The 50 best biographies of all time

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.

But despite its long history dating back to ancient Rome and Sumeria, biography as a genre didn’t really pop off until the middle of the twentieth century, when we became obsessed with celebrity culture. Since then, biographies of presidents, activists, artists, and musicians have regularly appeared on bestseller lists, while Hollywood continues to adapt them into Oscar bait like A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, and Steve Jobs.

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.

$49.11 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$11.49 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$18.41 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$14.89 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$18.47 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$24.97 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$28.00 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$12.32 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$16.31 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$29.21 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$18.37 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$16.19 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$9.95 Shop Now amazon.com

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.”

$60.89 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$19.31 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$9.00 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$13.26 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$41.44 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$18.39 Shop Now amazon.com

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.

$6.39 Shop Now amazon.com

St. Martin's Griffin The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, by Randy Shilts

If you’ve never seen the 2008 film Milk starring Sean Penn, you might not be familiar with the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California before his assassination in 1978. Shilts’s biography provides a much more detailed look at the policies and politics Milk fought against in San Francisco to become one of the most crucial advocates for LGBTQ+ rights in American history.

$12.19 Shop Now amazon.com

The Brontë Myth, by Lucasta Miller

Without Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, we’d have no Wuthering Heights, no Jane Eyre, no The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—and something like half as many BBC television and radio adaptations. The thing that makes Lucasta Miller’s “metabiography” so absorbing is that she doesn’t just recount the lives of the three Brontë sisters in Victorian Yorkshire; she also narrates her own process of discovery as she realizes just how much their first biographer—a family friend who tried to sugarcoat their personal lives—misrepresented the Brontë family.

$30.99 Shop Now amazon.com

University of Minnesota Press Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama, by Diane C. Fujino

Yuri Kochiyama is best known as the woman who held Malcolm X in her arms as he died in the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, but she was also “the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s.” Fujino’s biography traces Kochiyama’s life from her family’s experience in an internment camp for Japanese Americans to her advocacy for a variety of causes as an activist—some of which remain extremely controversial to this day, resulting in a remarkable story that will challenge you in every chapter.

$24.50 Shop Now amazon.com

British Film Institute Wong Kar-Wai: Auteur of Time, by Stephen Teo

In just ten films released between 1988 and 2013—including In the Mood for Love and Fallen Angels—the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai established himself as a revolutionary, one-of-a-kind director. This engrossing book covers Kar-Wai’s story up until his seventh film, but where it really shines is when Teo turns his attention to the interplay between Kar-Wai’s life and the movies themselves. One can only hope for a follow-up that examines Kar-Wai’s three most recent releases—2046, My Blueberry Nights, and The Grandmaster.

$46.95 Shop Now amazon.com

Penguin Books The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History, by Joseph M. Marshall III

You probably learned about the Battle of Little Bighorn in grade school, but this well-paced biography of the Lakota warrior known as Crazy Horse reveals many new details, thanks to Marshall III’s extensive on-the-ground research with oral historians in the Black Hills and beyond. At just over 300 pages, it’s also one of the shortest biographies on this list, which makes it a great gift for readers who are leery of 1,000-page doorstoppers.

$10.99 Shop Now amazon.com

Oxford University Press The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, by Jeffrey C. Stewart

Speaking of 1,000-page doorstoppers! Despite his status as the “father of the Harlem Renaissance,” Alain Locke isn’t quite the household name that many of his mentees became, like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence. Stewart’s massive biography is absolutely worth its page count—not just because of its velvet-smooth writing about Locke himself, but also because of its revelations about other members of the Harlem Renaissance who were influenced by Locke.

$29.69 Shop Now amazon.com

Amistad Press Ida: A Sword Among Lions, by Paula J. Giddings

Born into slavery in Mississippi, Ida B. Wells became an investigative journalist after she was thrown from a train car she was attempting to desegregate in 1884. With the eye of a novelist and an exquisite mix of historical summary and dramatic scenes, Giddings traces Wells’s career fighting for civil rights and women’s suffrage from Memphis to Chicago.

$17.46 Shop Now amazon.com

Farrar, Straus and Giroux The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Bobrow-Strain’s suspenseful book is the story of an undocumented immigrant, Aida Hernandez, whose mother brought her from Mexico to Arizona to escape her abusive father. After having a child of her own, Aida was deported back to Mexico, and had to fight the American immigration system to be reunited with her son. It’s a chilling look at how U.S. detention centers and immigration courts wreak havoc on the lives of impoverished and vulnerable people.

$6.67 Shop Now amazon.com

Simon & Schuster Ali: A Life, by Jonathan Eig

On the heels of his books about Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig, the celebrated Chicago sports biographer Jonathan Eig turns his eye to Muhammad Ali in this soaring book based on more than five hundred interviews. It’s also filled with new revelations from long-classified FBI and U.S. Department of Justice files on Ali—and it’s the basis for an upcoming Ken Burns documentary.

$10.70 Shop Now amazon.com

Random House Trade Paperbacks Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie

All four of Massie’s Romanov books are fantastic. His biography of Peter the Great earned a Pulitzer Prize, but it can’t help but feel like a prequel to the main event when Catherine (the queen who overthrew Peter in 1724) is an infinitely more fascinating character. If you loved the Hulu TV series The Great (of course you did!) based on Peter and Catherine’s marriage, this book is the perfect entry point into Russia’s imperial dynasty, which reigned from 1613 until the 1917 revolution.

$10.20 Shop Now amazon.com

Vintage Anne Sexton: A Biography, by Diane Wood Middlebrook

Shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1991, Middlebrook’s shocking biography of Anne Sexton made waves for detailing the poet’s infidelity and incest—including the sexual assault of her husband and children. Many of its revelations came from recordings of Sexton’s psychiatric sessions, which were given to Middlebrook by the poet’s therapist and sparked a controversy upon the book’s publication for violating doctor-patient confidentiality. More than thirty years later, it remains a truly chilling read.

$14.39 Shop Now amazon.com

Harper Perennial Joan of Arc: A History, by Helen Castor

Castor’s spellbinding biography of Joan of Arc never really feels like a biography—it feels more like an HBO adaptation of a George R. R. Martin novel. There’s a throne, quite a few castles, and a whole lot of blood in her vivid and violent portrait of fifteenth-century France, as Castor narrates how the fates of nations were swayed by a teenage warrior-woman who believed she could hear the voice of God.

$13.49 Shop Now amazon.com

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

In the 1960s, five extraordinary women met at Radcliffe College’s experimental Institute for Independent Study: the writers Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and Tillie Olsen, and the artists Barbara Swan and Marianna Pineda. Doherty’s moving and masterful group biography shows how these women influenced one another while reshaping conversations about American feminism and culture.

$17.99 Shop Now amazon.com

Random House Trade Paperbacks The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris

The first of three books in Morris’s series on Teddy Roosevelt won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for biography—the closest thing a biographer can get to an EGOT. As the title indicates, The Rise covers the first four decades of Roosevelt’s life between 1858 and 1901, when he “transformed himself from a frail, asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man.” You might expect a presidential biography to be a solemn affair, but reading Morris feels like watching a rock opera.

$12.92 Shop Now amazon.com

Picador USA The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, by Kao Kalia Yang

Few biographers write about their own fathers, but after winning multiple awards for her memoir, The Latehomecomers, Kao Kalia Yang retold the life of her dad in this powerful book written with a daughter’s unique sense of compassion and awe. Bee Yang, a Hmong refugee who immigrated to Minnesota during the Laotian Civil War, shared the story of his people through singing poetry. His own story will absolutely make you cry.

$15.56 Shop Now amazon.com

Simon & Schuster Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight

If you write a book about Frederick Douglass, the influential abolitionist who escaped from slavery in Maryland, you have to compete with Douglass’s own autobiographies, including 1845’s gripping Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. But Blight’s biography—the literary equivalent of a six-season character-study television series like The Sopranos—is among the best ever written, garnering a Pulitzer Prize and the Lincoln Prize in 2019.

$14.49 Shop Now amazon.com

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

Zora Neale Hurston is on this list twice: once for a book she wrote, and again for a book written about her. Hurston’s latest biographer, Valerie Boyd, was an exquisite narrative journalist who explored every facet of Hurston’s life—her writing, of course, but also her friendships, her sexuality, and her spirituality.

$16.49 Shop Now amazon.com

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

The Paynes’s biography of Malcolm X won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, a stunning achievement they absolutely deserved. Les Payne spent almost thirty years writing the bulk of the book, while his daughter Tamara completed it and added additional materials after his death. The Dead Are Arising is a perfect companion to Malcolm X’s autobiography, filling in the gaps and adding new context to his tumultuous life story.

$19.13 Shop Now amazon.com

Holt Paperbacks W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963, by David Levering Lewis

Originally published as two volumes in 1993 and 2000—both of which won Pulitzer Prizes—this 900-page omnibus is a remarkably told chronicle of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, the “premier architect of the civil rights movement in America.” With its attention to detail and sweeping historical context, reading it is akin to watching a Ken Burns documentary.

$28.04 Shop Now amazon.com

Penguin Books Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow

Best known for writing the book that inspired the Broadway musical Hamilton—as well as biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, John D. Rockefeller, and the J.P. Morgan dynasty—Chernow’s best book might be this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of America’s first president, George Washington. Why? Because Chernow will change your impression of Washington from a boring, frowning statesman to something like an 18th-century punk rocker who liked to dance with women and hunt foxes, all while pulling no punches when it comes to Washington’s military failures and ownership of slaves.

$21.99 Shop Now amazon.com

Penguin Classics The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius

One of the earliest biographies still in print is this chronicle by the Roman historian Suetonius, written in 121 AD. Two millennia later, it remains the best record of the lives of the first twelve Roman emperors—Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian—and it’s surprisingly easy to read for something almost as old as the Colosseum.

$13.69 Shop Now amazon.com

Simon & Schuster A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar

A Beautiful Mind is a powerful, heart-wrenching book about the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and is now famous following a 2001 film about his life starring Russell Crowe. More than most books on this list, A Beautiful Mind is full of great dialogue, like the opening exchange between Nash and a Harvard professor who asks, “How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?” Nash responded, “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did.”

$13.37 Shop Now amazon.com

Princeton University Press Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges

The 2014 Benedict Cumberbatch film, The Imitation Game, was based on this heartbreaking 1983 biography of Alan Turing, the English mathematician who invented one of the earliest mechanical computers and helped the Allied Powers win World War II, only to be chemically castrated by the British government under laws prohibiting “homosexual acts.” But like Heather Clark’s biography of Sylvia Plath, Hodges doesn’t overemphasize the worst parts of Turing’s life, and the WWII material is as thrilling as a John Le Carré novel.

$11.99 Shop Now amazon.com

Beacon Press Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, by Imani Perry

Imani Perry just won a National Book Award for her memoir, South to America, but she also wrote a stunning biography of Lorraine Hansberry, the queer Chicago playwright behind A Raisin in the Sun whose social activism drew the attention of the FBI. The MacArthur Fellow writer Jacqueline Woodson said reading Looking for Lorraine “feels as though Ms. Hansberry has walked into my living room and sat down beside me”—the highest praise a biographer could possibly hope for.

$16.70 Shop Now amazon.com

Amistad Press Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", by Zora Neale Hurston

Written nearly 100 years ago but never published until 2018, this book from the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God is the riveting story of the last presumed survivor of the Altantic slave trade, Cudjo Lewis, including his capture in Africa, his journey on the Middle Passage, and his life as a slave in Alabama before the Civil War. Thanks to Hurston’s intimate first-person narration and her preservation of Lewis’s vernacular dialect, it feels like listening to the most fascinating conversation you’ve ever eavesdropped on, and it provides a devastating first-hand account of what it was like to live through the worst atrocity in American history.

$13.67 Shop Now amazon.com

Harper Perennial Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, by Hayden Herrera

Herrera’s 1983 masterpiece is the definitive biography of Frida Kahlo, adapted by Julie Taymor into the 2002 film Frida starring Salma Hayek. It’s all here in gorgeously written detail: Kahlo’s accident, her paintings, her marriage, her affairs, and her impact on both Mexican history and art. It’s also extremely valuable for correcting the historical record that Kahlo herself sometimes misrepresented for effect—like when she changed her own birth year to match the beginning of Mexico’s revolution.

$21.59 Shop Now amazon.com

Liveright Publishing Corporation Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin

It’s rare for the biography of a great writer to be just as good as said writer’s best work, but that’s certainly the case with Ruth Franklin’s captivating book about Shirley Jackson. Her sentences are so good! Her plotting is so smooth! Plus, fans of The Haunting at Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle will eat up Jackson’s real-life inspiration behind those unforgettable novels.

$15.27 Shop Now amazon.com

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

Fraser’s first-ever biography is a genuine masterpiece, both for the quality of its writing and the depth of insights it brings to the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Midwestern author of the Little House on the Prairie books between 1932 and 1943. It won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2018, and it conveys such a strong sense of place, you can smell the Dakota milkweed and switchgrass.

$9.89 Shop Now amazon.com

Vintage The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro

Every volume of Caro’s four-part (so far) series on Lyndon Johnson is amazing, but his crowning achievement might still be this biography of Robert Moses, the urban planner who reshaped New York City in the mid-twentieth century. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1975, and you can instantly see why from page one: Caro can set a scene and establish characters as well as Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola.

$18.91 Shop Now amazon.com

W. W. Norton & Company The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed

“Until very recently, American historians were no more receptive to arguments about a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings than The Da Vinci Code's Catholic Church was to a romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene,” wrote the historian Jane Dailey in 2010. But everything changed thanks to Annette Gordon-Reed’s groundbreaking research proving that Jefferson had children with one of his own slaves. This comprehensive biography of Hemings’s family before, during, and after their lives at Monticello belongs on the biography genre’s Mount Rushmore thanks to Gordon-Reed’s revelatory investigation and her stellar narration of history from a previously hidden perspective.

$18.95 Shop Now amazon.com