Best Books of 2022: Biography

2022 wasn’t quite an outright grim year for new books, but it was hardly cause for handsprings either, generally speaking. I read more than in any previous year of my life, but in 2022 those starburst moments of “I loved this book!” were very thin on the ground, and after a while, I started pinning more and more of my hopes on my favorite genre, biography. And once again, the field of biography didn’t let me down. There were long-expected items that lived up to expectations, and there were surprises, things that shouldn’t have worked but did. I read every mainstream biography published in 2022, happily, and these were the best of them:

10 A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell (Viking) – Letters collections of authors can be oddly satisfying reading experiences, glimpses into both the works and the psyche of the worker, and this remarkable volume put together by Tim Cornwell is a prime example of this process when it’s done very well: here we get the famous and beloved author schmoozing, deflecting, caustically entertaining, and also flailing himself in letter after letter to a wide array of recipients. The rhetorical talent and human insight that make his novels so memorable are on full display in almost every one of these letters.

9 The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri Greenridge (Liveright) – The kneejerk slander-impulse of the modern era has very predictable stages: find a person who’s lauded for good works, check to make sure the person doesn’t belong to any of the protected categories of the moment, and if the coast is clear, attack the figure as both a fraud and a hypocrite, actually guilty of the very injustices they built their reputation on fighting. So a new biography of the famous abolitionist Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, seems like a recipe for boring depression – but Kerri Greenridge manages to avoid the excesses of generational vengeance in favor of telling a very intriguing story about the Black relatives of the Grimke sisters.

8 We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story by Simu Liu (William Morrow) – 

Virtually every year, the field of biography will present me with a genuine surprise, something that should have been pureéd cow-crap but turned out to be substantial – call it the Trevor Noah Born a Crime phenomenon. This year that book was certainly this slim memoir from Marvel Cinematic Universe star Simi Liu, which turns out to be a heartfelt and funny story of a young actor and immigrant uprooted from one family and planted in another but always striving to hope for the best. The 21st century tendency to turn literally everything in existence into a condescending lecture is here steadfastly resisted. 

7 I Used To Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (WW Norton) – The preponderance of writing-biographies on the list this year might very well be a long-term after-effect of COVID-driven inwardness, but whatever the cause, the result is a bounty of excellent biographies of some of the least dramatic people in history. This excellent book by Miranda Seymour takes readers in exquisitely-chosen detail through the life of Jean Rhys, from her Caribbean girlhood to her disappointed elder years, with copious insightful commentary on this author’s handful of disturbing novels. 

6 Eliot after “The Waste Land” by Robert Crawford (FSG) – Robert Crawford’s follow-up to his terrific Young Eliot with this generous volume about the poet’s years of fame, and as in that earlier volume, here Crawford brings enormous, wide-ranging research to the task of fleshing out every facet of Eliot’s life. This older and more cynical Eliot is a formidable figure, his inner self leeching deeper and deeper into layers of celebrity and evasion, but Crawford has searched into every detail to find the living man. This volume added to the previous one forms a biography of Eliot that’s unlikely to be bettered in this century.

5 Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland  by Troy Senik (Threshold Editions) – When it comes to biographical surprises, the year hardly had a greater example than this captivating book by Troy Senik about President Grover Cleveland, virtually the poster child for Forgotten Presidents With Odd Names. With a good deal of research and a bracingly energetic enthusiasm, Senik restores to Cleveland all the stature he actually enjoyed in his lifetime. It won’t work to raise Cleveland’s reputation – Washington and Lincoln can sleep easy – but it will delight every presidential biography fan into reconsidering the man.

4 The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution  by Alison Bashford (University of Chicago Press) – Alison Bashford’s densely-packed book works as both a double biography, of Victorian T. H. “Darwin’s Bulldog” Huxley and zoologist Julian Huxley, and a surprisingly rollicking broad-canvas portrait of popular scientific progress over the course of a century. These two Huxleys barely met – an old T.H. once remarked approvingly about how disobedient little Julien was – and they faced radically different challenges, but thanks to Bashford’s lively narrative skill, a unity emerges in their separate quests for scientific literacy. This is perhaps the least likely biography this year to be this entertaining.

3 The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown) – Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra set a bar for popular biography that hardly any other writer could clear, and in this new book, a life of key American Revolution string-puller Samuel Adams, lesser-known cousin to future President John Adams, she scores another hit. Her main strength is her readability; here she writes the most fluid, insightful, and gripping life of Samuel Adams since 1885.

2 Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney (FSG) – This intricate and oddly moving memoir chronicles Darryl Pinkney’s long interaction with the great critic Elizabeth Hardwick, first as a student in the 1970s and then later as a doting but clear-eyed apprentice in Hardwick’s literary world of the New York literary scene. Pinckney very effectively works in a good deal of autobiography, but the weird glory of his book is its lovingly nit-picking portrait of Hardwick, here rendered more knowingly and believably than half a dozen full-dress biographies could likely do. 

1 Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas (FSG) – Just as author biographies featured prominently on the list this year, so too the best biography of the year was a writer’s life: the long-awaited authorized biography of Shirley Hazzard by Brigitta Olubas, drawing on a broad variety of archives and interviews to paint an elegant portrait of this reserved and recondite author. Hazzard herself was sometimes mordantly witty on the prospect of somebody raking through her documents and writing about her life, but Olubas does such a graceful and even-handed job that it’s hard to think her subject would have objected.