LIST: Our 10 Best Biographies of 2021

1.     Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)

There were other madams in Manhattan, but none had the charisma and brains that made Adler the “proprietress of Manhattan’s most renowned bordello,” writes Applegate, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. Her deliciously readable biography of Adler has been built on deep, wide-ranging archival research and Applegate’s instinct for revelatory details of the era. She captures the full scope of Adler’s life, from her childhood in a small Russian shtetl and her 1913 arrival alone in America, to ambitiously making her way out of a Massachusetts corset factory to Manhattan, where her “intoxicating playground” revealed the outsize role of illicit sex in business and politics. “Polly was hailed as a symbol of a decadent, long-gone era,” Applegate writes. “But she preferred to cast herself as a modern Horatio Alger heroine.”  

2.     You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker (PublicAffairs)

Group biography at its best, Becker’s book brings to life its trio of intrepid female journalists who redefined the role of women in war reporting and enhanced appreciation of the nuances of the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The trio were the brilliant magazine writer Frances FitzGerald, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fire in the Lake; stunning photographer Catherine Leroy; and fierce combat reporter Kate Webb. Becker contends that these journalists transformed the war story: “They were outsiders – excluded by nature from the confines of male journalism, with all its presumptions and easy jingoism.” A journalist herself, Becker followed the trail blazed by these women in Southeast Asia, reporting on the war from Cambodia, which gives her a unique, nuanced understanding of the region’s landscape and dynamics.

3.     Robert E. Lee: A Life by Allen C. Guelzo (Knopf)

Guelzo brings his powerful analytical gifts and literary flair to a complex and divisive historical figure: Gen. Robert E. Lee. Multiple winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, Guelzo illuminates Lee’s upbringing, including his obsession with money and his decision to enter West Point, and how, after undistinguished years as a general, he finally met with success in 1862 and showed his prowess as a leader. Guelzo gracefully dissects Lee’s philosophy and explains how he opposed secession and a drawn-out war and that while he found slavery objectionable and opposed mistreatment of the enslaved, he resisted Reconstruction and steps toward Black equality.

4.     Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (Penguin Press)

Psychologically keen and culturally perceptive, Harris has written a smashing success of a biography of Mike Nichols, whose five decades as a legendary film and theater director followed a start in improv comedy, and whose greatest creation was perhaps himself. Nichols’ The Graduate (featured in Harris’ brilliant debut, Pictures at a Revolution, about the 1967 best-picture Oscar nominees) was a revelatory moment in American culture and a pivot point in entertainment, and Harris chronicles how this Jewish refuge from Nazi Germany and college dropout transformed himself into an influential force at the epicenter of the cultural universe, from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Angels in America. More than a litany of Tony, Oscar, Grammy, and Emmy awards, this biography bursts with insight about Nichols’ self-creation, which Harris signals by beginning with Nichols at age 7, crossing the Atlantic Ocean by ship.

5.     The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster)

In his previous books about geniuses of the distant past, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, Isaacson steered clear of hagiography and incisively captured the special alchemy of their pioneering discoveries. In his latest captivating biography, he shines a spotlight a modern-day genius: Jennifer Doudna, a winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Isaacson captures Doudna’s formative years in Hawaii as she figured out her place in the world, reading James Watson’s The Double Helix in sixth grade, which helped to inspire her determination to develop CRISPR technology to cut and change DNA sequences. Since the promise of eradicating genetic diseases is so closely connected to the peril of misusing the technology and doing lasting harm to humanity, Isaacson suggests wisdom and caution. “To guide us, we will need not only scientists, but humanists,” he writes in this brilliant, accessible book. “And most important, we will need people who feel comfortable in both worlds, like Jennifer Doudna.”

6.     Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine (Simon & Schuster)

Historian Levine tells the story of one of the most ardent abolitionists in the U.S. Congress, a sarcastic Radical Republican who won the wrath of his colleagues, who saw him as a demagogue. Born into poverty in Vermont, Stevens developed a strong antipathy toward slavery and as a representative from Pennsylvania was chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee and vociferously advocated voting rights and citizenship for freed slaves. Stevens preceded President Abraham Lincoln, and then strenuously advocated for the impeachment of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, but died during Reconstruction., before the pendulum swung back strongly away from his progressive views on race.

7.     The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson by Robert S. Levine (W. W. Norton)

Levine’s dual biography of Southern Democrat Johnson and prominent Black leader Douglass focuses on their post-Civil War wrestling over building a more egalitarian nation through Reconstruction, the promise of which began to fade just months after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and Johnson’s elevation to the White House. While Johnson’s impeachment drama is central to this engrossing history, Levine argues: “The story of Douglass and the impeachment of Johnson addresses the hopes and frustrations of Reconstruction during the moment of opportunity and crisis that was the Johnson presidency.” The promises of Reconstruction were soon dashed and, in his fascinating book relevant for those concerned with voting rights today, Levine shows how Douglass and his compatriots grew disillusioned with Johnson and how the reluctance to grant voting rights to African Americans contributed to his impeachment.

8.     Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Salzman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In her deliciously satisfying narrative, Saltzman hits the history button reset on Napoleon Bonaparte by telling his history through a slant: Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana, the massive masterpiece pillaged from Venice to become a crown jewel of the Louvre Museum, which would also display other great works of art looted from Italy. “The looting of art reflected the best and the worst of Napoleon’s character,” writes Salzman in her vivid, revelatory history. “Bonaparte didn’t think of himself as a plunderer. Anything but. In the Italian campaign he saw himself as a soldier, a commander, a victorious general in chief – a citizen of the Republic of France carrying the Revolution abroad, and already a statesman, a diplomat who told the people of Lombardy he was freeing them from the despotic Austrian regime.”

9.     Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight by Julia Sweig (Random House)

Known for her beautification efforts that have brought flowers to roadways across America, seen as the quintessential first lady with a stiff upper lip and a soft Southern lilt, Lady Bird Johnson, it turns out, was also thinking about the Vietnam War and civil rights, and advising her husband, President Lyndon Johnson, not to seek reelection. Thanks to Sweig’s creative, prodigious work, Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson is ready for her close-up. Lady Bird dictated daily audio diaries and 123 hours of her time in the White House and left portions sealed until she died in 2007 at age 94. Now Sweig has dug deeply into those surprising diaries and written a marvelous book — and produced an excellent podcast revealing Lady Byrd’s influence on her husband’s presidency and underscoring the exciting prospects of encountering overlooked historical clues to fascinating stories.

10.  The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights by Dorothy Wickenden (Scribner)

Who knew that Auburn, New York, provided such fertile ground for the fight for abolitionism and suffragism? In Wickenden’s engaging social history, this little city in the central part of the state is where Seneca Falls organizer and Quaker Martha Coffin Wright and Frances Seward, wife of William Seward, governor and Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, provided a stop for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. They were allied with Harriet Tubman, who had emancipated herself and her family, and moved to Auburn in 1857. Wickenden brings Wright, Seward, and Tubman to life, describing their evolution from homemakers into insurgents between the antebellum period and Reconstruction. “Tubman saw Wright and Seward as two of her most trusted associates, and they drew strength from her,” writes Wickenden in her eloquent prologue. “In the coming decades, these women, with no evident power to change anything, became co-conspirators and intimate friends – protagonists in an inside-out story of the second American revolution.”