Literary Biographies
Last updated: October 20, 2024
Some of the literary biographies that have been recommended on Five Books.
“It was very strange writing his biography. I found out things about him that he didn’t know…He was living in a room on the top floor of a Quaker-run club, or hostel…it was never actually your room, even if, like John Wyndham, you were living there for 20 or 30 years. He lived life in this hostel, in one room, with his long-term girlfriend in the next room – to all intents and purposes, married. But fantastically, all food’s laid on, and no one has to do any housework. So that was his way of dealing with having a partnership that was not a marriage.” Read more...
Amy Binns, Biographer
“Clare Carlisle is obviously a very interesting philosopher, and what qualifies her as a good Eliot biographer is that she herself has translated Spinoza, and can talk about her work in expert terms. But the book is not short of emotional power; she clearly feels the impact of Eliot’s work and Eliot’s life. She does a bit of both. It’s nuanced and careful and brief. It’s really quite touching at the end. This is suitable, because George Eliot herself said that an appeal to moral sensibility through statistics and reason is not good enough. This is true; now we have behavioural economics telling us that people remember stories and they do not remember graphs, right? Eliot was saying this in the 1850s: you need to embed the idea in real talk, real actions, the real stories of a life.” Read more...
The Best Intellectual Biographies
Henry Oliver, Biographer
“One interesting book for fans of the great epic poem of the Augustus years, the Aeneid, is a literary biography of its author, Vergil. Vergil: The Poet’s Life is by American scholar and translator Sarah Ruden. Other than his poem, we don’t know much about the author, so Ruden has to do a lot of heavy lifting, but why not? Ruden recently translated the Aeneid, and you can also read her Five Books interview about Vergil.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Eva Hoffman has taken on the Polish poet and Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Czesław Miłosz, in her latest book: On Czesław Miłosz. It’s a personal response to Milosz’s life and work, about a man who experienced firsthand some of the horrors of the 20th century.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“He became the quintessential war poet, certainly in a British context. Not during his lifetime. But in England, Owen is a poet that everyone will have encountered in some way. He was born in 1893, and famously—this is part of the legend of Owen—he died just a week before the end of the war, on the 4th of November, 1918. His parents got the telegram telling them that he had died on the 11th of November as the bells were ringing to celebrate the end of the war. Owen’s poetry sometimes gets described as ‘anti-war’. I don’t think I’d go that far. It’s important to note that he was not a conscientious objector, he was in uniform. He won a Military Cross. So he was actually quite a successful soldier, later on in his service. But he is a poet who highlights the horror of the war for many people, and is sceptical of ideas of heroism, service, duty, and all those other concepts brought to the fore by the government, church, and the right-wing press in terms of encouraging people to join up.” Read more...
The best books on Poetry of the First World War
Guy Cuthbertson, Literary Scholar
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell
🏆 Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2023 British Book Award for Non-Fiction: Narrative
“Rundell is a children’s author who also specializes in Renaissance literature and makes the case that Donne should be as widely feted as William Shakespeare, his contemporary. She writes, ‘Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite. The word most used across his poetry, part from ‘and’ and ‘the’, is ‘love”.” Read more...
Award Winning Biographies of 2022
Sophie Roell, Journalist
Pessoa: A Biography
by Richard Zenith
✩ Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for biography
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote prolifically throughout his life, but often under a series of assumed names and identities, which he called 'heteronyms.' Relatively unknown during his lifetime, he left a cache of more than 25,000 papers which are still being studied, translated and published almost a century after his death. Here, the renowned translator and Pessoa scholar offers an insight into Pessoa's teeming imagination and polyphonous genius by tracing the back stories of his alter egos, recasting them as projections of Pessoa's inner tensions—social, sexual, and political.
“Frankly, Blotner’s biography is the original and, in my view, the best. There have been astounding contributions to biographical studies of Faulkner, including those by Frederick R. Karl, Robert W. Hamblin, and Carl Rollyson, to name only a few. However, Blotner’s account set a benchmark, a gold standard, for all the biographers who followed in his wake.” Read more...
The Best William Faulkner Books
Ahmed Honeini, Literary Scholar
“Clark not only unearths new evidence about Plath’s life but also brings a fresh, subtle and nuanced critical perspective to her work. Plath is mythologised and pathologised; she has come to be seen as an icon or a victim, a “high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death,” as Clark writes. What Clark does here is recover Sylvia Plath as an aesthetically accomplished, important poet.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“I think it is an excellent introduction to Goethe. It gives you a view of his life, the contexts of his activity, and the major influences on him. It offers a rich and insightful account of the full spectrum of his literary work. The focus is primarily literary, but not exclusively by any means. There’s a wonderful introduction that tells us about Goethe’s ongoing influence into the 20th and 21st centuries. We also get an outline of his biography, since the book is chronologically organized.” Read more...
David E. Wellbery, Literary Scholar
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi tells the story of the great Russian novelist's life by brilliantly intertwining it with his own words, taken from where Dostoevsky's fiction is drawn from his own lived experience. And it was quite some life: amongst other ups and downs, Dostoevsky was nearly executed and spent four years in a Siberian labour camp. You can read more in our interview with Alex Christofi on the best Fyodor Dostoevsky books.
“In selecting this volume of Reiner Stach’s richly detailed 3-volume biography of Franz Kafka, elegantly translated by Shelley Frisch (volume 2 is Kafka: The Decisive Years and volume 3, Kafka: The Years of Insight), I am chiefly engaged by its newness. Contrary to appearances, this is the last book of the three to appear, owing to the author’s wish to consult materials to which he has had exclusive access. These notebooks and letters are now held by the Israeli National Library after taking possession of Kafka’s papers stored in vaults in Zurich and Tel Aviv and an ill-assorted heap allegedly scattered about the house of the aged, cat-loving daughter of Max Brod’s secretary.” Read more...
Stanley Corngold, Literary Scholar
Poet of Revolution: the Making of John Milton
by Nicholas McDowell
***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year***
“There have been quite a few biographies of Milton over the years, many of them very good, but I think this new book by Nicholas McDowell is superior to anything that I’ve yet read—and it’s only the first volume of two. It’s about the young Milton and this hothouse atmosphere in which he pursued his intellectual interests.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2020
Paul Lay, Historian
“Becoming Beauvoir is not just an outstanding philosophy book, it’s one of the best books I’ve read for a while. It’s of interest far beyond the narrow area of philosophy. Whether you love her or hate her, Simone de Beauvoir was a really significant cultural figure and it’s great to have such an interesting new biography of her.” Read more...
The Best Philosophy Books of 2019
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
“Miller sets out to reclaim Landon’s literary accomplishments and establish her as a bridge between Romanticism and Victorianism. Miller contends that Landon’s work has been overlooked and perhaps made invisible because she was regarded as popular writer whose feminine poetry was dismissed, and that she should be considered from a contemporary perspective as ‘proto-postmodern,’ sort of postmodernist in training.” Read more...
The Best of Biography: the 2020 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“I love Robert D Richardson’s book. His tone is warm, judicious, and empathetic, but not overly so. In a biography often laser-focused on Emerson’s intellectual development, the short chapters give you breathing room. “ Read more...
The best books on Ralph Waldo Emerson
James Marcus, Journalist
“Knowlson’s biography is the most well-rounded. The particular picture of Beckett that emerges is one that is not hagiographic, that’s for sure. It’s an objective, well-balanced, informed one.” Read more...
Mark Nixon, Literary Scholar
“What this biography does above all is to re-invest the story of her life with suspense, with the texture of emotions she’s going through. You get caught up in it. It’s a real page-turner. It feels like a du Maurier novel.” Read more...
The Best Daphne du Maurier Books
Laura Varnam, Literary Scholar
“Tomalin’s is still my favourite among all Austen biographies. It shows us, in the context of crucial family, literary, and social context, that Austen was tough; that she was unafraid; that she was in an environment of difficulty and distress – even crisis – through parts of her life.” Read more...
Devoney Looser, Literary Scholar
“She is such a good biographer. I would read anything by her. She’s so intelligent. She is sympathetic to him but she is not blind to him. She gets his energy, his ferocity. He could be callous. People always say, ‘Oh, he was horrible to his wife.’ Well he was. He chucked her out of the family home when the youngest child was only 6. He said she was a terrible mother, but we have no evidence of that, at all. So he did behave badly. I’m afraid that when marriages break down, people do.She writes about his whole life brilliantly.” Read more...
The Best Charles Dickens Books
Jenny Hartley, Biographer
The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman
by John and Carol Garrard
The book's original title was The Bones of Berdichev. Berdichev was Grossman’s hometown in Ukraine, and the place where his mother was murdered along with about 20,000 other Jews in September 1941.
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro
🏆 Winner of the 2006 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Winner of Winners Prize, which aims to pick out the best nonfiction book of the past 25 years
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is a brilliant book that brings to life the world Shakespeare lived in, and events taking place around him, in 1599. That was the year Shakespeare finished writing Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and made his first draft of Hamlet. 1599 is by James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia (You can also read our interview with him about Shakespeare's life, as he is one of many experts to recommend the best Shakespeare books for us).
“It is a hugely fine biography and I’m a great admirer of Janet Malcolm … She has done something very original here.” Read more...
Lyndall Gordon, Biographer
“I think it was a brilliant idea to approach one’s past through language. She grew up in post-holocaust Poland before she emigrated to Canada.” Read more...
Lyndall Gordon, Biographer
Jane's Fame
by Claire Harman
A chunk of it is a flashback to Jane Austen’s actual life, but the bulk of the book is about her afterlife, the making of her reputation
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
by Frances Wilson
"It’s not the 'and then, and then' formulation of the 20th century biography. She just goes for the kernel of Dorothy Wordsworth’s life."
“It’s not a biography of Dante in the ordinary sense, and I don’t think Eliot thought of it as such. I chose it because he sets out a schema that was of huge importance to Eliot’s life and achievement. You don’t have to have read Dante’s The Divine Comedy to know that the inferno is followed by purgatory followed by paradiso. Eliot argues that this is a universal life and a universal pattern, and he wanted to tap into that pattern. It’s the schema of a life which moves from a sense of sin to an awareness of a broken-down life – a Waste Land life – and which moves deliberately through a purgatorial phase of suffering. One could say the equivalent was Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday”. In some sense Eliot remains a purgatorial poet, always looking towards a paradiso that he didn’t attain. He shared with Dante that sense of sin and introspection. Dante was, to him, the greatest exponent of the soul’s journey.” Read more...
Lyndall Gordon, Biographer
The Best Literary Biographies, recommended by Lyndall Gordon
The inner life is a mystery but the best biographies expose the hidden kernel of a person, says literary biographer and academic, Lyndall Gordon. She picks five books that push the boundaries of the genre.
