The Best Books of 2023: Biography!

One of the only side-benefits of a benighted era in which people are encouraged to shape their own information bubbles and claim their own personal realities is that such an era encourages renewed energy when it comes to interrogating the accepted narratives of history. Biographies have never been more spirited or iconoclastic than they've shown themselves in the 21st century, and although this has naturally given rise to a wide farmyard of nonsense and heresy, it's also produced a fair share of truly invigorating new perspectives. Geniuses become more nuanced; scoundrels receive almost always warrantless attempts at rehabilitation; murky nonentities are thrust into the spotlight at last, and the famous are rendered in often very belated human tones. The world might be crumbling into lethal solipsism, but the genre of biography has never seen healthier examples. These were the best of them:

10 The Wounded World: WEB Du Bois and the First World War by Chad Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The fact that WEB Du Bois never managed to finish what he intended to be a major work on black soldiers during the First World War provides the impetus for this brilliant book by Williams on both that failure and the immensely complicated writer who made it, who comes alive more in these pages than he has in the last four or five full-dress biographies he's received.

9 President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by CW Goodyear (Simon & Schuster)

The year's best US President biography is centered around a fairly unlikely subject, since President Garfield is most famous for being assassinated. But Goodyear, bless him, does a vigorous, even valiant job at arguing that Garfield was more interesting and more important than history has judged. You might not end up convinced, but you'll certainly be entertained.

8 The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence by David Waldstreicher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Former Boston slave Phillis Wheatley has been generously chronicled by biographers, but she's never had so detailed and wise a study as this one by Waldstreicher, which treats Wheatley as both an iconic figure and, most interestingly, a working writer.

7 King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Martin Luther King has of course had an epic three-volume biography by Taylor Branch, but for readers who balk at the idea of 2000 pages on any subject, Eig's deeply serious and eloquent biography, certainly the best on-volume life this pivotal figure has ever received, will do nicely.

6 Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson by Sally Jacobs (St. Martin’s)

This life of groundbreaking tennis great Althea Gibson would make for fascinating reading even if Jacobs merely showed up and reported the facts, since Gibson's life was inherently interesting and stirring. But Jacobs also invests the whole narrative with tremendous excitement, and her sensitivity for Gibson's often very nuanced personality is wonderfully consistent throughout.

5 Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins by Jennet Conant (WW Norton)

Probably the single most revelatory biography on the list this time around, this brilliant book by Conant is about the once-legendary and now-forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Herald Tribune reporter Maggie Higgins, who went laughingly into danger alongside sneering male reporters and out-wrote all of them.

4 August Wilson by Patti Hartigan (Simon & Schuster)

The great American playwright August Wilson will likely never receive a biography more exhaustively and inventively researched than this one by Hartigan, but the author here brings more than prodigious research to bear – the book is also solidly readable from start to finish, admiring but free of hagiography.

3 Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer,an Epic Journey, a Lost Era by Reid Mitenbuler (Mariner)

Even from the famous phot

ograph on the cover of this book, its subject, explorer Peter Freuchen, looms larger than life, and Mitenbuler's foremost achievement in these pages is to humanize Freuchen without reducing him – and he's likewise fantastic at his lifelike portraits of all the people around the explorer.

2 Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen by Karen Sullivan (University of Chicago Press)

As the title of Sullivan's book indicates, this biography of the great wife of England's King Henry II is as much about the nature of the sources as it is about Eleanor herself, and it's a tribute to Sullivan's insightful prose and deft narrative touch that she manages to make such a double focus so interesting.

1 Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song by Judith Tick (WW Norton)

This kind of a biographical look at the great Ella Fitzgerald, pointed with wit and firmly grounded in booking tours and recording contracts, is long, long overdue, and Judith Tick here writes it with a spirit and omnivorous curiosity that makes this the best biography of the year.