you won't pay any fees with an OppLoans loan, including an origination fee , late fee, or prepayment penalty. Other lenders on our list charge fees. 

Which Quick Loan Lender Is the Most Trustworthy?

The Better Business Bureau, a non-profit organization focused on consumer protection and trust, evaluates businesses using factors like their responsiveness to consumer complaints, honesty in advertising, and clarity about business practices. Here is each company's score:

All of our three top picks are rated B+ or higher by the BBB. Keep in mind that a top-notch BBB score does not ensure a positive relationship with a lender. You should keep doing research and talking to others who have used the company to get the most information possible. 

Alternatives to Personal Loans for Quick Cash

It's worth noting that if you have an emergency fund or cash savings , dipping into those resources is a better option than borrowing. If you need to borrow money in an emergency , there are a few other avenues to explore. 

Payday alternative loans from a credit union

Not to be confused with traditional payday loans , payday alternative loans are offered by many different credit unions and work with all types of borrowers. Only available to members, these loans are good for anyone needing a small loan, and who can repay it quickly.

According to the National Credit Union Administration , payday alternative loans typically range from $200 to $1,000 and have terms between one and six months. Check with your credit union to see if this option is available, and what interest rates and borrowing amounts are available.

Loans from friends or family

While loans from family or friends aren't to be taken or made lightly, it could be an option for anyone needing cash quicker than a bank could send it. 

If you plan to make or ask for this type of loan, one financial planner recommends putting loan terms and repayment plans in writing, and paying interest if possible.

A 0% interest credit card

If you happen to have (or can open) a 0% interest credit card that's still within the intro APR term, it could be a useful option for spending. However, you'll need to repay the balance before the 0% term expires. Most cards have between nine and 21 months of interest-free borrowing.

See our full ratings methodology for personal loans » 

How Do I Choose the Best Fast Cash Loans for Me?

To find the best fast loan for you, consider the factors that are most important to you. Many borrowers prioritize the speediest funding time, but also take into account the lowest personal loan interest rate , any fees, the minimum credit score needed, and the accessibility of the lender's customer service. You'll also want to make sure you're able to select a term length that works for you and that your loan's purpose is allowed by the lender you choose.

Guides like this one will help you compare multiple lenders in the same place to weigh their pros and cons. Make sure to also read individual reviews of any lenders you're considering. 

In some cases lenders will charge higher interest rates or fees for the convenience of quick cash, so you might save money if you waited longer for your money. However, if you have an excellent credit score , you could very well be offered the same interest rate for quick loans as you would for loans that take a longer time to fund.

Personal loans are some of the most simple and fast loans you can get. While three-to-five business days is a more common timeframe to expect, it's possible to get a same-day loan or next-day loan with some lenders. However, there are variables that could affect the funding speed, such as how quickly your bank processes the proceeds and makes them available in your account.

While you won't get your money "instantly," in some cases you can apply for a personal loan, be approved, and and have access to the cash very quickly. With fully online application and funding processes, some lenders can provide same-day loans if you qualify.

Some online lenders can approve you for a personal loan and deposit the funds into your bank account on the same day, if you complete the application and it's processed by a certain time of day. LightStream and Rocket Loans are two examples.

Why You Should Trust Us: Our Experts' on Choosing the Best Fast Loans

We consulted personal loan and financial experts to give their insights into finding the best quick cash loans for your needs.

• Markia Brown, certified financial education instructor and registered financial associate at Money Plug, LLC
• Ryan Wangman, former loans reporter at Personal Finance Insider

Our Experts' Advice on Choosing the Best Fast Personal Loan How do borrowers decide on their repayment terms?

Markia Brown:

"Repayment options are important when considering a lender for a loan because some lenders may charge you a fee if you repay your loan early. When you pay your loan off early, it means you pay the lender less in interest. They charge this prepayment penalty to get some of that money anyway. This fee varies by lender and loan type, so keep this in mind when shopping for a lender."

Ryan Wangman:

"Repayment terms can be crucial in determining the overall cost of your loan. One of the biggest things to watch out for are origination fees. Origination fees are taken out of the total proceeds of your loan and reduce the overall amount of money you receive."

What makes the best personal loan?

Markia Brown: 

"The best personal loans meet your financial needs without exceeding your budget. They have the lowest interest rate and fees, flexible repayment options, and the money is available quickly."

"Especially when it comes to fast funding, the best personal loans will get you your cash quickly without saddling you with an overwhelming amount of fees. You'll also want a lender that has minimum credit score requirements that fit your financial situation."

Why Trust Our Recommendations?

At Personal Finance Insider, we strive to help smart people make the best decisions with their money. We spent hours comparing and contrasting the features and fine print of dozens of personal loans so you don't have to.

We understand that "best" is often subjective, however, so in addition to highlighting the pros of a lender's personal loan, we outline the cons, too.

Methodology

We rate all personal loan products in our reviews and guides on a 1-5 scale. The overall rating is a weighted average that takes into account seven different categories, some of which are judged more heavily than others. They are:

• Interest rate (20% of rating)
• Fees (20% of rating)
• Term lengths and loan amounts (15% of rating)
• Funding speed (15% of rating)
• Borrower accessibility (15% of rating)
• Customer support (7.5% of rating)
• Ethics (7.5% of rating)

Each category's weighting is based on its importance to your borrowing experience. Rates and fees have the most direct impact on the overall cost of your loan, so we weigh those the most heavily. Customer support and ethics are still very important parts of the borrowing experience, but do not directly tie to a personal loan's terms, so they have less of an impact on the overall rating. 

OneMain Financial Personal Loan disclosure: Not all applicants will be approved. Loan approval and actual loan terms depend on your ability to meet our credit standards (including a responsible credit history, sufficient income after monthly expenses, and availability of collateral) and your state of residence. If approved, not all applicants will qualify for larger loan amounts or most favorable loan terms. Larger loan amounts require a first lien on a motor vehicle no more than ten years old, that meets our value requirements, titled in your name with valid insurance. APRs are generally higher on loans not secured by a vehicle. Highly-qualified applicants may be offered higher loan amounts and/or lower APRs than those shown above. OneMain charges origination fees where allowed by law. Depending on the state where you open your loan, the origination fee may be either a flat amount or a percentage of your loan amount. Flat fee amounts vary by state, ranging from $25 to $500. Percentage-based fees vary by state ranging from 1% to 10% of your loan amount subject to certain state limits on the fee amount. Visit  omf.com/loanfees  for more information. Loan proceeds cannot be used for postsecondary educational expenses as defined by the CFPB's Regulation Z such as college, university or vocational expense; for any business or commercial purpose; to purchase cryptocurrency assets, securities, derivatives or other speculative investments; or for gambling or illegal purposes. Borrowers in these states are subject to these minimum loan sizes: Alabama: $2,100. California: $3,000. Georgia: $3,100. North Dakota: $2,000. Ohio: $2,000. Virginia: $2,600. Borrowers in these states are subject to these maximum loan sizes: North Carolina: $9,000 for unsecured loans to all customers, $9,000 for secured loans to present customers. Maine: $7,000. Mississippi: $15,000. West Virginia: $14,000. Loans to purchase a motor vehicle or powersports equipment from select Maine, Mississippi, and North Carolina dealerships are not subject to these maximum loan sizes. Example Loan: A $6,000 loan with a 24.99% APR that is repayable in 60 monthly installments would have monthly payments of $176.07. Time to Fund Loans: Funding within one hour after closing through SpeedFunds must be disbursed to a bank-issued debit card. Disbursement by check or ACH may take up to 1-2 business days after loan closing.

Editorial Note: Any opinions, analyses, reviews, or recommendations expressed in this article are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any card issuer. Read our editorial standards .

Please note: While the offers mentioned above are accurate at the time of publication, they're subject to change at any time and may have changed, or may no longer be available.

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Personal Finance Insider offers tools and calculators to help you make smart decisions with your money. We do not give investment advice or encourage you to buy or sell stocks or other financial products. What you decide to do with your money is up to you. If you take action based on one of the recommendations listed in the calculator, we get a small share of the revenue from our commerce partners.

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