Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

One of France's most high-profile writers and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Albert Camus experienced both public adulation and acrimonious rejection during his career, which was cut short by a fatal car accident in 1960 when he was only 45 years old. Born in 1913 to a worki...

"Albert O. Hirschman was not, by any standard, a typical scholar. German by birth, by age thirty he had fought in two world wars, lived in seven different countries on three continents. He spoke and wrote in five languages, used multiple pseudonyms, and could pass as a French native. He held posi...

Entrepreneur, aviator, publisher, publicist, propagandist, playwright, songwriter, motorist, land developer, dreamer: for five brief years it seemed like there was nothing Clement John DeGaris couldn't do. He'd inveigle your life savings out of you with a promise of doubling them in a year and th...

The biography of one of America's founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, which became the basis for the hugely successful Broadway show Hamilton. 'I was swept up by the story. I thought it 'out-Dickens' Dickens in the unlikeliness of this man's rise from his humble beginnings in Nevis in the Carib...

When Alexander McQueen committed suicide in February 2010, aged just 40, a shocked world mourned the loss of its most visionary fashion designer. McQueen had risen from humble beginnings as the youngest child of an East London taxi driver to scale the heights of fame, fortune and glamour. He desi...

This title is dedicated to Alexander McQueen's work and talent, and exhibits not simply visually electrifying fashion images, but also reveals the deep reservoir of the designer's imagination.

Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist and explorer of his day. "I view him as one of the greatest ornaments of the age," wrote Thomas Jefferson, and he received Humboldt in the White House in 1804. Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated Humboldt as "one of those wonders of the world," and ...

The man who invented shock rock tells how he slayed his demons--with a golf club. One day between concerts, when Cooper was bored and drunk on a quart-of-whiskey-a-day habit, a friend dragged the rocker out of his room and suggested a round of golf. Cooper has been a golf addict ever since. This ...