Eight of the Most Fascinating Biographies to Read

Literary biography is a cruel genre. The authors of these books—by which I mean not just biographies about literary figures but also those that aspire to writerly excellence—have been described by the writer Janet Malcolm as “professional burglars.” After rifling through a person’s affairs, they must conjure inside their pages a living, breathing human being—and then, inevitably, they’ll have to close the coffin on their resurrected subject. But I like to think the “literary” element can temper the sting of these dastardly deeds, insofar as the author is tasked with perpetrating them in the most humane way possible: with the appropriate amount of reverence, style, and, yes, love. This is, at least, what I tried to do in my own literary biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, about James Baldwin’s life and relationships.

I was inspired by other biographers, including the great Robert Caro, who has immortalized Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Moses. I followed the essential dictums from his memoir, Working (turn every page, for example, and visit every setting possible)—but I was perhaps guided even more by memoirists, novelists, essayists, and poets. The eight titles below include some that particularly shaped my approach in Baldwin; others are more recent, artful examples that incorporate complex layers of experience and emotion. Each is animated by the author’s love—for their subject, for language, and for pushing the boundaries of what a biography can do.

Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee

Lee opens her classic 1997 work by quoting a question posed by Woolf herself—“My God, how does one write a Biography?”—and responds over the course of more than 700 magnificent pages. Lee is all too aware that Woolf was a skeptic of the genre (she preferred the term “life-writing”), and with that caveat in mind, she produces something genuinely novelistic in scope, detail, and insight. Her concerted attention to place (she writes about Woolf’s childhood summer house, her various London flats, and her charming later home in Sussex) provides the backdrop for her true subjects: the relationships that formed and sustained Woolf—with her parents; her husband, Leonard; and her lover Vita Sackville-West, for instance. Along the way, Lee is attentive to the roles of mental illness and gender in Woolf’s genius, and proves that a doorstop biography doesn’t have to be an exercise in tedium. Rather, it can be its opposite—a thrilling work of absorption and revelation.

[Lauren Groff: Why read literary biography?]

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, by Susana M. Morris

Morris’s book also takes on the challenge of describing a complex female genius: the trailblazing science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler described her will to write as a “positive obsession”—something propulsive and dangerous, connected to “not being able to stop at all.” Morris skillfully blends Butler’s difficult and singular story with cogent analyses of how her fiction critiqued—and predicted—late-20th and early-21st-century America (for example, Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, tells the story of a young Black woman in the 2020s whose community is locked in conflict with a tyrannical autocrat while Los Angeles burns). Morris makes pressing political and academic ideas accessible while allowing them to remain as expansive as the universes that Butler explored so brilliantly. That she does so in just a few hundred pages, while losing none of the crucial context of Black feminism, the civil-rights movement, American imperialism, and the Reagan era, is a testament to Morris’s skill as that rare scholar who is also very much a writer. Her own positive obsession with Butler becomes the reader’s great reward.

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo

This book rightfully won a Pulitzer Prize in recognition of the depth of Woo’s research, the accomplishment of her writing, and her generous idea of what a biography can be. Rather than recount the arc of a single figure’s life, Woo has written both a collective history lesson and an exhilarating tale. Her focus is on Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia to the North in 1848 by dressing up, ingeniously, as master and slave. As the couple make their way up to Philadelphia, then Boston, and eventually to England, vivid details and expertly rendered scenes of danger give way to an important historical record of slavery and the vicissitudes of the post-emancipation era. In her coda, Woo writes with great compassion and erudition about what can’t be found in archives, particularly the specifics of how Ellen Craft died. This is a stirring example of how, even after subjects have been roused so masterfully, mysteries can persist: It remains unclear when Ellen was ultimately buried under a tree in Georgia, the state that she and her beloved had fled.

[Read: History is never only one person’s story]

The Age of Phillis, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Although this book was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, it could easily have been categorized as biography. As both a work of life-writing and a book about the challenges of writing, it may have no equal. Focusing on the groundbreaking 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, the collection reimagines her childhood in West Africa, her existence with her white American enslavers, her friendships and her marriage to John Peters, and, in the volume’s haunting final poem, her death at roughly the age of 31. The volume concludes with a learned essay reflecting on the possibilities and the perils of biographical writing: Jeffers questions, for example, the historical account of a 19th-century white woman who claims to be related to Wheatley’s enslaver, as well as racist accounts of Wheatley’s husband in early biographies. By moving through and beyond several genres, this book joins a rich new tradition of what the scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” a mode of imaginative writing that fills in gaps of African American history, correcting misrepresentations along the way.

The Flower Bearers, by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Much like Jeffers, Griffiths is gifted across several genres—as a poet, a novelist, and now, a memoirist. In this book, she interweaves three stories: her own genesis as a young artist in New York City; the sudden loss of a key member of her chosen family, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon; and the near-fatal 2022 attack on her husband, Salman Rushdie, less than a year later. Not since Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name has the pluck and resilience required of a Black woman hoping to be an artist been captured with such a resoundingly original and poetic voice. In the end, though, this book is a love story. The author’s depth of emotion for her friend, for her partner, and for the self she has lost radiates with deep, hard-earned understanding.

[Read: A book that puts the life back into biography]

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan, by Darryl Pinckney

This was, hands down, my favorite book of 2022. Pinckney, a celebrated novelist and critic, animates not just his relationship with his teacher and longtime mentor, the legendary writer and editor Elizabeth Hardwick, but an entire milieu: the world, by turns rarefied and gritty, of literary New York in the 1970s. Pinckney introduces the reader to a number of men, and he invokes the devastations of the impending AIDS epidemic in a wholly original way as he suggests that they will be lost to the disease in the years to come. Both somber and hilarious, this memoir elevates gossip to high art, taking readers through Pinckney’s years trawling the East Village in the era when he wrote his earliest articles for The New York Review of Books. It may well send you back to read, or reread, some of the figures covered in its pages—Hardwick and Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy. After that, you may yearn to read this volume all over again; I did precisely that.

This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, by Lauren Sandler

Sandler’s story of a year in the life of Camilla, an unhoused Latina woman in New York City, is a product of the kind of immersive reporting that produced Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here. As Camilla tries to navigate the city’s Byzantine public housing system in her quest for a home for herself and her newborn son, she emerges as a heroic young woman whose obvious smarts and resourcefulness are still no match for a woefully insufficient bureaucracy. Difficult material, yes—but somehow Sandler injects snap and humor into these pages, whether they’re set at the welfare office or on the road in the Dominican Republic, making this a true pleasure to read. No wonder her feat of reporting has inspired a staged musical titled Shelter. Last summer, a rousing workshop version starred the ebullient Tony Award–nominee Jasmine Amy Rogers—and the form uncannily suits the emotions of Camilla’s journey.

Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff

Schiff, the consummate biographer as literary stylist, manifests the nearly impossible by portraying, in technicolor, a subject who left behind virtually no primary sources and whose history is encased in centuries of mythologizing. Schiff’s method is steeped in the techniques of writers such as Caro and Lee, augmented by her own cinematic prose. She addresses the lack of access to Cleopatra’s childhood, for example, by turning the ancient city of Alexandria into a glittering character itself, letting it take up an early section of the book. But her greatest ingenuity lies in how she addresses the death of her subject. Instead of just recapitulating questionable myths around Cleopatra’s demise by way of poisonous asp, Schiff grants her not one possible death but two: She speculates, convincingly, that the queen may have poisoned herself in a final act of agency before her imminent capture by the Romans. In Schiff’s deft hands, the biography functions as an historical corrective that is also an act of mercy.