Biography book series in reading order

by James Herriot

by Jack Sheffield

by Jill Conner Browne

by Art Spiegelman

by Heather Morris

by Gill Hornby

by John E. Douglas

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

G.K. Chesterton

114 books• 6 series

G.K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 29 May 1874 to 14 June 1936) was an English writer of Christian apologetics, noted for wit, paradox and a defence of tradition. Chesterton created the priest-detective Father Brown and wrote the apologetic works Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism. The catalogue lists 114 books, opening with The Defendant (1901) and Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Carlyle (1902), and including The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), Heretics (1905) and The Club of Queer Trades (1905). Biographers place Chesterton as a successor to Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman and John Ruskin.

Tom Clavin writes narrative history and biography. Baseball supplies Roger Maris (2010) and Gil Hodges (2012); golf supplies The Ryder Cup (1999) and Sir Walter (2005); the Second World War and the United States Marine Corps supply Halsey's Typhoon (2007), The Last Stand of Fox Company (2008) and Last Men Out (2011). Clavin also writes the Frontier Lawmen books. Thirty-four catalogued titles reach The Phantom (2026).

Isaac Asimov

553 books• 31 series

Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer who also taught biochemistry at Boston University. Hard science fiction is the core of Asimov's reputation, and the Foundation series about a fallen space empire is the most famous work; Asimov ranked with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the "Big Three" of the genre. The output also covers mysteries, fantasy and popular science, with non-fiction lines such as How Did We Find Out and the Library of the Universe. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books. This catalogue opens with the story Marooned Off Vesta (1939) and names Asimov on 400 of the listed books.

Gary Paulsen

181 books• 17 series

Survival and outdoor adventure run through Gary Paulsen's writing for young readers. The catalogue holds 181 books, from Some Birds Don't Fly (1968) to Northwind (2022), at a median length of 105 pages. Brian Robeson, Francis Tucket, Duncan Culpepper, Murphy and the World of Adventure books head the series lines, with non-fiction and picture books alongside. No new Paulsen title has appeared since 2022.

John Buchan

84 books• 4 series

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (26 August 1875 to 11 February 1940), was a Scottish novelist, historian, army officer and Unionist politician who served as the 15th Governor General of Canada. Buchan published a first novel in 1895, the year of Sir Quixote of the Moors, the earliest catalogued title, and went on to write more than a hundred books, The Thirty-Nine Steps the best known among them. Series include Richard Hannay, the Leithen Stories and Dickson McCunn. Buchan studied at Glasgow and Oxford, practised as a barrister, and in 1901 was private secretary to Lord Milner in southern Africa near the end of the Boer War. Subjects include the First World War, the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the intelligence service and Scotland.

Farley Mowat

38 books• 1 series

Farley Mowat (1921-2014) was a Canadian writer and environmentalist whose work was translated into 52 languages and sold more than 17 million copies. People of the Deer (1950) opens a catalogue of 38 titles and begins Mowat's writing on the Canadian north, its Inuit peoples and the Arctic. Never Cry Wolf (1963), an account of life among Arctic wolves, was filmed in 1983. Mowat wrote for children as well, taking the Vicky Metcalf Award in 1970, and the catalogue closes at Eastern Passage (2010).

Julian May

50 books• 7 series

Julian Clare May (July 10, 1931 - October 17, 2017) was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, science and children's books, working under several pseudonyms as well. The Saga of Pliocene Exile, titled Saga of the Exiles in the United Kingdom, and the Galactic Milieu books are the work May is best known for. The catalogue holds 50 titles dated 1961 to 2015, opening with Robots and Thinking Machines. Much of the run is juvenile writing: profiles of Johnny Unitas, Willie Mays, Bobby Orr, Ernie Banks, Fran Tarkenton, Gale Sayers, Roberto Clemente and Billie Jean King all fall between 1972 and 1974, and Sports Close-Up is among the series on record. Median length across the catalogue is 47 pages.

Larry McMurtry

48 books• 10 series

Larry McMurtry (Larry Jeff McMurtry, June 3, 1936 to March 25, 2021) was an American novelist, essayist and screenwriter. Most of McMurtry's fiction takes place in the Old West or in contemporary Texas, and the early novels Horseman, Pass By (1961), The Last Picture Show (1966) and Terms of Endearment (1975) trace the decline of small-town Texas life. Screen adaptations of McMurtry's work received 34 Oscar nominations and 13 wins. The catalogue lists 48 books from 1961 to Thalia (2017), including the Lonesome Dove and Berrybender Narratives series and non-fiction.

David McCullough wrote American history and biography. The Johnstown Flood (1968) opens the catalogue; The Great Bridge (1972) takes on the Brooklyn Bridge; The Path Between the Seas (1977) and Mornings on Horseback (1981) follow. Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001) are the presidential biographies. Fifteen titles are catalogued, running to History Matters in 2025.