Plath, Pessoa, Polly and more seven inspiring biographies

Ever since James Boswell wrote what many consider to be the first modern biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, in 1791, biographies have helped us gain insight into people’s lives, allowing us to observe them as they grapple with crises and make important decisions.

Biographies capture history through an account of events based upon people’s lives and can lead us to greater understanding of time and place. Enlightening, inspiring and entertaining, these are some of the best biographies published in 2021.

Known for her brilliant biographies of writers Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, in

Tom Stoppard: A Life Hermione Lee takes on one of the greatest living playwrights. A towering literary figure, Stoppard is recognised for his narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language. His works incorporate art, science, history, politics and philosophy and span the genres of theatre, radio, film, TV, journalism and fiction. His most acclaimed creations

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia and

Shakespeare in Love remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences. Lee’s absorbing biography weaves Stoppard’s life and work together into a vivid and riveting portrait of a remarkable man.

Richard Zenith’s Pessoa immortalises the life of one of the 20th century’s greatest European writers. Nearly a century after his death from alcoholism, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who spent nine years in Durban as a child, remains one of the most enigmatic of writers. Haunted by the spectre of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, under whose names he wrote. After his death, about 25,000 unpublished papers were discovered in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources, as well as on unpublished family letters and setting the poet’s life against the nationalism of 20th-century European history, Zenith delves into the depths of Pessoa’s imagination and literary genius.

Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, WG Sebald’s anguished literary vision combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and tackled some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. Carole Angier’s Speak, Silence pursues Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and the work he left behind. From Sebald’s birth as a second-generation German at the end of World War 2, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, Angier explores the choice of isolation that drove the work of a mind on the edge.

In Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant poet who was an accomplished published writer

even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with

Ted Hughes; and much more. Clark promotes a deeper understanding of Plath’s final days. Along with revealing readings of the poems themselves, her meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer to a visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets everywhere.

In 1850s’ South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few treasured items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language, including Rose’s wish that “it be filled with my love always”. Not a biography in the traditional sense, Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, is a family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Miles unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives and the lives of so many women like them to write a revelatory history of the experience of slavery in the US, and the uncertain freedom afterwards.

Everybody came to Polly’s. Pearl “Polly” Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but were places where the culturati and celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld. As a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, Adler’s life is a classic American story of success and assimilation that reads like a tale straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald. She declared her ambition to be “the best goddam madam in all America” and succeeded. In Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, by Debby Applegate, Adler’s story is a key to unpacking what made the 1920s the horrendously corrupt yet glamorous and transformational era that it was.

The smartphones in our pockets. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the 20th century, Von Neumann was one of the most influential scientists. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and expounded on the limits of brains and computers, and how they might be overcome. The Man from the Future is Ananyo Bhattacharya’s illuminating biography of the visionary thinker who shaped a century.