The Best Biographies: The 2025 NBCC Shortlist

Let me begin by remarking on what a wonderfully varied shortlist you have settled upon this year. Did you notice any trends among the submissions?

There are two very obvious trends. The first is that all the authors identify as women, and the second is that four out of five biographical subjects identified as women. I think that’s the best way to phrase it—Candy Darling, one of the biographical subjects, was born a man, but her ardent desire was to be a woman, and she worked hard at transitioning.

I understand all the judges are book critics, and so you must have an unusual awareness of and understanding of the field of biography. Is that fair to say?

I think so. Some people in the committee are more knowledgeable than others. I know you spoke to Liz Taylor recently, who is a real student of biography and has published a biography herself, and there are other biographers on the committee. The rest of us are critics or teaching criticism. Personally, my relationship with biographies is more as a general reader.

That makes sense. And it’s very helpful to have a specific biography shortlist, because it can be difficult to keep track of new publications in this genre, their subject matter being so disparate.

Yes, they’re definitely in their own particular slot. I love biographies, I really do. Sometimes it’s a sales job to get somebody interested in reading one, because they can be like: Hey, it’s 1000 pages long—how much time can I devote to one person? But I do feel they are a great way of seeing history: through the eyes of an individual.

Absolutely. Shall we start with Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, by the historian Jane Kamensky? Could you introduce us to Candice Vadala— also known as Candida Royalle—the subject of this book?

Sure. She became an internationally recognised pornography star, but she started out life as a pretty conventional teenager from Long Island. Jane Kamensky had access to her diaries, and they make for fascinating reading. As a teenager, she was drawing fashion, writing ‘I love so-and-so,’ mostly interested in fashion and boys. A very exuberant individual.

She was from a fairly conventional background, but from the moment she left home she threw herself into art. She went to art school—this was the late 1960s New York, so there was a lot going on. Then, like many people did at that point in their lives in that era, she got in a car with three other women and drove to San Francisco, hit it right at the moment where things were really blowing up there.

She did pretty much everything you could do there, and did it with a lot of creativity. She enrolled in art classes, experimented with a lot of drugs, had a lot of sexual partners, lived in a commune—lived, in some ways, a fairly ragged life—and found she could make money working in sexually explicit films.

“I do feel that biographies are a great way of seeing history: through the eyes of an individual”

That’s how her career in pornography started. Unlike a lot of people who worked in the industry—although everything I know about porn, I learned from this book, so I should try not to make generalisations—she developed a real desire to make porn that would appeal to women, that would tap into female fantasies. She considered most porn to be very male-oriented and pretty brutal.

So that’s what she did. She approached it first from the viewpoint of an actor, and eventually became a producer. She was a very attractive woman, and evolved again into a kind of spokesperson for porn in an era where a lot of people were really objecting to its proliferation. Everybody from right-wing politicians to a pretty potent strain of the feminist movement was saying that porn was exploitative of and dangerous to women. So she wound up on talk shows, testified at government hearings, that sort of thing.

She never had a lot of success as a businessperson, and the end of her life was hard. I think she ended up feeling she hadn’t achieved her potential. She died of cancer pretty young. I guess if Kamensky hadn’t come along people might have forgotten all about her. But Kamensky—who is a professor emerita at Harvard and is now the president of The Thomas Jefferson Foundation—got access to all the Candida Royalle papers donated to the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, which studies women in their evolution in this country. Then she wrote this book.

I personally got a lot out of this book, because Candida Royalle and I were almost the same age. Kamensky does a great job resurrecting the tumult of the times we grew up in. I really, really loved that. But it was sad to have to watch her as she waged some painful personal battles.

I like the idea of Kamensky bringing a real academic rigour to a subject like this, elevating her as a person of significance in American cultural history.

Yes, I agree.

And perhaps we could say something similar of the second book on the NBCC biography shortlist—and, in fact, the winning biography—which is Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Supererstar by Cynthia Carr. It features the queer icon who was—can I describe her as a ‘muse’ of Andy Warhol?

I don’t know about ‘muse.’ She was definitely part of Warhol’s pack.

This is a compassionate portrait of Candy Darling, who lived a pretty tough life. Like Candida Royalle, she started life in a New York borough. She was born James Lawrence Slattery, but from the beginning it was very apparent that she wanted to become a woman, a very glamorous woman. She studied cosmetology, and worshipped iconic movie stars like Kim Novak and Jean Harlow. She wanted nothing to do with feminism, which I found kind of interesting. She really wanted to be a woman, in the way people thought about women in those days.

So she left Queens and wound up in this group of people that flocked around Andy Warhol. At this point, she looked really good—beautiful in a very willowy, blonde, movie-star kind of way. Andy ended up using her in his films, and she became a movie star of sorts, although not the kind of movie star she really wanted to be. An Andy Warhol version of a movie star.

She’s the ‘Candy’ that Lou Reed was talking about in his song ‘A Walk on the Wild Side.’

Yes. And she really did walk on the wild side. The hard part is that nobody really took care of her, including Warhol. She had to turn to sex work to survive. She was often homeless. To aid her transition, she took a lot of untested hormones. I’ll get back to that in a minute. But she did achieve the fame she was looking for, in a way.

She was in a lot of Warhol’s films, she was in plays, and she was looking to break out more generally in conventional movies. But that’s where she hit a wall. Conventional movies didn’t want somebody with her background, and she ended up dying very young at 29, also of cancer, perhaps brought on by these hormonal drugs.

I simultaneously felt so much sympathy for her and aggravation at the people who had a lot more resources than her and didn’t really help her. But she also had some really good friends. One, Jeremiah Newton, helped her a lot while she was living. Shortly after she died, he started interviewing all her closest companions and friends. But he never ended up writing a book himself. When Cynthia Carr started working on this book, Newton turned all that over to her.

Wow, what a treasure trove for a biographer.

Those interviews lend the book a real immediacy. It’s a very interesting read.

Our third book on the 2025 biography shortlist is Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse.

I love this book! Jean Strouse is such a superb writer and she has won several prizes for her biographies of the American financier J.P. Morgan and Alice James, Henry James’s sister. So she’s super familiar with the territory of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which enabled her to create this beautiful background, then plug her characters in.

Sargent was a portrait painter, as most people know, and he painted people who were famous or rich or prominent in some other way, like politics, art and literature. The book is a window into this world of wealthy, entitled people around the turn of the last century.

The Wertheimers, who are the main subject of this book, were kind of outliers in that world because they were Jewish. The first Wertheimer who emigrated from Bavaria to England made a real fortune, first by creating copies of rare antiques, and then by selling rare antiques himself. Then his son, Asher, became a big-time art dealer. The portraits that Sargent did, nine from this one family, all ended up in the National Gallery. Now they are at Tate Britain.

The portraits are just amazing. Everyone from Asher to his beautiful, rich, long-suffering wife. And the portraits of the children are fantastic too, especially the daughters, who were very exuberant people who had the means to live life at its fullest.

There was also a lot of tragedy because they—the kids, especially—had perhaps too much money, and suffered from what can happen to the next generation of wealth, often through a lack of focus or purpose. Some died early by drug overdose, or in wartime. One who went to Italy ended up under house arrest under Mussolini and didn’t come to a good end.

Strouse creates both a vanished world and these wonderful characters who lived in it. And it’s a look at painting and art as Sargent practiced it. I love reading about all these things, so I loved this book.

Thank you. Next we have Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tia Miles.

In this country, Harriet Tubman is practically a pop culture icon at this point. She was an escaped slave who very bravely turned around and became a key part of the Underground Railroad, rescuing as many as 80 slaves and getting them to the North or to Canada. Many books have been written about her, from books for children to full-fledged biographies.

Miles was interested in something different; she’s interested in Tubman’s spirituality. Tubman was very religious, and her conception of God was such that God was there alongside her, helping her and protecting her. This hasn’t been written about much.

The problem is that Harriet Tubman did not write about herself. While she was alive, she dictated her life to a number of women who were mostly white, middle- to upper-class abolitionists. So her life is interpreted through them. There’s nothing direct from Tubman about how she felt about her faith.

I should back up and say that Miles is really well-versed in the lives of enslaved women. She has written other books on the topic.

Right, I remember discussing All That She Carried with Susannah Lipscomb when it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction here in the UK last year.

So, like Strouse, she already knew the territory. She went to texts about other Black women of that era who were very spiritual—primarily preachers—and took their words and tried to shape them in a way that would reflect Tubman’s faith. So it’s not a fully-fledged biography; to me it reads more like an extended essay on the faith that these women had, how it sustained them. Miles’s deep reservoir of knowledge really carries it along.

I should note for our readers that it is the first in a new Penguin series of shorter biographies about notable Black figures, Significations. The New York Times called it a ‘scholarly megaproject.’

Absolutely.

Finally we come to The World She Edited: Katharine S White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading.

Wow, this is a book that, if you like The New Yorker you really should read. It’s basically the story of how the New Yorker blew up into a major influence in literature and a cultural treasure in general.

Katharine White was from an upper-class family, went to Bryn Mawr, one of the ‘Seven Sister’ colleges—the women’s version of the Ivy Leagues—and got married young. But somehow she walked into this job. Harold Ross, the then-editor of The New Yorker, hired her as a manuscript reader five months after the magazine was founded, and she succeeded so well in this male-dominated world that within a year or two she was what amounted to the executive editor.

She was incredibly influential, and shaped the magazine as a home for great writers, all while juggling a very complicated personal life. She divorced her first husband, with whom she had a child. Then she married E.B. White, a writer everyone knows as the author of Charlotte’s Web but who was an amazing New Yorker writer in his own right. So she really knew complicated writers from the inside out.

As a freelancer, you will be astonished at how much care White took with her writers. She supported them, wrote them letters, found them agents, tided them over when they didn’t have money. Even her rejection letters were scrupulously detailed. That’s how she managed to bring on so many amazing writers, from Mary McCarthy to Vladimir Nabokov to John Updike. She turned the New Yorker from a comedic rag to the place you wanted to be published as a writer in America in the 20th century.

This sounds so interesting, particularly for writers working today. She sounds like the Platonic ideal of the editor.

Have you ever been treated that way? I have not. And I was an editor myself for a long time and tried to be that kind of editor, but you get overwhelmed with everything. It’s really great to see that these writers got that kind of support.

Thank you for this overview of your shortlisted books. Did you come away from the judging process feeling optimistic about the state of biography in 2025?

Optimistic, yes, in the sense that people are trying out a lot of different forms and going after subjects that, 30 years ago, I seriously doubt anybody would have taken on. Candy Darling, for example.

One dilemma I see, and that we talked about in the committee, is that biographies are very labour and time intensive. So by definition the people who end up writing them are people who have some other means of support—whether they are academics or have their own money. In a sense, it restricts who can write biography.

But I think the field recognises that and is trying to figure out a way to address that. It’s definitely something that needs work.