T he past list of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies is an excellent resource if you’re looking for a deeply researched and expertly composed nonfiction book on a historical topic. Often the winning books have portrayed major American political or cultural figures—George Washington, Louisa May Alcott, Malcolm X—but there are some stories from further afield in there too. We’re confident you’ll find something to suit your tastes from the list, which we’ve compiled to cover all winning titles since 2000. If you’d like to browse through earlier winners, you can find the full listings—going back to 1917—here .
🏆 Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts is a dual biography of the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-1788), a French aristocrat and author of a 36-volume Natural History, as they sought to categorize the natural world. Although better known today, Linnaeus does not come out of the book looking good, and it was Buffon's ideas that led more directly to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection just under a century later.
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“Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife tells the incredible life stories of Ellen and William Craft, a married Black couple who escaped slavery in 1848 and disguised themselves as a disabled white man (Ellen) and his manservant (William). Together they fled Georgia for the North, became celebrities within the abolitionist movement but were later forced to flee the country after the imposition of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 left them again vulnerable.” Read more...
Award-Winning Biographies of 2024
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“Eig enriches our understanding of King and rescues the civil rights leader from what he describes as ‘the gray mist of hagiography.’ He traces the arc of ‘Little Mike,’ son of a Georgia sharecropper, to national prominence as an eloquent advocate for Black rights, as well as a crusader against the Vietnam War and poverty, all the way to Memphis and the Lorraine Motel balcony. Building on more than 200 interviews and recently released FBI files, Eig made national news by debunking a famous quotation about Malcolm X attributed to King, tracks fissures in the civil rights movement, and reveals King’s womanizing.” Read more...
The Best Biographies of 2024: The National Book Critics Circle Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor ,
Biographer
🏆 Winner of the 2023 NBCC Biography Award
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
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“Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents, of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: ‘We cannot know our own story without understanding his.'” Read more...
The Best Biographies of 2023: The National Book Critics Circle Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor ,
Biographer
“Rembert was from a family of field labourers in Cuthbert, Georgia and taught himself to paint at the age of 51 using leather tooling skills he learned in prison. In the preface, he writes that he had been scared to draw attention to what happened to him in Cuthbert during his lifetime, and so he only composed his memoir as he was dying. It’s a wrenching tale told in a very direct and touching way. The book also includes pictures of his paintings—of cotton fields, of his mother giving him away as a baby.” Read more...
Award Winning Biographies of 2022
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“It is remarkable that the Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive through thousands of eye-witness reports and personal documents. They went way beyond the declassified FBI files and secondhand stories of the legend of Malcolm’s transformation. Payne may have drawn on his journalistic skills to build this biography on first-hand accounts, oral history, but he also worked as a historian to contextualize these contradicting accounts and synthesize them into an extraordinary narrative.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor ,
Biographer
🏆 Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
The judges of the Pulitzer Prize called the book, an authorised biography, "an authoritatively constructed work told with pathos and grace, that captures the writer's genius and humanity alongside her addictions, sexual ambiguities, and volatile enthusiasms."
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🏆 Joint winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
🏆 Winner of the 2018 National Book Award
A definitive biography of the man best known as the father of the Harlem Renaissance . In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly described it as "a poignant portrait of a formidable yet flawed genius who navigated the cultural boundaries and barriers of his time while nurturing an enduring African-American intellectual movement."
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🏆 Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
🏆 Winner of the 2017 NBCC Prize for Biography
Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series―draws together insights from unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records in this biography of an iconic American author, whose own life story takes in so much of the story of westward expansion in the United States.
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“It’s one of those books that you can sit and read, very easily, in one sitting. Hisham Matar is telling one story, rather than weaving together many different elements. It’s about a UK-based writer whose father disappeared in Libya. At the start of the book, he is about to go back to Libya, having left as a small child to go into exile. He’s interweaving his own journey to Libya, after the fall of Gaddafi, with the story of his father and his efforts to find the truth of what happened to him. The story is gripping in itself and, although many books have been written about the Arab Spring and different regimes in the Middle East, I didn’t feel I had read such a personal story of Gaddafi’s Libya.” Read more...
Best Nonfiction Books of 2016
Stephanie Flanders ,
Economist
“For both Finnegan and I, surfing, initially, was an identity when were searching for one, and then we discovered it made us feel better about ourselves. It wasn’t fiction, it was real… and we wrote about that. Surfing is such a kinetic medium, it can be hard to capture in words. Maybe that’s why film and photography seem to be the foremost media for telling surf tales. And yet, Finnegan’s descriptions of waves are stunningly vivid.” Read more...
The best books on Surfing
Gerry Lopez ,
Sportspersons & Sportswriter
🏆 Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
David I. Kertzer reveals the fascinating secret history of Pope Pius XI’s relations with the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Drawing from years of archival research in the Vatican and Fascist archives, Kertzer presents a convincing case that Pius XI played a crucial role both in making Mussolini’s dictatorship possible and keeping him in power.
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🏆 Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Margaret Fuller—the 19th-century the transcendentalist, war correspondent and feminist thinker—lived a remarkable life. She is the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a book is widely accepted to be the first American book on women's rights, acted as Henry David Thoreau's first editor, and worked as a foreign correspondent in Italy. In this award-winning work of narrative nonfiction, Megan Marshall combines the atmosphere of a novel with the rigour of archival research.
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🏆 Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Alexandre Dumas, the French author and playwright, was drawing on a rich seam of family legend when he composed his 1846 work of classic literature The Count of Monte Cristo : his father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was a swashbuckling military leader during the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic Wars. He was also the son of a Black Haitian slave, rising to remarkable power in a period of finely balance race relations. Time magazine described Tom Reiss's hit biography as "one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that also sheds light on the flukey historical moment that made it possible.”
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🏆 Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
🏆 Winner of the 2011 NBCC Prize for Biography
This masterful biography of the 'mastermind of the Cold War' by the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis offers a deeply reported study of one of the United States' most influential architects of foreign policy. Kennan was reportedly so forthcoming and outspoken in interviews that he and the author agreed that it would not be published until after his death. Writing in The New York Times , Henry Kissinger declared it "as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants"
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🏆 Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
An expertly told, cradle-to-grave biography of the first US president from the author of Alexander Hamilton declared the LA Times when it was released in 2010.
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🏆 Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
🏆 Winner of a 2009 National Book Award
In one of the greatest rags-to-riches tales of all time, biographer T.J. Styles offers an overview of the making of the great American capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt—from humble birth to the birth of the modern corporation—and in so doing tells the wider story of U.S. economic history. Styles, observed The New York Times Book Review , "offers a fruitful way to think about the larger history of American elites as well as the life of one of their most famous members.”
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🏆 Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
A definitive biography of the polarising seventh president of the United States who rose to power as a military commander and vastly expanded the power of the White House. Biographer Jon Meacham explores family papers to expose the human drama behind the political storms that marked Jackson's presidency.
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🏆 Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
CUNY English literature professor Jon Matteson tells the dual life stories of the author of Little Women and her father, the eminent teacher Bronson Alcott, against the unfolding backdrop of the American Civil War and the growing Transcendental intellectual movement. ""A double biography is a difficult thing to bring off but Matteson does it beautifully," observed The Guardian , on first release in 2008, "giving a vivid but delicate account of two complicated characters inextricably entwined."
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🏆 Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
A Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe's charismatic preacher brother, Henry, who became internationally famous for his spectacular sermons on the "gospel of love"—before a sex scandal brought everything tumbling down. As Applegate writes, "what Beecher brought to American culture in an era of bewildering change and fratricidal war was unconditional love so deep and so wide that the entire country could feel his warmth, like it or not."
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🏆 Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
American Prometheus returned to bestseller lists in the wake of Christopher Nolan's movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer. The movie is long, as is the book (700+ pages) but it is highly readable. The scariness of the weapon Oppenheimer ended up creating gives the book a built-in narrative momentum as you read about his German Jewish background, his schooling in New York and holidays in New Mexico, into the major events of his life.
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“The story of de Kooning is one of the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America, the mid-century New York art world and its wide-ranging cast of characters from artists, to critics, to dealers and so much more. At the center is the artist, his art, his relationships. The authors command a vast amount of information (detailed in the notes and bibliography) in a story that takes us from the artist’s beginning in the slums of Rotterdam to his dementia late in life, to create a compelling narrative that illustrates what a biography of a figure of recent history might accomplish. Through the accounts of his contemporaries, de Kooning emerges not only as a great artist, but as sympathetic figure for whom we are rooting from the first pages” Read more...
The best books on Goya and the art of biography
Janis Tomlinson ,
Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Khrushchev started off a miner’s son and had one of those rocket rides in the social stratosphere that could happen once Stalin had got rid of all the old Bolsheviks and needed a completely new political class. He went being from being a semi-literate party member out in the country to the deputy mayor of Moscow in about five years, and he finally ended up as one of Stalin’s inner circle. He worked closely with Stalin for nearly 20 years and approved thousands of arrests and executions and then went on to lead Russia during the Cold War. For me, this is a magisterial biography and strangely funny. Khrushchev was a funny guy – it is one of the things about him which was appealing and then, when you think about it, more worrying still. Of all the Soviet leadership, Khrushchev is the one who is recognisable as a human being. He had that rare gift among politicians of remaining recognisable, thinking on his feet and cracking jokes. He had an almost Clintonesque gift of the gab, which really wasn’t a crucial skill among high-level Stalinists. In some ways, I would guess that he survived at the top of Stalin’s Russia in spite of it.” Read more...
The best books on 20th Century Russia
Francis Spufford ,
Historian
🏆 Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
🏆 Winner of a 2002 National Book Award
🏆 Winner of the 2002 L.A. Times Book Prize
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“I always tell people that this is one of the first books you should read if you’re really interested in congressional history. It’s a wonderful book, the third part of Caro’s multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson that focuses on his time as Senate Majority Leader. It’s also a splendid history of the Senate itself.” Read more...
The best books on Congress
Julian E. Zelizer ,
Historian
“I love biographies and this one in particular strikes me. I don’t believe John Adams comes immediately to mind as one of the great presidents, but he was. Students of history know he had a hand in so many of the founding documents we remember today. Politics today is so polarised – but this division is not unique to our time. If you look back on the relationship between John Adams and Jefferson, it was not always smooth. Yet together they helped make the Declaration of Independence a reality. Progressives should keep their eyes on the prize, but we should never be afraid to constantly engage with those whom we perceive to be rivals…Adams was also incredibly courageous when he defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. He was a patriot who understood that a democratic society cannot undermine the basic democratic rights of even the most despised in our society. There are few today who would be willing to do what he did in today’s supercharged partisan environment. I’m not sure anyone would be willing to do that today.” Read more...
The best books on Progressive America
Antonio Villaraigosa ,
Politician
🏆 Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
The second volume in a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the leading figure of the civil rights movement in America, by the historian David Levering Lewis. The first volume, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 , told PBS : "I stopped volume one... at the end of World War I, when Dubois was midstream in his life. He would live, until 1963, a life as full as the years antecedent to the time that I interrupted. I wanted to take Dubois out of [...] quite focused concerns about one group of people, and put him in a larger forum in which he becomes concerned about equality and economic justice for people of all colors everywhere."
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“What Dava did utterly brilliantly was ostensibly to wrote a book about Galileo’s relationship with his daughter but actually it reveals a lot about Galileo and science along the way. This story doesn’t show the greatest side of Galileo because Galileo put his two daughters into a convent, essentially because he couldn’t find husbands for them. And the reason he couldn’t find husbands for them was because he was a fairly poor astronomer, with expectations of grandeur, if you like, and he couldn’t raise a dowry sufficient to attract the kind of men he thought his daughters should be married to, which would lead to the correct social standing for his family.” Read more...
The best books on Astronomers
Stuart Clark ,
Novelist
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