Max Boot, Reagan: His Life and Legend (Liveright)

Political columnist Max Boot interviewed over 100 of Reagan’s aides, friends, and family members, and researched thousands of newly available documents to write what critics call “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date.” Boot contextualizes Reagan’s life and provides a nuanced look at the 40th president.

Cynthia Carr, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Cynthia Carr puts Candy Darling, a transgender icon and Warhol film star, back into the spotlight in this meticulously researched biography. Candy Darling died at the young age of 29, in 1974, a time in which conversations about gender identity were just beginning.

Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss (Random House)

Fredericka Mandelbaum’s rise from tenement poverty to vast wealth in Gilded Age New York City was not a simple rags-to-riches tale. Margalit Fox’s well-researched and flamboyantly told biography captures the fascinating story of a woman who rose through the ranks of New York City society by becoming a criminal mastermind.

Stephanie Gorton, The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (HarperCollins)

Stephanie Gorton provides a richly researched and bold perspective on the clash between two women—Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett—whose activism led the way to the modern discourse over women’s reproductive freedoms. Gorton weaves details of how race, class, and gender, as well as the Great Depression and the eugenics agenda impacted the fight for bodily autonomy and access to birth control into this portrait of rivals whose work affected generations to come.

David Greenberg, John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster)

Most people know of John Lewis’s work in the civil rights movement, but David Greenberg’s biography goes beyond this, covering Lewis’s rise into politics, his work as a voting rights activist, and his dedication to nonviolence and justice. Greenberg uses sources ranging from archives to interviews with almost 300 people, as well as footage of Lewis speaking from his hospital bed in Selma to create a fully dimensional picture of this icon of civil rights and freedom.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival Is A Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Macmillan)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the first researcher to fully explore the depths of Audre Lorde’s manuscript archives. As a result, she has written a biography that captures Lorde’s teachings, creativity, resilience, and her deep engagement with the planet itself in a way that does justice to this force of poetic nature.

Lucy Hughes-Hallet, The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham (Harper)

In a biography that reads much like a novel, Lucy Hughes-Hallet explores the world of the Duke of Buckingham, James I’s confidant, advisor, and lover, and the dynamic world of early modern England.

Heath Hardage Lee, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady (Macmillan)

Heath Hardage Lee shows the elusive Pat Nixon as few have seen her. While the press portrayed this First Lady as elusive and “plastic,” Nixon did important work for humanitarianism, equal rights, and political policy. This biography portrays a woman that deserved her accolade as the “Most Admired Woman in the World.”

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Macmillan)

This is the thrilling story of Frantz Fanon, the intellectual activist who wrote revolutionary works about race and the psychology of power. His work challenged white supremacy and racial capitalism and still resonates today.

Jackie Wullschläger, Monet: The Restless Vision (Penguin Random House)

Drawing on thousands of letters and unpublished resources, Jackie Wullschläger reveals a new perspective on the life of one of the most important painters of the 19th century, Claude Monet. The author shows how his tumultuous love life impacted his painting and gives readers a new understanding of Monet’s work as well as his life.

By A’Lelia Bundles

The publication of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance on June 10 [by Scribner] will mark the fifth biography I’ve written, but my fascination with the genre began in elementary school during the late 1950s, when I read several books in Bobbs-Merrill’s “Childhood of Famous Americans” series. 

I was drawn to stories about women like author Louisa May Alcott, aviator Amelia Earhart, doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, and Helen Keller. I must have run out of books about women, so I even read about Knute Rockne, Notre Dame’s legendary coach.

But who I didn’t read about was Black people. If the books about Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune—the only Black women in the 220-book series—were in my library, it’s hard to believe I would have missed them. I think now what an inspiration it would have been for me as the only little Black girl in my first, second, and third grade classes to actually have seen somebody who looked like me in a book.

Nevertheless, those library books must have planted seeds for On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner/Lisa Drew, 2001) and my two young adult biographies: All about Madam C. J. Walker (Cardinal/Blue River Press, 2017) and Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur (Chelsea House, 1991).

The Bobbs-Merrill “Childhoods of Famous Americans” series, which began in 1940, was intended to inspire young readers to learn history. And the books did do that, though I now know they were very close to what now would be categorized as the kind of “patriotic education” that sanitizes slavery, glosses over racial discrimination, and gives very little space to women, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans.

I enjoyed those books as a child, but I’m very happy that young readers today have many more choices with much more diversity and, yes, equity and inclusion. Today, most major publishers have children’s and young adult’s biography series with hundreds of titles. And even if children live in communities where school boards and state legislatures have banned accurate Black history or where libraries won’t stock books about justice-seeking Black people, they can learn about amazing African Americans on Instagram, TikTok, PBS, and hundreds of websites.

A’Lelia Bundles is a BIO member and the author of several biographies, including the upcoming Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance (Scribner, June 2025).

What is your current project and at what stage is it?

I’ve just begun a biography of Thomas Cooper, a brilliant English-born polymath who emigrated to America in 1794 and became president of South Carolina College. In England, he was a radical, a fierce critic of the slave trade, and a sympathizer of the French Revolution. In America, after a period as a Jeffersonian liberal, he supported slavery, nullification, and secession. He wrote about a wide range of topics, from the sciences and religion to economics and political parties. He also did jailtime for sedition, in 1800. Cooper was famous in his day (Thomas Jefferson called him “the greatest man in America”), but he’s now almost completely forgotten. It will be a short biography, nothing on the scale of my Van Buren book. I like the challenge of bringing an obscure figure back to life. I’m also eager to explore how people can shift so dramatically to embrace the darkest of ideas. 

What person would you most like to write about?

Probably the film director John Ford. It’s a fantasy of mine to write about an artist. I read lots of biographies of novelists, musicians, and filmmakers. I envy those with the skill and knowledge to pull it off. I don’t have the talent for it, though. Biographers, like all writers, must be self-aware. 

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?

That’s a no-brainer: Robert Caro—for his example as much as his output, as thrilling as his books are. I’m in awe of his doggedness and dedication. I’m sure he didn’t intend to spend half a century writing about Lyndon Johnson. I’m sure he didn’t want to. But he decided that that was what was needed, so here we are, in 2025, awaiting the final volume. (Please finish, Mr. Caro!) He truly is peerless. As for my favorite biography, that, too, is a no-brainer: The Power Broker, a 1,200-page page-turner. Honorable mentions: Bernard Bailyn’s The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, Stacy Schiff’s Vera, T. J. Stiles’s The First Tycoon, and Leon Edel’s magisterial multivolume biography of Henry James. 

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

Finishing the book was pretty satisfying! Other than that, I would say the writing process. Of course, there are moments of discovery in the library and the archives that are exhilarating, but when your writing is clicking—really clicking—there’s no better feeling. Unfortunately, those moments are fleeting and infrequent. I love this quote from Thackeray: “There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.” How true! I remember when I was finishing the book, I had an inkling of what I wanted the last line to be, but nothing I put down was satisfying. Then, the perfect sentence just came out. I was making a point central to the book, but I somehow had not thought of it in quite that way. The sentence was tucked away in my cerebellum, and then magically it appeared on screen. It’s one of the few lines in the book that I didn’t amend at all. My editor didn’t touch it, either. (Sorry, I’m not quoting it here; you’ll have to get the book and judge for yourself.)

What have been your most frustrating moments?

The opposite of everything I just wrote. Writing is a draining, brutal slog. Things almost never go smoothly. And just when you think you find your rhythm, you hit a wall. Rinse, wash, repeat. Also dispiriting is the fruitless quest for material—driving for hours to the archives only to find nothing of any value. Then there’s the painful realization that there are limits to what we know. This comes with the profession when you write about people who lived a long time ago. We search for material to patch together a narrative, but there are often glaring gaps in the record. I know so little about Van Buren’s childhood, for example, and what kind of relationship he had with his parents, even his wife. Sometimes I picture Van Buren reading my book, laughing at my attempts to understand and explain the past, where, as a novelist once famously wrote, they do things differently.

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?

Sometimes I need a break from a steady diet of U.S. history, so I’ll jump into contemporary fiction. The best of the recent lot is Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin: A Novel (Pantheon, 2024), an absorbing and powerful book. I also read a lot of history outside my field and general nonfiction. Peter Frankopan’s work, which I’ve only recently discovered, is remarkable. When I need to unwind, I often turn to memoirs and diaries; I just finished Francine Prose’s terrific 1974: A Personal History (Harper, 2024), and I’m now into Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (Penguin Press, 2024). Favorite writer: Gore Vidal. If I could only have one book (what a terrifying thought!), it would be his United States: Essays 1952–1992, and I would probably never be bored. Other favorites (in no order) are: Henry Adams, Vivian Gornick, Richard Hofstadter, Tocqueville, John Lukacs, V. S. Naipaul, Tony Judt, Philip Roth, David Lodge (RIP) . . . I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Oh, and I just started [Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow—this is the year I do it! Check in with me in 12 months.

James M. Bradley is the author of Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician, published by Oxford University Press, in December 2024.