7 Stellar Biographies I Highly Recommend Reading

As I shared last month, I love reading biographies.

Having read several dozen of them, I’ve developed a few principles to guide their consumption.

The first is to be choosy in your selection. Even “short” biographies can be 400+ pages long, and some can stretch to a thousand or more. If you’re going to be spending that much time with a book, it ought to be supremely well done. Unfortunately, there are more bad biographies out there than good ones. It takes exceptional skill as a writer to turn the dry facts of someone’s life into an engaging, illuminating, page-turning narrative. You’ll know within a couple of chapters whether the biography you’ve chosen hits that mark and you enjoy the author’s style; if you don’t, don’t feel guilty about discarding the book and trying another.

Second, the enjoyment of a biography often arises out of the intersection of a time period and a figure you find intriguing.

I find the Transcendental movement and WWII to be particularly fascinating eras, and thus read more biographies that feature them as backdrops. I don’t find ancient history, America’s founding, or the Civil War particularly interesting, so I have only read a few biographies that profile people from those periods.

At the same time, as I mentioned in my previous article, I particularly recommend reading biographies of figures who worked in a field related to your profession; reading about folks who achieved eminence in a similar line of work can inspire you to reach for greater excellence in your vocation. I thus read a disproportionate number of biographies of writers.

Putting these two dimensions of the second principle together, if you are, say, someone who’s an entrepreneur and always been interested in the late 19th century, then reading a biography of a figure like Andrew Carnegie might represent your biographical sweet spot.

Of course, biographies about figures who are totally unlike you and lived in a period you don’t think you’re drawn to can turn out to be quite compelling as well.

Finally, don’t be afraid of reading more than one biography of a person you’re particularly interested in. Each biographer brings in different details and comes at the subject’s life from a different slant, so that each book gives you new insights into their character. Because writers who lived during the Transcendental period hit my biographical sweet spot, I’ve read several biographies of both Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I plan on reading still more. I’m always eager to get a deeper understanding of my historical heroes.

If you’re looking for a place to begin with your biography reading, I make seven recommendations below. Each represents an engaging, enjoyable, and insightful read. While I think these suggestions offer widespread appeal, they have of course been shaped by the personal preferences I just described. They all also notably feature male subjects; I have admittedly only read a couple of biographies of women because my reading is often done in conjunction with my work on the Art of Manliness, and because, while I guess this is not polite to say out loud these days, men have done the majority of the most interesting things in world history.