List of biographers
Biographers are authors who write an account of another person's life, while autobiographers are authors who write their own biography.
Biographers
Countries of working life: Ab=Arabia, AG=Ancient Greece, Al=Australia, Am=Armenian, AR=Ancient Rome, Au=Austria, AH=Austria/Hungary, Ca=Canada, En=England, Fl=Finland, Fr=France, Ge=Germany, Id=Indonesia, In=India, Ir=Ireland, Is=Israel, Jp=Japan, Nw=Norway, SA=South Africa, Sc=Scotland, SL=Sierra Leone, So=Somalia, Sp=Spain, Sw=Sweden, TT=Trinidad & Tobago, US=United States, Ve=Venezuela, Wl=WalesA–G
- Hermann Abert – Robert Schumann, Niccolò Jommelli, W. A. Mozart
- Alfred Ainger – Charles Lamb
- Ellis Amburn – Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Jack Kerouac, Elizabeth Taylor, Warren Beatty and Janis Joplin
- Rudolph Angermüller – Antonio Salieri, W. A. Mozart
- Núria Añó – Salka Viertel
- Marie Célestine Amélie d'Armaillé, Désirée Clary
- Rosemary Ashton – George Eliot
- Aaron Badgley – George Harrison and Ringo Starr
- Deborah Baker – Allen Ginsberg and Laura Riding
- Elizabeth Biddulph, Baroness Biddulph – Charles Yorke, 4th Earl of Hardwicke
- Jennie M. Bingham — Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, Charlotte Brontë, Margaret Fuller, Charles Lamb, Briton Rivière
- Lucie Boissonnas – Robert E. Lee
- James Boswell – Samuel Johnson
- Catherine Drinker Bowen - Edward Coke, Benjamin Franklin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Paula Broadwell – David Petraeus
- Max Brod – Franz Kafka
- Leslie Brody – Jessica Mitford
- Vincent Brome – various writers
- Egerton Brydges – English writers
- Andrea Cagan – Diana Ross
- Thomas Carlyle – John Sterling and Frederick the Great
- Robert A. Caro – Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson
- Humphrey Carpenter – J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Evelyn Waugh, Benjamin Britten Robert Runcie and Spike Milligan
- Virginia Spencer Carr – Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles and John Dos Passos
- Charles Castle – Noël Coward, Joan Crawford, Oliver Messel, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, La Belle Otero, Richard Tauber
- George Cavendish – Thomas Wolsey
- Nirad C. Chaudhuri – Clive of India and Max Müller
- Ron Chernow
- Na Chokkan – Sachin Tendulkar, Dhirubhai Ambani, Charlie Chaplin, Rahul Dravid, Azim Premji, Lakshmi Mittal, Walt Disney etc. in Tamil
- Vincent Cronin – Napoleon, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great
- Douglas Day – Malcolm Lowry
- Thomas DiLorenzo – Abraham Lincoln
- Damon DiMarco – Roy Simmons
- Richard Ellmann – James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats
- Marthe Emmanuel – Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Robert Falcon Scott
- Alberthiene Endah – Chrisye, Krisdayanti and Raam Punjabi
- Ivar Eskeland – decorated with the Order of the Falcon and winner of the Bastian Prize for his biographies of Gisle Straume and Snorri Sturluson
- Wayne Federman – Pete Maravich
- Elaine Feinstein – Marina Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Ted Hughes
- Mary Fels – Joseph Fels
- Kitty Ferguson – Stephen Hawking
- William Fitzstephen – Thomas Becket
- Amanda Foreman – Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
- Esther G. Frame – Esther G. Frame
- Antonia Fraser – Mary, Queen of Scots and Oliver Cromwell
- Russell Freedman – Abraham Lincoln
- Douglas Southall Freeman – Robert E. Lee and George Washington
- Leonie Frieda – Catherine de' Medici
- Jean Overton Fuller – Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Sir Francis Bacon
- Elizabeth Gaskell – Charlotte Brontë
- Peter Gay – Sigmund Freud and W. A. Mozart
- Gary Giddins – Bing Crosby, Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong
- Martin Gilbert Winston Churchill
- Annie Somers Gilchrist
- Josef Greiner – Adolf Hitler
- Adrian Greenwood – Colin Campbell, 1st Baron Clyde
- Peter Guralnick – Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips
- Gamal Abdul Nasir Zakaria – Mohammad Natsir
H–M
- Seppo Heikinheimo – Aarre Merikanto, Oskar Merikanto and Martti Talvela
- Charles Higham – Errol Flynn, Howard Hughes and Katharine Hepburn
- Thomas Jefferson Hogg – Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Richard Holmes – Mary Shelley, Coleridge, The Age of Wonder
- Michael Holroyd – Lytton Strachey
- Imogen Holst – Gustav Holst
- Louise Seymour Houghton – David Livingstone
- Marilla Baker Ingalls – Mah Po
- Walter Isaacson – Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger
- Edward Jablonski – George Gershwin and Irving Berlin
- Elizabeth Jenkins – Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Lady Caroline Lamb Joseph Lister and Elizabeth I
- Samuel Johnson – Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
- Ernest Jones – Sigmund Freud
- Kathleen Jones – Katherine Mansfield
- Landon Jones – William Clark
- Alicia Jurado – William Henry Hudson, Cunninghame Graham, Jorge Luis Borges
- Shakuntala Karandikar – Chandrashekhar Agashe
- Kitty Kelley – Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Nancy Reagan
- Jacqueline Kent – Kenneth Cook, Beatrice Davis, Julia Gillard and Hephzibah Menuhin
- Harriette A. Keyser — Henry C. Potter
- Jennie Ellis Keysor - Raphael
- Marvin Kitman – George Washington and Bill O'Reilly
- Edward Klein – Hillary Clinton
- Randy Kryn — James Bevel
- Robert Lacey – Elizabeth II, Princess Grace, Henry VIII, Henry Ford and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
- Jane Lane – Titus Oates
- Hermione Lee – Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf
- Sidney Lee – Dictionary of National Biography, William Shakespeare and Queen Victoria
- J. Michael Lennon – Norman Mailer
- Santeri Levas – Clara & Robert Schumann, Jean Sibelius
- Barbara Levick – specialising in Roman emperors
- Gail Levin – Edward Hopper, Judy Chicago and Lee Krasner
- Roger Lewis – Anthony Burgess
- Martha D. Lincoln — John Wesley Powell
- Kenneth S. Lynn – Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin and Ernest Hemingway
- Brenda Maddox – Elizabeth Taylor, D. H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Rosalind Franklin
- Norman Mailer – Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald and Gary Gilmore
- Koryun – Mesrop Mashtots
- William Manchester – Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur and John F. Kennedy
- Cristina Marcano – Hugo Chávez
- Bruce Marshall – Wing Commander F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas
- John Matteson – Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller
- André Maurois – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Benjamin Disraeli, Victor Hugo, Balzac and Sir Alexander Fleming
- David McCullough – Harry S. Truman, John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt
- Jimmy McDonough – Neil Young, Andy Milligan, Russ Meyer, Tammy Wynette
- Merle Miller – Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson
- James McGrath Morris – Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Chapin, Ethel Payne, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos
- Miyoshi Kiyotsura – Japanese scholar-statesman
- Ibn al-Qaisarani – medieval Arab biographer of previous medieval biographers
- Simon Sebag Montefiore – Grigory Potemkin and Joseph Stalin
- Thomas Moore – Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Byron and Lord Edward FitzGerald
- Jeffrey Morgan – Alice Cooper and The Stooges
- Ted Morgan – William S. Burroughs, W. Somerset Maugham and Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Andrew Morton – Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky and Tom Cruise
N–Z
- Ira Nadel – Leon Uris, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard and Leonard Cohen
- Alanna Nash
- Nakane Kōtei
- Philip Nel – Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss
- Cornelius Nepos
- Nizamuddin Asir Adrawi
- Iris Origo
- James Parton – Horace Greeley, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Voltaire
- Hesketh Pearson
- F. David Peat – David Bohm
- Plutarch
- H. F. M. Prescott – Mary I of England
- Arnold Rampersad – Langston Hughes
- Piers Paul Read – Alec Guinness
- James Redpath – John Brown
- E. J. Richmond – Harriet Hosmer
- W. Andrew Robinson – Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore
- Romain Rolland – Beethoven, Michelangelo, Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi
- Henry Salt – Shelley, Richard Jefferies and Henry David Thoreau
- Carl Sandburg – Abraham Lincoln
- Stacy Schiff – United States; Véra Nabokov, Benjamin Franklin, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Cleopatra and the Witches of Salem
- Anton Schindler – Ludwig van Beethoven
- Anne Sebba – Wallis Simpson
- Nachman Seltzer
- Lee Server – Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner
- Miranda Seymour – Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, Hellé Nice, Mary Shelley
- Kirit Shelat – India
- Dawn Langley Simmons – Princess Margaret, Margaret Rutherford and Jacqueline Kennedy
- Roy S. Simmonds – John Steinbeck, William March and Edward O'Brien
- Jean Edward Smith – Ulysses S. Grant, John Marshall and Lucius D. Clay
- Laura J. Snyder – Charles Babbage, John F.W. Herschel, William Whewell, Richard Jones, Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Oliver Sacks
- Dava Sobel – John Harrison, Sister Maria Celeste, daughter of Galileo, Galileo
- Maynard Solomon – Beethoven, W. A. Mozart
- Leslie Stephen – Dictionary of National Biography, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift George Eliot and Thomas Hobbes
- Jane Agnes Stewart — Frances Willard
- Irving Stone
- Lytton Strachey – eminent Victorians
- Marshall Terrill – Steve McQueen, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Billy Graham, Pete Maravich
- Mary Wilder Tileston - Mary Wilder White, Mary Wilder Foote, Amelia Peabody Tileston
- Bankole Timothy, Kwame Nkrumah
- Nick Tosches – Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin and Sonny Liston
- Meriol Trevor – John Henry Newman, Philip Neri, Pope John XXIII, Thomas Arnold and James II of England
- Henri Troyat – Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Gogol, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Maxim Gorky and Rasputin
- Jenny Uglow – Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society
- Rosa Kershaw Walker – eminent Americans
- Blanche Warre-Cornish – William Thackeray
- Alison Weir – Elizabeth I of England, Eleanor of Aquitane, Mary, Queen of Scots
- Sam Weller – Ray Bradbury
- Theodore White – Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon
- Alice Willard – Bertha Baur
- A. N. Wilson – Sir Walter Scott, John Milton, Hilaire Belloc, Leo Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Jesus Iris Murdoch and John Betjeman
- Molly Worthen – Charles Hill, American diplomat and Yale professor
- Marguerite Young – Eugene V. Debs