A number of BIO members have had suggestions for a list of good books about writing biography. Here is the list, as of December 2022:

• Catherine Drinker Bowen, Biography: The Craft and the Calling
• Leon Edel, Writing Lives
• Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story 
• James Atlas, In the Shadow of the Garden 
• Gale E. Christianson, Writing Lives is the Devil: Essays of a Biographer at Work 
• Hermione Lee, Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing
• Milton Lomask, The Biographer’s Craft
• John McPhee, Draft #4 
• Nigel Hamilton, How to Do Biography  
• Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABCs of Modern Biography 
• Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft  
• Carl Rollyson, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography
• Carl Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide 
• Uchenna Njiaju, How to Write Your Family Biography