Biography & Memoir

We open biographies wanting to know how someone "got there." What we usually walk away with is more interesting: the realization that every subject was, at some point, an ordinary person. Steve Jobs was fired from the company he started. Lincoln lost election after election. Marie Curie slept on a chair in a Paris winter because she couldn't afford to heat her apartment. Biography returns achievement to its process.

Three formats, all welcome here:

1. Biography (written about someone else): Walter Isaacson on Jobs, Einstein, Franklin, Da Vinci, and Musk; Robert Caro's monumental Johnson volumes and The Power Broker; David McCullough on Truman and the Wright brothers; Annette Gordon-Reed on the Hemings family. The strength of biography is distance — the biographer can place a life inside its larger context.

2. Autobiography: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, Trevor Noah's Born a Crime. The strength is texture and detail; the risk is selective memory.

3. Memoir (which we treat as biography's literary cousin): Tara Westover's Educated, Patti Smith's Just Kids, Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Michelle Obama's Becoming, Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

Where to start: Pick someone you admire but whose actual life you only half know. If technology is your world, Isaacson's Steve Jobs is more accessible than his Franklin. If you want a story about an ordinary person fighting their circumstances, Tara Westover's Educated is the best memoir of the last decade. If you want to feel the texture of how a life ends, Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air.

What we don't include: ghost-written CEO hagiography, "authorized" biographies that smooth over the difficult parts, motivational-speaker memoirs.

Subcategories: Political Figures · Founders & Inventors · Scientists · Artists & Writers · Public Intellectuals · Ordinary Lives

Browse: 10 Biographies of People Who Changed Their Fields · Memoirs That Show You Modern America