The best biographies of American women

Why this book?

This is the book that introduced me to astonishing research and the art of life writing when I was in high school. Milford’s vivid and deeply researched biography of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is unsurpassed; she found letters presumed lost and assembled her own archive. Milford’s feminist reading of Zelda’s life is subtle and convincing, suggesting that some of Zelda’s madness may have been induced by her frustration at never becoming a creative artist in her own right. Also possibly a contributing factor: Scott’s theft of many details of her life and letters to fuel his own writing!

• Buy this book at:
• Bookshop.org
• Amazon

When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.

Why this book?

Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton is a model literary biography because of her thorough evocation of life at midcentury for middle-class women, and their everyday frustrations and humiliations because of their sex. Sexton was at once privileged because of her striking beauty, creativity, and connections to the beating heart of American poetry after World War II (through Robert Lowell), and hobbled by her self-destructive mental illness. Taken together with Milford’s book, these biographies are shocking documents of the barbarism of mental health care for women in the twentieth century.

• Buy this book at:
• Bookshop.org
• Amazon

When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.

Why this book?

Not a biography in the strict sense, this book is an investigation into “an American controversy” by a legal scholar that demonstrates the value of historical research and analysis by showing how Jefferson’s grandchildren, and white scholars and biographers following their lead, effectively conspired to hide the truth of Jefferson’s 30+ relationship with a woman he owned. And Gordon-Reed published this book a full year before the DNA-based analysis showed that Jefferson was overwhelmingly likely to have been the only father to Hemings’s four children.

• Buy this book at:
• Bookshop.org
• Amazon

When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.

Why this book?

Kerrison’s triple biography of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters is a brilliant evocation of life in post-Revolutionary America—its exciting possibilities as well as the limitations that still bound most women, free as well as enslaved. The three women here stand for the lives of millions of women in early America as mothers, mortal beings, and mysterious absences in the historical record: Maria (Polly), like her mother Martha Wayles Jefferson, was doomed by fragile health to an early death; Martha (Patsy), who strongly resembled her father physically and temperamentally, had a large family as the matriarch of Monticello, but endured a vexatious marriage to a troublesome man; and Harriet, Sally Hemings’s only daughter, vanished into white society and remains largely a mystery. Kerrison’s account of her attempts to find Harriet is a gripping adventure tale itself!

• Buy this book at:
• Bookshop.org
• Amazon

When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.

Why this book?

• Buy this book at:
• Bookshop.org
• Amazon

When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.