The Best Books of 2024: Biography

2024 was a rich if sometimes oddly stilted year for my own favorite kind of reading, biographies. Life stories can be boring but definitive, catchy but crappy, and any intermix along those vertices. And regardless of where 2024 biographies fell on this arrangement, most of them stayed true to the rest of 2024 by largely disappointing me. But some were very good, and these were the best of them:

10 The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England by Nicholas Jenkins (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) – This capaciously learned volume looking at WH Auden's life and writing in the interwar years starts out along more or less straightforward biographical lines but steadily broadens out to encompass so much of the entire era that Auden himself would have approved.

9 Carson the Magnificent by Bill Zehme (Simon & Schuster) – This big completion of Zehme's crowning life's work shares a besetting sin of so many 2024 biographies, open hagiography, but it compensates with shrewd insights, zesty writing about a not-necessarily-zesty subject, and, yes, unfailing compassion.

8 The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (Basic Books) – Hasegawa takes the very familiar story of the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and back-fills it with the political and aristocratic complexities that have tended to be blurred or erased by more romantic versions. The Nicholas II in these pages might have a kind of furtive nobility, but he's oburately stupid, and there's something refreshing in that.

7 The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Harper) – Hughes-Hallet clearly mostly likes her subject, the handsome favorite of both King James and King Charles, and she's a very lively narrator of big, contradictory personalities that surrounded him. Her narration just in general, in fact, is exuberantly fun.

6 Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra (Mariner Books) – There's plenty of exuberance as well in this generous new life of Boston's infamous art collector and society figure, but Dykstra's real genius in these pages, what differentiates it from the excellent earlier biographies of this odd little figure, is its darker, less romantic element.

5 Zhou Enlai by Jian Chen (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) – This heavily-detailed life of modern China's first premier and in many ways defining soul is at a glance a kind of final word on the subject (absent the opening of who knows how many archives) but also sometimes frustratingly mannered in its careful steps.

4 Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life by Michael Nott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – Careful steps characterize this equally-definitive life of the great poet, although at least this big book side-steps the perils implied by its deadly subtitle. Nott knows everything about his subject and pulls no punches, and gradually his narrative pulls together a story of daring and loss.

3 Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – The third of our excellent but careful definitive doorstop biographies this year lays out all the details of Ishwerwood's friendships, loves, and written works in elaborate, almost stultifying exactitude. Like all the other authors of these books, Bucknell saves the whole project from tedium by sheer narrative energy.

2 Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones (Viking) – Sheer narrative energy is present in almost embarrassing abundance in this biography by Dan Jones, who's made his name more recently as a writer of explosively readable historical novels. He's carried those freshly-honed gifts to this life of Henry V, the best book on the subject in decades.

1 Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot (Liveright) – Some of the other figures on the list this time around are people who've accumulated layers of legend, Ronald Reagan more than most – his latest biographer, in this, the best biography of 2024, even notes it in his book's title. But Boot manages to carve away a great deal of fat and fluff in order to find the real man underneath it all.