Best biographies goodreads

Nothing tells us more about how to be alive now than learning from those who have gone before.

Famous biography books

And nothing captures their triumphs and disasters better than a book. We invited 25 writers to recommend a biography they love. Here are their picks of 25 lives well lived, 25 lives well told. Read them. Learn from them. Return to them. Using letters and drafts of poems, he shows how Lowell and Moore did everything they could to influence and help and often patronise Elizabeth Bishop.

Kalstone, who died in , three years before the book was published, was a scholar with a light touch, a critic with a real interest in what lay behind poetic influence and inspiration. His book is one of the great biographies. A boyhood in Mississippi will do that to you or else turn you into a Republican. Gwynne is an especially informed and felicitous writer, while Jackson poses a challenge to the most resourceful student of human character.

Jackson was a compendium of glaring opposites: a pious and uxorious homebody and failed science teacher, who transformed himself in an absurd and bad cause into the fiercest and most ingenious of battlefield generals. Kazan was a dynamo. All the forces in American theatre come together, one way or another, in him. His memoir is unique for its honesty, intimacy, and insight into all the great talents with whom he worked and into his own legendary struggle to be an artist and to be true to his political principles.