The Best Author Biographies To Keep You Turning the Pages

While people all over the world have been following the exploits of little Anne Shirley – better known as Anne of Green Gables – for over a century, considerably less is known about the writer who created her. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up on Prince Edward Island, which became the model for Green Gables, but she kept much of her life private, even as her books became international bestsellers translated into more than 35 languages. In Looking for Anne of Green Gables, author Irene Gammel combines biography and cultural history to tell the story not only of Montgomery but of her literary creation, providing a “gold mine for fans of the novels.”

Graham Greene once called Evelyn Waugh “the greatest novelist of my generation,” and yet this troubled and fractious figure has been veiled in enigma and scandal for decades. In this gripping new biography, drawn from a variety of first-hand sources, author Philip Eade aims to “re-examine some of the distortions and misconceptions that have come to surround this famously complex and much mythologized character.” 

The result is a book that should delight both fans of Waugh’s many classic novels and newcomers to the author who are looking to learn more about one of literature’s most complicated figures.

While The Chronicles of Narnia has become, over the years, a mainstay of fantasy fiction and our own popular imagination, it was far from the only thing that author C.S. Lewis contributed to culture. 

An Oxford don, influential philosopher, and important religious writer, Lewis lived a vivid and storied life, one brought to the page in this scintillating biography by Alan Jacobs, which traces not merely Lewis’ life, but his literary career, his friendship with J.R.R Tolkien, and how he came to create one of the most recognizable fantasy epics in English letters.

Zelda Sayre was a titan of the Jazz Age in her own right, a Southern belle who was also a fiercely talented author. Yet her own career was overshadowed by that of her husband's, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

In this “profound” and “overwhelmingly moving” book (New York Times), author Nancy Milford explores Zelda’s life both within and outside the shadow of her famous marriage. It is a story of both triumph and tragedy, as Zelda rises to the top of the literary world and plunges into depression and instability as she spends the final decades of her life in hospital care before perishing in a blazing inferno.

“As rewarding as Updike’s best fiction” – that’s how The Boston Globe described this “superb achievement” from author Adam Begley, tracking the life and literary influences of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who was a worldwide bestseller and a “golden boy” at The New Yorker, among many other things. 

“The joys,” writes Orhan Pamuk in The New York Times Book Review, come in “discovering the autobiographical content” that populates so much of “Updike’s vast fictional universe.” For old fans and those who are new to the celebrated author, this “monumental treatment of a towering American writer” (New York Observer) is a must-read.

For a figure as titanic as Walt Whitman, no ordinary biography will do. That’s why the author of Walt Whitman had to be a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner himself, putting together a “brilliant” (Publishers Weekly) portrait that shows us a Walt Whitman who is “alive and kicking – hugely human, enormously attractive” (Newsweek). 

The result is a book that is “not only readable, but dramatic” (The New York Times Book Review), giving readers an unexpurgated peek into the life of one of America’s most influential poets and most striking personalities.

Subtitled “The Will to Create as a Woman,” this remarkable book is something distinct from the typical biography. While it tells the story of Virginia Woolf’s life, it also examines how the author came to meet Woolf, and how their lives intertwined. 

In 1932, Ruth Gruber was the youngest person to ever earn a PhD and her doctoral dissertation was one of the first-ever feminist critiques of the writings of Virginia Woolf. Since then, Gruber’s work on Woolf has become defining, and this book—which chronicles the lives of both extraordinary women—is a perfect place for readers to see why.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, Megan Marshall’s “thoroughly absorbing” (Boston Globe) biography of a too-often-forgotten literary pioneer brings to life a nuanced woman who was the first editor of Henry David Thoreau, an important voice for women and the urban poor, a daring wartime correspondent, and much more. 

“Shaping her narrative like a novel, Marshall brings the reader as close as possible to Fuller’s inner life and conveys the inspirational power she has achieved for several generations of women” (New Republic).

From the author of Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love comes this rollicking look at the bad boys (and girls) of literary history. While today, it may be rock stars and movie stars who make the headlines in the scandal sheets, at one time, many celebrity authors engaged in heated literary battles (and sometimes actual fisticuffs), went on drug-fueled benders, embarked upon tumultuous affairs, and otherwise behaved badly in the public eye. 

From Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde to Hunter S. Thompson and Bret Easton Ellis, this “terrific blend of literary history, biography, and witty commentary” (Publishers Weekly) takes readers on a tour of some of the most notorious figures in literary history.

The history of writing under a “pen name” is a long and storied one, with as many motives as there are writers and their various pseudonyms. 

In this “engrossing, well-paced literary history” (Bookforum), Carmela Ciuraru takes us on a tour of eighteen authors who famously wrote under other names, exploring not only the who and how, but the why that drove them to do so. The results are sometimes playful, sometimes tragic, but always fascinating in this “richly documented literary excursion into the inner, secret lives of some of our favorite writers” (Joyce Carol Oates).