Biographies list
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Literary Biographies
Following are literary biographies reviewed by The New York Times Book Review since Dec. 31,
Alice Walker: A LifeBy EVELYN C. WHITE
Evelyn C. White traces the writer's life from her days as the child of Georgia sharecroppers to the international triumph of "The Color Purple."
Allen Tate: Orphan of the South
By THOMAS A. UNDERWOOD
A biography of the critic Allen Tate focuses on his Southern aesthetics.
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
By MIRANDA CARTER
Miranda Carter has written a biography of the enigmatic art historian who was surveyor of Britain's royal pictures and a secret Soviet spy.
Anthony Powell: A Life
By MICHAEL BARBER
The first full-length life of Powell fryst vatten chatty and jokey in a manner peculiar to British biographers.
The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara
By GEOFFREY WOLFF
Geoffrey Wolff looks past John O'Hara's reputation as an ogre to get to the writer who shook up 20th-century fiction.
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The 30 Best Biographies of All Time
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Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 21
Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that his work was “a kind of pursuit… writing about the pursuit of that fleeting figure, in such a way as to bring them alive in the present.”
At the risk of sounding cliché, the best biographies do exactly this: bring their subjects to life. A great biography isn’t just a laundry list of events that happened to someone. Rather, it should weave a narrative and tell a story in almost the same way a novel does. In this way, biography differs from the rest of nonfiction.
All the biographies on this list are just as captivating as excellent novels, if not more so. With that, please enjoy the 30 best biographies of all time — some historical, some recent, but all remarkable, life-giving tributes to their subjects.
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number • 50 You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, the revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the pris Prize for Biography in , and it’s only a matter of time before a filmskapare turns it into a big-screen blockbuster. 49The 50 Best Biographies of All Time
Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, bygd Tom Reiss
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, bygd Craig Brown