Biography category: 101305 books

The first biography of an American master The Songs We Know Best, the first comprehensive biography of the early life of John Ashbery—the winner of nearly every major American literary award—reveals the unusual ways he drew on the details of his youth to populate the poems that made him...

The first book by distinguished novelist, journalist, and literary critic Rebecca West: a biography of Henry James Setting the standard for a century’s worth of criticism, Rebecca West diagnosed Henry James as an American who “could never feel at home until he was in exile” in this slim,...

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. After his father's death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works...

A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything...

A “mesmerizing” biography of the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Sophie’s Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Darkness Visible (Entertainment Weekly). William Styron was one of the most highly regarded and controversial authors of his generation. In this illuminating...

A Finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography The most definitive biography to date of the poet Pablo Neruda, a moving portrait of one of the most intriguing and influential figures in Latin American history Few poets have captured the global imagination like Pablo Neruda. In...

Drawing on a great wealth of newly available sources, this definitive biography recounts the eventful life of a great writer spoilt by success—a life lived in the shadow of two world wars, and which ended tragically in a suicide pact. Matuschek examines three major phases in the life of the world-famous...

Hundreds of years have passed since William Shakespeare's time. He has left behind nearly a million words of text, but his life is still a mystery. This book is an engaging introduction to a subject that students will certainly encounter many times throughout their education—and their lives. Lucid...

The New York Times bestselling writer Tracy Daugherty illuminates his most vital subject yet in this first biography of the Catch-22 author Joseph Heller Joseph Heller was a Coney Island kid, the son of Russian immigrants, who went on to great fame and fortune. His most memorable novel took...

Karl Marx is a magisterial and defining biography that vividly explores not only the man himself but also the revolutionary times in which he lived. Between his birth in 1818 and his death sixty-five years later, Karl Marx became one of Western civilization’s most influential political philosophers....

The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion—on modernism itself. Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant...

On the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, a landmark biography transforms Charlotte Brontë from a tragic figure into a modern heroine. Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and siblings whose astonishing...

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly...

J.D. Robb is the pen name Nora Roberts uses for her In Death series of futuristic police procedurals. She is a prolific writer with over 200 published novels, 176 New York Times bestsellers, and over 400 million copies of her books in print worldwide. Over 34 of the books are from Robbs In Death series...