What are some great biography book examples

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links. Biographies have always been controversial. Since then, biographies of presidents, activists, artists, and musicians have regularly appeared on bestseller lists, while Hollywood continues to adapt them into Oscar bait like A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game , and Steve Jobs.

Why do we read so many books about the lives and deaths of strangers, as told by second-hand and third-hand sources? Is it merely our love for gossip, or are we trying to understand ourselves through the triumphs and failures of others? To keep this list from blossoming into hundreds of titles, we only included books currently in print and translated into English.

We also limited it to one book per author, and one book per subject.

Top 10 best biographies

In ranked order, here are the best biographies of all time. Few biographies are as genuinely fun to read as this barnburner from the irreverent English critic Craig Brown. The late American jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk has been so heavily mythologized that it can be hard to separate fact from fiction.