Top 10 Literary Biographies

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Guardian, 10 Books

A list of works from the era after the second world war by Jay Parini, who has written seven books about authors including the delightfully titled Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal.

This list was originally published in 2015 and was added to this site over 1 year ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
868 Henry James Leon Edel 1953 American English
4389 James Joyce Richard Ellmann 1959 American English
9582 Edith Wharton R. W. B. Lewis 1975 American English
10451 The Life Of Langston Hughes Arnold Rampersad 1986 American English
14985 Shelley Richard Holmes 1974 British English
17152 Dickens Peter Ackroyd 1990 British English
10451 Will In The World Stephen Greenblatt 2004 American English
17152 Tolstoy A. N. Wilson 1988 British English
17152 The Imperfect Life Of T. S. Eliot Lyndall Gordon 1998 British English
10451 The World Is What It Is Patrick French 2008 Trinidadian English