The Best Books of 2020: Biography!

It’s probably fitting that in a year so thoroughly characterized by chaos my surest safe harbor in all the reading world, my favorite genre, biography, should offer me precious little refuge but instead challenge me, bother me, and unsettle me. In no other reading year can I remember a roster of my favorite biographies that so little reflected my favorite time periods, styles, or subjects (dead kings, dead Romans, and dead Kennedys, as one wag once summed them up). Fraudulent artists, crappy musicians, sub-par poets, more or less total strangers thickly populate the ranks of biographies, including many of the best of them:

10 Child of Light by Madison Smart Bell (Doubleday)

In a pairing rare enough to be almost unprecedented, one genuinely impressive novelist here writes a biography of another genuinely impressive novelist, and the result, Madison Smart Bell’s biography of Robert Stone, is spellbindingly interesting.

9 Calder: The Conquest of Space, The Later Years, 1940-1976, Jed Perl (Knopf)

The great art critic and historian Jed Perl here concludes his massive, definitive biography of the famous sculptor/talentless fraud “Sandy” Calder, providing the indisputably authoritative starting point for any future scholars dumb enough to venerate a figure like Calder.

8 Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate (Yale University Press)

Indispensable biographer Jonathan Bate takes the customary thumbnail of William Wordsworth - the grey, fatally abstracted eminence grise of English poetry - and totally upends it, spotlighting in these pages an urgent and very much unfinished young passionate writer.

7 The Planter of Modern Life by Stephen Heyman (WW Norton)

This story of a critically well-regarded 1920s novelist transforming himself into an experimental organic farmer is one of the many examples of how 2020’s great biographies came at me from entirely unpredictable directions; Stephen Heyman turns this unlikely story into compelling reading.

6 Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix by Philip Norman (Liveright)

The brief life of famous guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who died at age 27 - mostly a saga of missed engagements, epic drug and alcohol consumption, and the occasional impromptu bit of musical inspiration - is transformed through Philip Norman’s prodigious narrative talents into something very nearly approaching the heroic.

5 Dante by John Took (Princeton University Press)

Given the hyper-abstruse undercurrents of Dante’s life, it’s probably fitting that this brilliant book by John Took is such a fiercely literary and intellectual study of the man through his work. Took’s book is not for Dante beginners, but it’s essential for Dante aficionados of all kinds.

4 The Dead Are Rising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les & Tamara Payne (Liveright)

The Paynes’ big biography of the martyred civil rights leader is an eloquent revelation from the first page, restoring to an often caricatured figure an amazing wealth of dimensions. 

3 Cross of Snow by Nicholas Basbanes (Knopf)

That informal poet laureate of all things bookish, Nicholas Basbanes, here writes a thoroughly engaging biography of the great and now-forgotten poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, illuminating plenty of details for the modern era and adding a dash of advocacy along the way.

2 These Fevered Days by Martha Ackmann (WW Norton)

Martha Ackmann uses ten super-charged moments in the odd, anguished life of Emily Dickinson in order to illuminate the whole of that life, and there’s something oddly apt in this quilt-like approach when applied to such a strangely chimerical figure - it yields a Dickinson portrait more thought-provoking than any previous one.

1 Red Comet by Heather Clark (Penguin Random House)

This big book by Heather Clark, the best biography of 2020, tackles another much-chronicled subject, the life and literary legacy of Sylvia Plath, entering a field not only already crowded with formidable biographies but with Plath’s own writing. It succeeds magnificently in giving readers a thoroughly human - and, incidentally, immensely likable working writer.