Best Biography Books

The diary kept by a Jewish teenager hiding in a secret annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands — the most widely read personal account of the Holocaust.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, one of America's most consequential and underestimated presidents.

Tara Westover's memoir of growing up in the mountains of Idaho without formal education, in a survivalist family, and her journey to Cambridge and Harvard.

David McCullough tells the gripping story of two self-taught bicycle mechanics from Dayton who changed the world by inventing powered flight.

The authorised biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, based on more than forty interviews with Jobs and over one hundred with family members, friends, adversaries, and colleagues.

The authorised biography of Warren Buffett — written by analyst Alice Schroeder with Buffett's full cooperation. Covers his childhood in Omaha, the development of his investment philosophy under Benjamin Graham, the building of Berkshire Hathaway, and the personal life that shaped and constrained the world's greatest investor.

William Dodd, the first US Ambassador to Hitler's Germany, arrives in Berlin in 1933 with his family. Through his diary and his daughter Martha's letters and memoirs, Larson reconstructs what it was like to watch the Nazi regime consolidate power from inside the American Embassy.

The definitive life of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the theoretical physicist who directed the Manhattan Project, witnessed the first atomic detonation at Trinity, and was subsequently destroyed by the McCarthyite security apparatus he had helped to empower. Twenty-five years in the making, it won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

A rich biography of history's greatest creative genius, based on Leonardo's notebooks and the latest scholarship, exploring the intersection of art and science that defined his work.

Andre Agassi's remarkably candid memoir about a sporting career built on hating the sport that made him famous — written with J.R. Moehringer.

Walter Isaacson's comprehensive biography traces Benjamin Franklin's extraordinary life from his Boston childhood through his years as a printer, scientist, diplomat, and Founding Father, revealing the man behind the legend as a pragmatic idealist who helped forge American identity. It is a portrait of perhaps the most versatile genius the colonies produced.

A sweeping history of the digital revolution — from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, William Shockley, and the personal computer pioneers — arguing that the most important innovations were always the product of collaboration, not lone genius.

The fourth volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography — New York in the late 1950s, the Harlem Writers Guild, the civil rights movement, her friendship with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and her years in Cairo and Accra.

A fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe's life — reimagined as Norma Jeane Baker, a woman of extraordinary sensitivity and intelligence consumed and ultimately destroyed by the cultural construction called Marilyn Monroe that she inhabits but does not fully control.

Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, the unelected master planner who shaped New York City for four decades and accumulated more power than any other American in the 20th century.

The definitive biography of Alexander Hamilton — orphan immigrant, Revolutionary War hero, first Secretary of the Treasury, and the Founding Father who built the American financial system.

Former child actress Jennette McCurdy's unflinching memoir about her mother's emotional abuse, the exploitation of the child acting industry, and her path to recovery from eating disorders and trauma.

Nelson Mandela's autobiography traces his journey from a Transkei village through law, activism, 27 years of imprisonment, and his emergence to lead South Africa's democratic transition.

Doris Kearns Goodwin examines Lincoln's political genius through the lens of the three rivals he defeated for the 1860 Republican nomination — whom he then appointed to his cabinet.

One of the most important American autobiographies ever written, chronicling Malcolm X's transformation from street criminal to international civil rights icon.

Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells the complete story of how Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos defrauded investors and endangered patients with a blood-testing technology that didn't work.