National Book Critics Circle Award Biography Winners and Finalists 2000-2019
1. 
3. 
The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)
by:
Robert A. Caro
4.40 avg rating β 19,288 ratings 
5. 
Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #3)
by:
Robert A. Caro
4.42 avg rating β 23,634 ratings 6. 
Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
by:
Yunte Huang
3.60 avg rating β 641 ratings 
9. 
Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
by:
Kenneth Whyte
4.35 avg rating β 1,437 ratings 10. 
Stalinβs Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva 3.97 avg rating β 5,051 ratings
12. 
"Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions
by:
Ian S. MacNiven
3.73 avg rating β 33 ratings 
14. 
16. 
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68
by:
Taylor Branch
4.43 avg rating β 1,899 ratings 17. 
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina
by:
David Hajdu
3.91 avg rating β 3,609 ratings 18. 
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
by:
George Packer
4.38 avg rating β 2,265 ratings 
20. 
The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century
by:
Mark Lamster
4.14 avg rating β 221 ratings 21. 
22. 
Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War
by:
Nigel Cliff
4.14 avg rating β 571 ratings 
25. 
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
by:
Caroline Fraser
3.94 avg rating β 19,449 ratings 
27. 
The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
by:
Howard Markel
3.88 avg rating β 911 ratings 28. 
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
by:
Charlotte Gordon
4.22 avg rating β 7,199 ratings 
30. 
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
by:
T.J. Stiles
4.15 avg rating β 1,895 ratings 31. 
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives
by:
Karin Wieland
3.60 avg rating β 241 ratings 
34. 
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
by:
S.C. Gwynne
4.28 avg rating β 8,559 ratings 35. 
Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
by:
Scott Anderson
4.08 avg rating β 16,525 ratings 
37. 
Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore
by:
Linda Leavell
4.24 avg rating β 118 ratings 
40. 
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
by:
Michael Gorra
4.30 avg rating β 414 ratings 41. 
Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography
by:
Lisa Jarnot
4.07 avg rating β 44 ratings 42. 
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
by:
Tom Reiss
4.02 avg rating β 21,030 ratings 
44. 
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
by:
Mary Gabriel
4.27 avg rating β 808 ratings 45. 
Hemingways Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934 - 1961
by:
Paul Hendrickson
3.75 avg rating β 2,087 ratings 
47. 
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
by:
Sarah Bakewell
4.02 avg rating β 10,619 ratings 
49. 
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History
by:
Yunte Huang
3.75 avg rating β 563 ratings 
52. 
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
by:
Benjamin Moser
4.28 avg rating β 1,218 ratings 
54. 
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line 3.37 avg rating β 1,040 ratings
55. 
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
by:
Patrick French
4.17 avg rating β 513 ratings 
57. 
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
by:
Steve Coll
4.01 avg rating β 1,911 ratings 
59. 
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
by:
Brenda Wineapple
3.98 avg rating β 548 ratings 60. 
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
by:
Tim Jeal
4.12 avg rating β 876 ratings 
63. 
A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years: 1917-1932 (Vol 3)
by:
John Richardson
4.24 avg rating β 322 ratings 
65. 
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
by:
Julie Phillips
4.24 avg rating β 1,381 ratings 66. 
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
by:
Debby Applegate
3.96 avg rating β 1,039 ratings 
68. 
A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler
by:
Jason Roberts
4.09 avg rating β 1,471 ratings 69. 
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by:
Kai Bird
4.31 avg rating β 55,179 ratings 
71. 
81. 
A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
by:
Blake Bailey
4.45 avg rating β 539 ratings 
84. 
Charles Darwin: A Biography, Vol. 2 - The Power of Place
by:
Janet Browne
4.29 avg rating β 737 ratings 
87. 
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music
by:
Mark Zwonitzer
4.30 avg rating β 1,169 ratings 88. 
Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson
by:
Adam Sisman
4.07 avg rating β 156 ratings 
90. 
The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
by:
Barry Werth
3.90 avg rating β 121 ratings 
92. 
The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics 3.83 avg rating β 418 ratings
93. 
I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 A Diary of the Nazi Years
by:
Victor Klemperer
4.38 avg rating β 1,266 ratings 94. 
96. 
Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
by:
Charles King
4.26 avg rating β 2,337 ratings 97. 
The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
by:
Josh Levin
3.70 avg rating β 2,090 ratings 98. 
L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "Female Byron"
by:
Lucasta Miller
3.89 avg rating β 160 ratings 99. 
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
by:
Sonia Purnell
4.15 avg rating β 58,206 ratings 100. 
Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet
by:
Eugene F. Walter
4.14 avg rating β 186 ratings