Biography book series in reading order

by James Herriot

by Warren W. Wiersbe

by Jack Sheffield

by Allan Zullo

by Spike Milligan

by Edward Willett

by Booker T. Washington

by Jill Conner Browne

by Art Spiegelman

by Heather Morris

by Echo Bodine

by Ace Collins

by Boris Pasternak

Who HQ is the credit on 429 children's nonfiction biographies in the catalogue, published from 2002 to 2026. The run opens with Who Was Albert Einstein?, Who Was Amelia Earhart? and Who Was Ben Franklin? (all 2002) and reaches Who Is Vera Wang (2026). Subjects include biography, history and juvenile nonfiction for readers aged 8 to 12. Other names credited on some of the books include Megan Stine (7), John Hinderliter (7) and Nico Medina (4).

James Herriot wrote about veterinary practice in the English countryside, mixing memoir, anecdote and animal stories. The catalogue holds 39 titles published between 1970 and 2023, among them All Creatures Great and Small (1972), All Things Bright and Beautiful (1974) and the 2023 collection The Wonderful World of James Herriot. All Creatures Great and Small is the best known sequence, and Herriot also wrote children's books such as Bonny's Big Day. The books are short at a median of 180 pages, and the catalogue is closed.

Victoria Holt's catalogue runs to 185 books published between 1940 and 1995, covering historical fiction, historical romance and mystery. Daughter of Anna (1940) is the earliest title, and Daughters of England (1995) the latest. The listing gathers several credits under other names, including titles marked as Jean Plaidy. Series include Tudor Saga, Plantagenet Saga, Georgian Saga, Stuart Saga, Norman Trilogy, Queen Victoria and Lucrezia Borgia. Kings, queens, England and France are frequent subjects.

Nancy Krulik writes for children, and the catalogue lists Grades 1-3 as the reading level. Series credited to Krulik include Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo, How I Survived Middle School, Magic Bone, Princess Pulverizer and Project Droid, and George Brown, Class Clown appears among the characters. Subjects range across magic, schools, friendship, dogs, robots and humorous stories. The most recent listed book is Fangs for Having Us! (2021), and the catalogue marks the output as dormant.

Wensley Clarkson is an English true crime writer, biographer and television producer, born in 1956. The catalogue holds 74 books dated 1991 to 2021, from Dog eat dog (1991) to Serial Killers of Russia (2021). Murderers, organised crime, serial murder and female offenders are the standing subjects, with case studies of British crime running through the list. Clarkson also published a biography of Quentin Tarantino in 1995. Books average 288 pages, and the 2000s were the peak decade.

Chris Nickson began in celebrity biography, with books on Brad Pitt (1995), Mariah Carey (1995), Soundgarden (1995), Denzel Washington (1996) and Keanu Reeves (1996), then turned to historical crime fiction. The DI Tom Harper, Richard Nottingham, Simon Westow, John the Carpenter and WPC Lottie Armstrong series carry that later work. Sixty-three books are catalogued between 1995 and 2026, with murder investigation, English history and police procedure recurring as subjects.

Sports biography accounts for most of Joe Layden's writing. The catalogue opens in 1994 with Thin Ice: The Complete, Uncensored Story of Tonya Harding and 40 Minutes of Hell, and takes in Deion Sanders (1995), Steve Young (1995) and USA Basketball (1996). Basketball, the NBA, football, women athletes and the Olympic Games run through the subjects, much of it written for young readers. 60 titles span 1994 to 2026, reaching In My Darkest Hour (2026), at a median 214 pages.

Marc Eliot writes biographies and memoirs of show business figures, and has ghost-written for film stars. The subjects run from musicians to actors: Phil Ochs in Death of a Rebel (1979), Burt Reynolds, Bruce Springsteen in Down Thunder Road, Walt Disney in Hollywood's Dark Prince, and Merle Haggard in The Hag (2022). Rockonomics and American Television take on the industries themselves. 28 titles span 1979 to 2022, at a median of 322 pages.

Alison Weir is a British historian and author who writes about English royalty, and about royal women in particular. Weir's first book, Britain's Royal Families (1989), set out a genealogy of the British royal family; biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Katherine Swynford and Elizabeth of York followed, alongside studies of Henry VIII and his court and of the Princes in the Tower. Weir writes historical fiction as well, including the Six Tudor Queens and Tudor Rose novels. The catalogue holds 59 titles between 1989 and 2026, the most recent being The Boleyn Secret.

Jerry Bruce Jenkins, born September 23, 1949, is an American writer who co-wrote the Left Behind series with Tim LaHaye. Jenkins also writes the novels based on The Chosen, the TV series about Jesus. Across more than 200 books, Jenkins covers biography, self-help, romance, mystery and young adult fiction, and 19 novels explore eschatological themes. The catalogue lists 207 books from The Night the Giant Rolled Over (1971) to The Battle for Heaven and Earth (2026). Series include Left Behind: The Kids, Red Rock Mysteries, Margo Mysteries and Wormling.

Susan B Katz and various authors is the credit on The Story of, a biography series for readers in grades 3 to 5. 52 books were published between 2020 and 2025, from The Story of Frida Kahlo (2020) to The Story of Olivia Rodrigo (2025). Subjects range from Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Alexander Hamilton and Amelia Earhart to Barack Obama, Benjamin Franklin, Fred Rogers and Gandhi. The median book runs 66 pages.

Carolly Erickson wrote history and historical fiction, from The Records of Medieval Europe (1971) to The Spanish Queen (2013). An American author born 1 January 1943 and died 11 November 2020, Erickson took the RT Reader's Choice Award for best Historical Fiction in 2008 for The Tsarina's Daughter. English royalty supplies most of the subject matter: Bloody Mary (1978), Great Harry (1980), The First Elizabeth (1983) and Mistress Anne (1984) all treat the Tudors, with Josephine and Royal Panoply, both 1980, beside them. The catalogue holds 28 books at a median of 368 pages.

Brad Meltzer

85 books• 14 series

Brad Meltzer, born April 1, 1970, is an American novelist, non-fiction author, television creator and comic book writer. The novels span political thrillers, legal thrillers and conspiracy fiction. Meltzer has written superhero comics for DC Comics and, at times, Marvel, and a run of short biographies of well-known people for young readers. The catalogue holds 86 titles from The Tenth Justice (1997) to We are the Wright Brothers (2026), and I am Taylor Swift is scheduled for 2027. Series include Ordinary People Change the World, Beecher White/Culper Ring and Escape Artist/Zig & Nola. Other titles include Identity Crisis (2004) and The Book of Fate (2006).

Antonia Fraser

40 books• 3 series

Antonia Fraser, born Antonia Pakenham on 27 August 1932, is a British writer of history, biography, novels and detective fiction. Fraser is the widow of Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel laureate in literature, and was known as Lady Antonia Pinter until his death in 2008. The catalogue runs to 40 books between 1954 and 2023, setting biographies and histories such as Mary Queen of Scots (1969), Cromwell (1973) and The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (1975) beside the Jemima Shore detective novels. Subjects record kings and rulers, queens, England and women detectives.

David Downing

37 books• 5 series

David Downing, born 1946, is a British author of mystery novels and nonfiction whose fiction depicts World War II and Berlin. The John Russell espionage thrillers, known as the Station Series, follow an Anglo-American character in 1940s Germany and take their titles from railway stations, most of them in Berlin. Jack McColl is a second series. The 37 catalogued books begin with Future Rock (1976) and include titles on film actors such as Clint Eastwood (1977), and Union Station (2024) is the newest.

Virginia Woolf

74 books• 6 series

Modernist writing in English owes a great deal to Virginia Woolf, who lived from 1882 to 1941 and did more than most to establish stream-of-consciousness narration as a working technique. Woolf was born in South Kensington, the seventh child of Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson, and grew up among eight siblings, the painter Vanessa Bell among them. The catalogue collects her diaries, journals, letters and Collected Essays, together with biography and criticism of Woolf herself.

Peter Ackroyd

70 books• 4 series

Peter Ackroyd is an English novelist, biographer and critic, born in 1949, whose standing subject is the history and culture of London. Seventy books are catalogued from London Lickpenny (1973) to Forgotten London (2025). Biography fills much of the list, in Chaucer (1980), Ezra Pound and His World (1980), T.S. Eliot (1984) and later lives of William Blake, Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More; the novels include The Great Fire of London (1982), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and Hawksmoor (1985). Ackroyd's Brief Lives, Voyages Through Time, a History of England and Shakespeare: the Biography are the series. The Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards followed.

H.W. Brands writes history and biography centred on American presidents, the Cold War and United States foreign relations. The catalogue lists 48 books from Cold Warriors (1988) to American Patriarch (2026), and includes the series Foreign Relations and the Presidency. Early titles are India and the United States, The Specter of Neutralism, Inside the Cold War, Bound to Empire, The Devil We Knew and The Reckless Decade. Brands is still publishing.

Stephen E. Ambrose

36 books• 4 series

Stephen Edward Ambrose, January 10, 1936 to October 13, 2002, was an American historian whose books concentrate on the Second World War, the American West, and the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Ambrose taught history from 1960 to 1995, joined the University of New Orleans in 1971 and became Boyd Professor of History there in 1989. Ambrose founded the Eisenhower Center at that university and was a co-founder of the National D-Day Museum, since renamed the National World War II Museum. The catalogue holds 36 books from Halleck (1962) to This Vast Land (2003), with Nixon and Eisenhower recorded as multi-volume series.

Charles Whiting (18 December 1926 to 24 July 2007) was a British writer and military historian credited with some 350 fiction and non-fiction books. Besides the Whiting name, the pseudonyms used include Duncan Harding, Ian Harding, John Kerrigan, Leo Kessler, Klaus Konrad, K.N. Kostov and Duncan Stirling. Subjects include the Second World War, the Battle of the Ardennes, military campaigns, biography and the secret service. The catalogue holds 152 books under the Whiting name, starting with The Frat Wagon (1954), and includes Decision at St. Vith, Patton, Bradley and Skorzeny. Series include T-Force, Assault Troop, Stuka Squadron, Special Boat Squadron and Spymaster.

Carole Boston Weatherford

67 books• 1 series

Carole Boston Weatherford, born Carole Michele Boston on February 13, 1956, is an American author, poet and critic. More than 50 of Weatherford's children's books have been published, mostly non-fiction and poetry. Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre won the 2022 Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Weatherford received the Children's Literature Legacy Award in 2025. African American history, civil rights and slavery appear among the subjects. The catalogue lists 67 books from Juneteenth Jamboree (1995) to Kin: Rooted in Hope (2023).

Elie Wiesel

47 books• 3 series

Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016), born Eliezer Wiesel in Romania, was an American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor. Night (1956), the first title in the catalogue, draws on Wiesel's imprisonment as a Jew at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel wrote 57 books, mainly in French and English, and the catalogue lists 47 books, including Dawn (1960), Day (1961), The Town Beyond the Wall (1962) and A Beggar in Jerusalem (1968). Filled with Fire and Light (2021) is the latest. The Holocaust, Judaism and Hasidism are recurring subjects.

Walter Isaacson

18 books• 1 series

Walter Isaacson is an American journalist and biographer, born on 20 May 1952, whose subjects have included Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna and Elon Musk. Isaacson has edited Time, chaired CNN and led the Aspen Institute, and was a professor at Tulane University as of 2024. Eighteen books are catalogued, from The Wise Men (1986) to The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (2025).

Maya Angelou

51 books• 3 series

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014), born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was an American memoirist, poet, essayist and civil rights activist. Angelou published seven autobiographies, three books of essays and several books of poetry. The first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), covers Angelou's life up to age 17. Other catalogued titles include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). The catalogue counts 51 books, including And Still I Rise (1978), and ends with Strategies of Abundance (2014). Angelou received more than 50 honorary degrees.