11 Amazing Biographies to Read

Biographies offer an escape into someone else’s story, giving you the chance to see why they made their decisions and second-guess them if you like. We’ve selected 11 Amazing Biographies to Read. Enjoy!

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11 Amazing Biographies to Read

Frida by Hayden Herrera

Frida is the story of one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary women, the painter Frida Kahlo. Born near Mexico City, she grew up during the turbulent days of the Mexican Revolution and, at eighteen, was the victim of an accident that left her crippled and unable to bear children.

To salvage what she could from her unhappy situation, Kahlo had to learn to keep still – so she began to paint. Kahlo’s unique talent was to make her one of the century’s most enduring artists. But her remarkable paintings were only one element of a rich and dramatic life.

Frida is also the story of her tempestuous marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera, her love affairs with numerous, diverse men such as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky, her involvement with the Communist Party, her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture, and of the inspiration behind her unforgettable art.

The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller

An original combination of biography, literary criticism and history, The Brontë Myth shows how the Brontë sisters became cultural icons. Since 1857, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, the story of literature’s most famous family has been endlessly reinterpreted, not just by biographers, but by film-makers and playwrights, choreographers and cartoonists, poets and artists.

Lucasta Miller follows the fortunes of the Brontës’ afterlife and explores how each retelling – whether in pious Victorian conduct books or in Freudian psycho-biographies, in feminist manifestos or on tea-towels made for the tourist market – reflects the preoccupations of its own age.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The bestselling and prize-winning study of one of the most legendary American Presidents in history, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin is the book that inspired Barack Obama in his presidency.

When Obama was asked which book he could not live without in the White House, his answer was instant: Team of Rivals.

This monumental and brilliant work has given Obama the model for his presidency, showing how Abraham Lincoln saved America by appointing his fiercest rival to key cabinet positions. As well as a thrilling piece of narrative history, it’s an inspiring study of one of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen.

Wong Kar-Wai: Auteur of Time by Stephen Teo

This study of Hong Kong cult director Wong Kar-wai provides an overview of his career and in-depth analysis of his seven feature films to date. Teo probes Wong’s cinematic and literary influences – from Martin Scorsese to Haruki Murakami – yet shows how Wong transcends them all.

Warhol by Blake Gopnik

When critics attacked Andy Warhol’s Marilyn paintings as shallow, the Pop artist was happy to present himself as shallower still: He claimed that he silkscreened to avoid the hard work of painting, although he was actually a meticulous workaholic; in interviews he presented himself as a silly naïf when in private he was the canniest of sophisticates. Blake Gopnik’s definitive biography digs deep into the contradictions and radical genius that led Andy Warhol to revolutionise our cultural world.

Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol’s surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist’s path from his origins as the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants in 1930s Pittsburgh, through his early success as a commercial illustrator and his groundbreaking pivot into fine art, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity of the ’70s and ’80s, as he reflected and responded to the changing dynamics of commerce and culture.

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra’s palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff’s is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Bruce Lee by Matthew Polly

More than forty years after Bruce Lee’s sudden death at age 32, journalist and author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee’s life. It’s also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee’s family, friends, business associates and even the mistress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon.

There are his early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father’s struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a troublemaking teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; his beginnings as a martial arts teacher, eventually becoming personal instructor to movie stars like Steve McQueen; his struggles as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and frustration seeing role after role he auditioned for go to white actors in eye makeup; his eventual triumph as a leading man; his challenges juggling a sky-rocketing career with his duties as a father and husband; and his shocking end that to this day is still shrouded in mystery.

King by Jonathan Eig

In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.

He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death.

As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became its only modern-day founding father – as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

Red Comet by Heather Clark

Drawing on a wealth of new material, Heather Clark brings to life the great and tragic poet, Sylvia Plath. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century as she thoroughly explores Sylvia’s world. We see Plath’s early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; we witness her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and, through clear-eyed portraits of the demonised players in the arena of her suicide, we gain a deeper understanding of her final days.

Featuring illuminating readings of Plath’s poems, Red Comet brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women the world over.

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany’s air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications.

But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer.

The Black Count by Tom Reiss

Who was the real Count of Monte Cristo? In this extraordinary biography, Tom Reiss traces the almost unbelievable life of the man who inspired not only Monte Cristo, but all three of the Musketeers: the novelist’s own father.

Born in St Dominigue in 1762, the son of a French nobleman and a sugar plantation slave, General Alexandre Dumas did not have an auspicious start in life. Things got worse when his father sold him into slavery to pay his passage back to Normandy. But six months later, Dumas’ fortunes changed. His father bought him out of slavery and raised him in France, where Dumas went to the nation’s finest schools and fencing academies, and having enrolled in the army became known as France’s most handsome and strongest soldier. By the time Napoleon invaded Egypt, Dumas was his top cavalry commander.

If you enjoyed 11 Amazing Biographies to Read, check our 10 Best Memoirs to Read