Author biography books
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The Best Author Biographies To Keep You Turning the Pages
What do we really know about our favorite authors? We come to feel as though we know them through their books, stories, and poems, but often their lives remain tantalizingly out of reach. Some live in the public eye, while others shun the spotlight, but most of the time, writers are overshadowed by their own oeuvres.
Not in these 10 author biographies, however, which shed light on the lives (secret and otherwise) of some of our most beloved authors, from Walt Whitman to Virginia Woolf and far beyond. Containing Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning volumes among its own number, these 10 biographies are must-reads for fans of these fascinating authors – and great writing in general!
Looking for Anne of Green Gables
By Irene Gammel
While people all over the world have been following the exploits of little Anne Shirley – better known as Anne of Green Gables – for over a century, considerably less
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The 50 Best Biographies of All Time
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Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss
You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, the 1844 revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013, and it’s only a matter of time before a filmmaker turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.
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50 Must-Read Literary Biographies
The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall
The supposed “American Brontës,” the three Peabody sisters influenced the thinking of writers like Thoreau and Hawthorne. The youngest sister, Sophia, married Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall
After you finish the story of the Peabody sisters and are searching for more stories about American Romanticism and the role women played in the literary scene at the time, pick up Megan Marshall’s other book, about Margaret Fuller.
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The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm
This is a biography of the biographies that have been written about Sylvia Plath. It tries to co