Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson is an American journalist and biographer whose authorised lives of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Einstein have made biography a genuine popular art form.

Walter Isaacson is a former editor of Time magazine and CEO of the Aspen Institute who has built a career writing substantial, accessible biographies of figures who shaped modern thought and technology. His subjects — Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Elon Musk, Robert Oppenheimer — share a particular profile: creative geniuses whose capacity for vision was matched by difficult, sometimes cruel personal behaviour. Isaacson is drawn to this type, and he has developed a consistent authorial approach: thorough research, fair-minded (if sympathetic) characterisation, and clear, readable narrative prose that makes the technical and scientific dimensions of his subjects’ work accessible to non-specialists.

Steve Jobs (2011) is his most widely read biography, authorised by Jobs himself shortly before his death and drawing on over forty interviews as well as extensive access to friends, family, and colleagues. It is candid about Jobs’s cruelty, his manipulation of colleagues, and his failures — the repeated abandonment of his daughter Lisa, the early management disasters at Apple — while also making clear the genuine creative genius that made him irreplaceable. It is a more honest book than most corporate hagiographies and more substantive than most celebrity biographies.

Leonardo da Vinci (2017) is his most intellectually ambitious work — a portrait of universal curiosity as a productive force, drawing on the notebooks Leonardo left behind to reconstruct both the art and the extraordinary range of investigation that sustained it. The criticism sometimes made of Isaacson — that his biographies are thorough but somewhat surface-level in their intellectual engagement with their subjects’ ideas — has more force with his science subjects than with the Jobs biography. But as readable, well-researched introductions to major figures, his books represent popular biography at a high level.