Biography as Literature
Biography is the genre that makes history personal. At its best, a great biography reveals the inner life of a person who shaped the world — the anxieties behind Churchill's imperious certainty, the self-doubt behind Lincoln's public composure, the specific texture of a life lived in the shadow of great events. At its best, biography is indistinguishable from the finest literary fiction in its psychological richness and narrative power.
Our editorial scoring for biography draws on specialist prizes (the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) as well as mainstream literary recognition.
The Ten Greatest Biographies and Memoirs
1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
Dictated to journalist Alex Haley in the months before Malcolm X's assassination, this memoir tracks one of the most remarkable transformations in American life: from petty criminal and drug addict to Nation of Islam minister to human rights activist. Time magazine named it one of the ten most important non-fiction books of the twentieth century. Its editorial score in our database is among the ten highest in any non-fiction category.
2. Long Walk to Freedom — Nelson Mandela (1994)
Mandela's autobiography, written largely during his 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island, is one of the most extraordinary personal narratives in the history of political leadership. The account of his childhood, his radicalisation, his imprisonment, and his emergence as South Africa's first democratically elected president is told with a calm, measured dignity that itself illuminates his character.
3. The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank (1947)
The most widely read document of the Holocaust remains, more than seventy years after its composition, an incomparably intimate portrait of a young woman's inner life under conditions of extreme danger. Frank's literary gifts — her precision, her humour, her capacity for self-analysis — make the diary an enduring literary achievement as well as a historical document.
4. The Power Broker — Robert Caro (1974)
At 1,344 pages, Caro's biography of Robert Moses — the unelected urban planner who reshaped New York City and, by extension, American urban planning — is the greatest work of biographical non-fiction in American history. It won the Pulitzer Prize and has been continuously in print for fifty years. The central argument — that power corrupts not through corruption but by becoming an end in itself — has rarely been demonstrated so rigorously.
5. The Years of Lyndon Johnson — Robert Caro (1982–ongoing)
Caro's multi-volume biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson is the most sustained work of political biography in any language. Four volumes spanning 3,500 pages have been published; a fifth is forthcoming. Each volume won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, or both. The second volume, Means of Ascent, is among the most devastating portraits of political ambition in literature.
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou (1969)
The first volume of Angelou's seven-part autobiography, covering her childhood in segregated Arkansas and her adolescence in San Francisco, is simultaneously a memoir, a work of social history, and a testament to the power of literature and community to survive trauma. One of the most widely taught memoirs in American schools.
7. The Periodic Table — Primo Levi (1975)
An Italian Jewish chemist structures his autobiography around the elements of the periodic table — each chapter named for a different element, each chapter a different phase of his life, culminating in his survival of Auschwitz. The result is one of the most original and formally perfect memoirs in world literature.
8. Churchill: A Life — Martin Gilbert (1991)
Martin Gilbert's one-volume biography of Churchill — distilled from his eight-volume official biography — remains the standard single-volume account of Churchill's life. Scrupulously researched and written with narrative drive, it covers one of the most consequential lives in twentieth-century history without hagiography.
9. Just Kids — Patti Smith (2010)
The musician's memoir of her formative years in New York City with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe won the National Book Award and is widely regarded as the finest rock-era memoir in English. Smith's prose has the quality of her lyrics: lapidary, image-rich, and unexpectedly tender.
10. The Glass Castle — Jeannette Walls (2005)
Walls's memoir of her chaotic, peripatetic childhood with dysfunctional but brilliant parents who rejected conventional society became a publishing phenomenon and launched a decade of "difficult childhood" memoirs. But it stands apart because Walls refuses easy judgement — of her parents, herself, or the life she led.
Contemporary Memoirs with Strong Editorial Recognition
The twenty-first century has produced a golden age of memoir. Among the most critically recognised: Tara Westover's Educated (2018), Roxane Gay's Hunger (2017), Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015, National Book Award), Michelle Obama's Becoming (2018), and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House (2019).