Best Biography Books

Henry Worsley, a British explorer obsessed with Ernest Shackleton, attempts to be the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unsupported — and does not survive the attempt.

Hurston's autobiography — the most unreliable and most revealing of the Harlem Renaissance — traces her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, her years studying under Franz Boas, her folk research in the South and Caribbean, and her life as a writer. Hurston revises, omits, and invents throughout; the book is most honest about what it refuses to say.

The second volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography, covering her late teens in post-war California — working as a cook, a dancer, a madam, and eventually a prostitute, while raising her young son alone.

A selection of Sylvia Plath's correspondence with her mother Aurelia from 1950 to 1963, edited by Aurelia Plath — a complex document that reveals the public face Plath maintained for her mother and the gap between that performance and the inner life she described elsewhere.

Bourdain's follow-up to Kitchen Confidential — a decade later, more famous, more conflicted, and harder on the food world and on himself.

A curated anthology of Fortune magazine articles spanning five decades, edited by Carol Loomis, that traces Warren Buffett's rise from obscure Omaha investor to the world's most celebrated businessman. The collection captures Buffett's evolving philosophy, sharp wit, and uncommon candor across a remarkable career.

Lewis spent a year embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange's catastrophic collapse. The result is a portrait of the man at the centre of one of the largest financial frauds in history — a portrait that refuses easy categorisation of SBF as either visionary or villain.

Andrew Kilpatrick's sprawling, encyclopedic biography of Warren Buffett chronicles the investor's life from childhood in Omaha through the building of Berkshire Hathaway into one of the world's most valuable companies. Updated across multiple editions, it serves as the most comprehensive single-volume reference on Buffett's personal and professional history.