📚 Biography

30 works · ordered by editions in print

A life rebuilt from letters, records and ruin — the form that turns one person into evidence about a whole time.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject biography in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Title	Author	First published	Editions
Autobiography of a Yogi	Yogananda Paramahansa	1946	183
The Story of Philosophy	Will Durant	1926	150
Dictionary of National Biography	George Murray Smith	1885	122
Memorabilia	Xenophon	1650	102
Autobiography	John Stuart Mill	1873	94
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	Maya Angelou	1969	81
Tagebücher	Franz Kafka	1937	76
The worldly philosophers	Robert L. Heilbroner	1953	67
Confieso que he vivido	Pablo Neruda	1974	61
Steve Jobs	Walter Isaacson	2011	56
A child called "it"	David J. Pelzer	1987	48
A Distant Mirror	Barbara Tuchman	1600	46
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"	Richard Phillips Feynman	1984	45
Einstein	Walter Isaacson	2007	45
Cider with Rosie	Laurie Lee	1959	44
Madame Curie	Eve Curie	1937	42
I am Malala	Malala Yousafzai	2012	42
Autobiography	Bertrand Russell	1944	39
Educated	Tara Westover	2018	37
A Beautiful Mind	Sylvia Nasar	1998	35
When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi	2016	35
Elon Musk	Ashlee Vance	2013	34
Just Kids	Patti Smith	2006	33
Wild	Cheryl Strayed	1767	31
All Creatures Great and Small (All Creatures Great and Small #1-2)	James Herriot	1972	30
The color of water	James McBride	1995	30
The Stranger Beside Me	Ann Rule	1980	28
Kitchen Confidential	Anthony Bourdain	2000	28
Shoe Dog	Phil Knight	2014	28
Alan Turing	Andrew Hodges	1983	27

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.