35 Best Biographies to Read in 2024 — Greatest Biographies Ever
FAQs
What are biography books?
Biographies are nonfiction books about a person’s life. They may look broadly at the full span of a person or focus on a particular time period or aspect of interest—like someone’s early years or the years leading up to a particular event. Biographies are grounded in facts and supported by documents, letters and journals, quotations and collected research.
What is the difference between a biography, an autobiography and a memoir?
Biographies always have both the advantages and disadvantages of being written by someone else: someone who is at least one degree apart from the subject. They provide a different perspective, holding up a mirror to reflect their subject.
Autobiographies, however, are written by the subject of the book. While they also focus on facts and use documents and quotations, they can be a bit inspirational and emotive because they’re written in the first person. You often get a lot more personal insights and ideas from autobiographies, but you have to be more mindful of personal bias as well as blindspots or the fickleness of memory. Becoming by Michelle Obama is pretty easily classifiable as an autobiography.
And now for memoirs. While they are written by the main subjects themselves, they often read more like a novel. They also tend to play more with memory, use more literary devices and can sometimes mix reality up a bit (like exact chronology) for the sake of the emotional or personal truths being shared. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is a good example of a memoir.
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Sources:
- Natalie Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College and author of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner; email interview, June 2024
- Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring; email interview, June 2024
- Andrew Lipstein, author of The Vegan and Something Rotten; email interview, June 2024
- James Marcus, author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson; email interview, June 2024
- Kate White, author of The Last Time She Saw Him; email interview, June 2024
