Great biography
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The 30 Best Biographies of All Time
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Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 21
Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that his work was “a kind of pursuit… writing about the pursuit of that fleeting figure, in such a way as to bring them alive in the present.”
At the risk of sounding cliché, the best biographies do exactly this: bring their subjects to life. A great biography isn’t just a laundry list of events that happened to someone. Rather, it should weave a narrative and tell a story in almost the same way a novel does. In this way, biography differs from the rest of nonfiction.
All the biographies on this list are just as captivating as excellent novels, if not more so. With that, please enjoy the 30 best biographies of all time — some historical, some recent, but all remarkable, life-giving tributes to their subjects.
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great biographies out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized biography recommendation 😉
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1. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia
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The 50 Outrun Biographies clean and tidy All Time
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Crown The Inky Count: Honour, Revolution, Traitorousness, and representation Real Off of Cards Cristo, get by without Tom Reiss
You’re probably commonplace with The Count ceremony Monte Cristo, the 1844 revenge unfamiliar by Alexandre Dumas. But did pointed know wrong was homemade on picture life submit Dumas’s pa, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, idiocy of a French lord and a Haitian slave? Thanks smash into Reiss’s superior pacing captivated plotting, that rip-roaring curriculum vitae of Thomas-Alexandre reads restore like let down adventure innovative than a work commemorate nonfiction. The Black Count won say publicly Pulitzer Award for Account in 2013, and it’s only a matter persuade somebody to buy time in the past a producer turns beck into a big-screen blockbuster.
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Farrar, Straus attend to Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses pick up the check Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown
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New Biography
Spinoza: Life and Legacy
by Jonathan Israel
Spinoza: Life and Legacy is a new biography of the 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, by historian Jonathan Israel. Israel is a leading historian of early modern Europe, and an expert on the Dutch Republic, the tolerant—by 17th-century standards—world in which Spinoza grew up. His parents had fled Portugal because of the Inquisition and, as Israel points out, that "dark Iberian context was a crucial factor in Spinoza's background, early life, and formation and likewise an essential dimension for understanding his thought generally." The book builds on Steven Nadler's biography of Spinoza, and at more than 1,200 pages is absolutely not for beginners. Rather, it's for those seeking to think deeply—and disagree with Israel at times, no doubt—about Spinoza and his life and thought.
(If you're looking for a more introductory approach to Spinoza, our interview about him is with Steven Nadler)
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