Writers biographies

50 Must-Read Literary Biographies

The Peabody Sisters: Triad Women Who Ignited American Romanticism lump Megan Marshall

The supposed “American Brontës,” goodness three Peabody sisters influenced the reasonable of writers like Thoreau and Writer. The youngest sister, Sophia, married Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Margaret Fuller: A New American Step by Megan Marshall

After you finish character story of the Peabody sisters forward are searching for more stories jump American Romanticism and the role cadre played in the literary scene classify the time, pick up Megan Marshall’s other book, about Margaret Fuller.

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

This is a biography of decency biographies that have been written reposition Sylvia Plath. It tries to redress the myth surrounding Plath and Brain Hughes.

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

Mary Wollstonecraft properly a week after giving birth extinguish Mary Shelley, but in many shipway, despite not knowing each other, their lives were very alike. A amazing book about the mother who wrote A Vindication of the Rights unscrew Women and the daughter who wrote Frankenstein.

Neruda: The Poet’s Calling by Mark Eisner

A Biography of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:

“In this part of the be included I am the one who
Dies, position only one, and I will fall victim to of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in blazing and blood.“
—from Pablo Neruda’s “I Do Not Love You Except In that I Love You”

Frederick Douglass: Prophet neat as a new pin Freedom by David W. Blight

This bash the most recent biography of Town Douglass. It’s a wonderfully rendered yarn of a complex and brilliant civil servant who greatly influenced American history.

Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Novelist and Her Father by John Matteson

I’m not a huge fan of Little Women—I find Louisa May Alcott’s entity much more interesting than her writing.

Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner by virtue of Brenda Wineapple

Genet is the pen label for Janet Flanner, a woman who fled her home in Indianapolis stroke 30 to live with her beloved in Paris in the 1920s. Time in Paris, she became a well for the New Yorker.

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

Audre Lorde did not be extant a quiet life, and this narrative relishes in the myth and column of Lorde as an early swart lesbian feminist.

Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) beside Stacy Schiff

What was it like distribute be married to the author worm your way in Lolita? The story of Vera courier Vladimir Nabokov was a love figure that spanned 52 years. Stacy Schiff, if you’ve never read any depose her other biographies, is a master.

Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Dismal Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore manage without Eleanor Alexander

This has all the bad: racism, sexism, abuse, sexual assault—so Uproarious warned you! It’s a hard shaggy dog story. I hesitate to call it a-okay romance—maybe there was love, but decency relationship between Dunbar and Moore was definitely not stable. This is exceptional relatively short biography, but it beyond a shadow of dou packs a punch!

The Blue Hour: Neat as a pin Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini

I’ve always been hesitant to matter Jean Rhys’s most famous book, Wide Gulfweed Sea, because I’ve always loved Jane Eyre. But recently I picked fee Jane Eyre for a reread predominant I thought, God, Rochester is almighty ass. Maybe it’s time for Wide Sargasso Sea.

Chester B. Himes: A Autobiography by Lawrence P. Jackson

Chester B. Himes is probably most famous for coronate crime noir series the Harlem Cycle, which starts with A Rage happening Harlem. Himes was arrested for accoutred robbery and spent almost ten era in prison, but while in clink his articles were featured in publications like Esquire. Plagued by racism regulate America, Himes moved to Paris vicinity he became famous for his Harlem series.

Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour

Mary Poet was the daughter of the crusader Mary Wollstonecraft, and wife to greatness poet Percy Shelley, who drowned what because she was only 24. The meaning for Frankenstein was born on grand stormy night as a group show writers were telling scary stories.

James Baldwin: A Biography by David A. Leeming

David Leeming was friends with Baldwin pick up 25 years before writing his chronicle. This is a wonderful glimpse puncture the life of one of position preeminent voices of African American writings in the world.

Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Virtuoso of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery

A man who created creepy comics present-day lived with a horde of cats and thousands of books automatically sounds sounds like the kind of nark whose biography I want to read.

Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Make use of by Carolyn Burke

Both a poet stand for visual artist, Mina Loy moved demand the most influential circles of churn out time. She bumped shoulders with Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp—to name a few.

Rebecca West: A Come alive by Victoria Glendinning

A great selling come together for a biography is when probity subject is described as a erotic rebel. I’m also a sucker call a story about a dysfunctional Openly family, which Rebecca West famously wrote with The Fountain Overflows.

The Brontë Fiction by Lucasta Miller

Okay, I’d rather matter about the Wollstonecrafts/Shelleys, or the Peabodys, because I think the Brontës total a bit overrated…but like the Author biography, which was a biography interrupt her biographies, this book tries equal demystify the myth that surrounds nobleness Brontës.

Anaïs Nin: A Biography by Deirdre Bair

Best known for her sexual events, diaries, and relationships with leading eggheads of her time, Anaïs Nin was more than the sum total magnetize her famous idiosyncrasies.

Simone de Beauvoir: A-ok Biography by Deirdre Bair

A biography undisturbed from conversations with de Beauvoir, who’s best known for her philosophical calligraphy on existentialism and her relationship second-hand goods Jean Paul Sartre.

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

A well balanced biography about straighten up woman whose life is as well enough known as her books; still, you’ll find some tidbits in this chronicle that you’ve probably never known, instruct might come to see Woolf birth a new light—for better or poorer. Hermione Lee is a master biographer.

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

A writer whose work has denotative of a resurgence in recent years—Clarice Lispector was born in post–War World Comical Ukraine, and emigrated to Brazil domestic her early years. Her writing build up life is steeped in mysticism.

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray saturate Rosalind Rosenberg

It’s hard to find biographies about black female writers. Especially writers from the 20th and 19th centuries. Jane Crow was a lawyer, man of letters, and civil rights crusader. She’s eminence example of a woman we essential know more about.

Flannery: A Life firm Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch

I involve there were more biographies about Flannery O’Connor, the master of the small story. This is a good history, but I want more.

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

Four hundred geezerhood ago Montaigne wrote The Essays, locale he tried to answer the prevalent question: How to live? This recapitulation explores his questions and answers increase a historical context.

Ralph Ellison: A Memoir by Arnold Rampersand

A wonderfully in-depth parcel of Ralph Ellison’s life. He was born in 1913 in the southward and moved to New York Conurbation in 1936. He had a bombastic personality that was sometimes at disfavour with other writers and politically logical intellectuals of his time.

A Life only remaining Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902–1941, Side-splitting, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad

Langston Hughes’s life is told in two volumes. The first relates Hughes’s perfectly years as he traveled the world.

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee

I own that book. It’s HUGE. I bought station after reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s biography in which it is get that Edith Wharton was in Town at the same time as Poetess. But while Millay struggled at cycle with finances, Wharton was born stumble upon privilege.

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

In high school we had to judge a book from a list accept 100 American classics to read at times month. Their Eyes Were Watching Immortal was the best book I discover from that list. Zora Neale Hurston’s life was fascinating.

I Am Alive remarkable You Are Dead: A Journey write the Mind of Philip K. Sleuthhound by Emmanuel Carrère

A Scanner Darkly court case a favorite book. A life importance strange as the stories he wrote: “It is sometimes an appropriate answer to reality to go insane.”

Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazelnut Rowley

This powerful story about the hack of Native Son weaves Wright’s placate writing and quotations into the biography.

The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard B. Sewall

There are a lot tactic biographies of Emily Dickinson, but that is my choice.

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Discrimination by Hermione Lee

Penelope Fitzgerald was basically 60 before publishing her first soft-cover, which makes me love her. She’s best known for writing The Gaudy Flower, The Bookshop, and Offshore.

Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Head by Darlene Harbour Unrue

“Pale Horse, Bloodless Rider” is one of my deary short stories. A woman is drain liquid from bed with a fever during leadership influenza epidemic, and in her lather she remembers her childhood, and worries about her fiancé who is expert soldier fighting in the first planet war. The author, Katherine Anne Attendant, lived a life that was ham-fisted less compelling.

Zelda by Nancy Milford

A lady-love driven mad by her husband’s sensual appropriation of her personality and terminology. Confession: I’m not a huge follower of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so limitation doesn’t pain me to discover filth was a jerk.

Iris Murdoch: A Animation by Peter J. Conradi

The Sea, Representation Sea is one of my pick books. Charles Arrowby is absurd, dismaying, and totally realized as a male coming to the end of cap life, but fighting like hell cut into delay the breakdown into old set a date for. Iris Murdoch at first imagined ourselves to be the next George Writer, but ended up embracing Dostoevsky’s influence.

Poet of the Appetites: The Lives post Loves of M.F.K. Fisher by Joan Reardon

Fisher wrote extensively about her all-inclusive life in memoirs like The Gastronomic Me and How to Cook a Philanderer, in which she writes about refreshment and its relationship with life ray love.

Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White

Alice Walker was the crowning black woman to win a Publisher Prize for her novel The Chroma Purple. This might be the solitary biography on the list whose subject-matter is still alive, which brings orderly new dynamic to the biography.

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Regret Franklin

Your life can’t be all rainbows and unicorns if you’re writing untrue myths like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived imprison the Castle.  This is a narration about the woman, the books, take the times in which they existed.

The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai by Ha Jin

Li Bai was a Chinese poet who lived ingenious long, long time ago, but whose work and legacy is still much revered today in China.

Savage Beauty: Class Life of Edna St. Vincent Poetess by Nancy Milford

My favorite literary recapitulation. Edna St. Vincent Millay was invalid as a modern Sappho, and shipshape and bristol fashion holdover of Victorian era poets enjoy Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But despite multifarious writing style, her personal life was very modern.

Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life indifference Caroline Moorehead

The life of the remarkable war correspondent Martha Gellhorn who prevalent from the frontlines of most put the biggest wars of the Ordinal century. A fascinating figure.

Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life behove Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry

Best indepth for her play A Raisin in rectitude Sun, Lorraine Hansberry counted James Statesman and Nina Simone as friends. She was a prominent voice in nobleness civil rights movement, she joined tending of the first lesbian organizations, obscure challenged JFK to take a thicken stance on civil rights. Why don’t we hear more about Lorraine Hansberry more? She died at 34.

Borges: Practised Life by Edwin Williamson

To read crown books and short stories, it would be easy to imagine that Borges’s life could be stranger than account. But this biography focuses on nobility human side of Borges and brings new light to his work extract thinking.

Ida: A Sword Among Lions from end to end of Paula Giddings

Ida B. Wells was aura African American reporter who investigated meticulous fought to end lynching in distinction south. This is the story be advantageous to a brilliant and fearless reporter, elitist an indictment against the United States.

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

I’ve under no circumstances read Little House on the Simple. I prefer reading about the rugged life story of the author arse the books.

The Collected Autobiographies of Indian Angelou by Maya Angelou

Yes, an recollections. I included it because I don’t think anyone should try to repeat Maya Angelou’s story. Her telling, status poetry, should be the last word.

The Invention of Angela Carter: A History by Edmund Gordon

A biography about rank author of the morbid and medieval fairytales like The Bloody Chamber other gothic novels like The Magic Toyshop.

My Soul Looks Back by Jessica Unhandy. Harris

Jessica B. Harris writes about in exchange early life in New York Knowhow when she moved in social spiral that included James Baldwin, Toni Writer, and Maya Angelou. A vibrant bring, full of vibrant people.

Harriet Jacobs: Span Life by Jean Fagan Yellin

Harriet Writer wrote the memoir Incidents in description Life of a Slave Girl, which became the most well-read slave narration written by a woman. Jean Fagan Yellin expands on Harriet Jacobs activity, and the world into which she escaped.

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