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Biographies — page 14
2,466 public-domain biographies books, summarised. Page 14 of 52.
The Life of Johannes Brahms (Vol 2 of 2)
Florence May
An artist's rise from hesitant ambition to enduring mastery requires patience, devotion, and an unyielding commitment to the craft. Florence May traces this quiet triumph through every performance, friendship, and score that shaped a musical titan.
A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
James E. (James Everett) Seaver
A young pioneer girl taken captive during the French and Indian War remains with the Senecas for life, choosing their quiet world over her lost heritage.
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 01: Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great
Elbert Hubbard
A brisk walk through history, geography, and personal encounter reveals how human genius takes root in the quiet, everyday soil of domestic life.
The Empress Frederick: a memoir
Anonymous
A brilliant English princess marries the heir to the Prussian throne, only to spend decades caught between her adopted country's rigid autocratic court and her own unyielding commitment to liberal reform.
Lucretia Borgia According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day
Ferdinand Gregorovius
Behind the sensational scandals of the Italian Renaissance lies a human history written in official ledgers, diplomatic dispatches, and private correspondence, stripping away centuries of myth to reveal a woman governed entirely by political necessity.
Index of the Project Gutenberg works of Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
An elaborate architectural blueprint maps out a massive historical epic, capturing the vast sweep and minute detail of a Prussian king's turbulent life.
Life of John Keats
William Michael Rossetti
A delicate young poet fights against poverty, frail health, and bitter critical hostility while attempting to capture the pure essence of beauty in English verse.
Ten Days in a Mad-House
Nellie Bly
An undercover journalist feigns mental illness to enter a women’s asylum, exposing systemized cruelty and securing lasting institutional reform.
Life and Letters of Robert Browning
Robert Browning
A boyhood spent roaming a family library gives way to standard-setting poetry, an iconic literary romance, and a quiet, steadfast old age.
The Englishman in China During the Victorian Era, Vol. 1 (of 2): As Illustrated in the Career of Sir Rutherford Alcock, K.C.B., D.C.L., Many Years Consul and Minister in China and Japan
Alexander Michie
A surgeon-turned-consul navigates thirty years of violence, gunboat diplomacy, and political paralysis as Great Britain forcefully carves out its commercial empire across Victorian East Asia.
Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
A masterclass in intellectual portraiture, this volume dissects the motives, moral failings, and grand political movements that shaped the modern Western world.
Giordano Bruno
J. Lewis (James Lewis) McIntyre
A restless sixteenth-century friar breaks his vows, wanders across Europe, and constructs a daring cosmic philosophy that eventually leads him straight into the flames of the Inquisition.
Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician
Frederick Niecks
A lonely child who played for emperors grew into an elusive master, transmuting the isolation of exile and chronic illness into music that shattered classical conventions without ever raising its voice.
How I Filmed the War: A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc
Geoffrey H. Malins
A cameraman navigates the mud, shell-fire, and mechanical marvels of the First World War, capturing a reality that forever altered how the public perceived the front line.
Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville
Mary Somerville
A childhood spent roaming free on the Scottish coast gives way to a lifetime of intellectual conquest, turning a quiet, self-taught girl into one of the nineteenth century’s towering scientific figures.
Cowper
Goldwin Smith
An fragile, exquisitely tender mind struggles against the shadows of dark melancholy to pioneer a revolutionary simplicity in English poetry, finding solace in quiet countryside routines, domestic love, and private correspondence.
The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume III
Alexander Wheelock Thayer
An aging titan, deaf and isolated, wages a fierce legal war for his nephew while summoning his final, transcendent masterpieces from the void.
The Wizard of Wall Street and His Wealth
Trumbull White
A quiet, frail man accumulates the largest personal fortune of his century, leaving behind a legacy of financial devastation, brilliant strategic manipulation, and a nation left questioning the moral limits of unbridled American capitalism.
Famous Men of Science
Sarah Knowles Bolton
Long night hours and silent labor shape the men who reveal the universe, proving that true scientific triumph comes from quiet, persistent work.
Tar : A Midwest childhood
Sherwood Anderson
A young boy stands at the edge of an Ohio field, watching a threshing machine turn wheat into a river of gold, and realizes that the quiet adult world is filled with secret labors, hidden griefs, and unexplained longings.
The Life of Nelson, Volume 2: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain
A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
A genius for naval warfare collides with personal frailty as Great Britain's greatest admiral shapes the fate of Europe while breaking his own life apart.
Abraham Lincoln, Volume I
Morse, John T., Jr. (John Torrey)
This detailed biography captures the steady emergence of Abraham Lincoln alongside the descent of a divided republic into civil war. John Torrey Morse Jr. reconstructs the era not as a sudden calamity, but as the unavoidable culmination of a long moral and political crisis.
Life of John Milton
Richard Garnett
A dedicated idealist moves through academic clashes, civil war, personal heartbreak, and political ruin, ultimately channeling his unyielding convictions into an immortal masterpiece of cosmic poetry.
Life of Mozart, Vol. 3 (of 3)
Otto Jahn
A vast, exhaustive portrait of a genius at his absolute peak captures the feverish final decade in Vienna, where creative mastery and crushing financial precarity collides in a radiant burst of operatic and instrumental invention.
Margaret Sanger: an autobiography
Margaret Sanger
A tireless advocate chronicles her transformation from a modest nursing student into the architect of a global movement for reproductive autonomy.
Benjamin Franklin
Robin McKown
From a humble Boston household to the glittering courts of Versailles, the life of a printer turned statesman reveals how curiosity and industry shaped a new nation.
My Memoirs, Vol. V, 1831 to 1832
Alexandre Dumas
Paris in the early 1830s is a powder keg of political unrest and artistic revolution, where the lines between the stage and the street are constantly blurring. This account captures the feverish energy of a young man navigating the volatile transition from the Bourbon Restoration to the reign of Louis-Philippe.
The Story of a Pioneer
Anna Howard Shaw
A rugged childhood in the Michigan wilderness forged a spirit that would later redefine the American pulpit and lead the national struggle for women’s right to vote.
A Queen of Tears, vol. 1 of 2: Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark and Norway and Princess of Great Britain and Ireland
W. H. (William Henry) Wilkins
This account of a neglected English princess thrust into a volatile foreign court reveals the tragic intersection of personal vulnerability and the cold machinery of European power politics. It is a detailed, sympathetic examination of a life defined by its isolation and eventual ruin.
Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey
The Victorian Age is a sprawling, contradictory ocean of information that defies a single, unified history. Instead of attempting a futile, exhaustive account, this work offers a series of selective, piercing portraits that reveal the era’s hidden character.
The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes, Volume 08: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II
Samuel Johnson
These biographical portraits capture the rise and fall of literary giants, offering a sharp, unsentimental look at the lives behind the verses of the English Enlightenment.
The journal, with other writings of John Woolman
John Woolman
This quiet, luminous volume records the inner life and travels of an eighteenth-century Quaker who sought to reconcile his daily existence with the radical demands of his faith. It is a work of profound, unflinching introspection.
The life and times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt
Arthur E. P. Brome (Arthur Edward Pearse Brome) Weigall
A vivid portrait of a queen navigating the collapse of a Mediterranean empire, this historical study reexamines the final, decisive years of Egypt’s last pharaoh.
William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir Compiled by His Wife Elizabeth A. Sharp
Elizabeth A. (Elizabeth Amelia) Sharp
A complex, hidden life reveals itself through the artistic dualism of a man who lived as both a critic and a mystic. This intimate memoir traces a journey from the literary salons of London to the soul-searching solitude of the Celtic fringe.
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial
Alexander H. (Alexander Hay) Japp
A tribute to a beloved writer, this account captures the spirit of a restless traveler and storyteller, balancing his professional achievements with the private struggles of a man plagued by ill health.
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XVI, Texas Narratives, Part 4
United States. Work Projects Administration
HOOK These voices from the twilight of the nineteenth century offer an unfiltered, haunting record of American slavery through the memories of those who survived it.
Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters: A Selection from His Correspondence with Boccaccio and Other Friends, Designed to Illustrate the Beginnings of the Renaissance
Francesco Petrarca
The legacy of the Renaissance begins not with a movement, but with a singular, restless mind searching for its own reflection in the fragments of the ancient world.
Brief Lives, Vol. 2
John Aubrey
A collection of candid, ink-stained portraits captures the human spirit of the seventeenth century, documenting the eccentric lives, private habits, and unvarnished deaths of poets, scientists, and kings with startling, intimate precision.
Lola Montez
Edmund B. (Edmund Basil) D'Auvergne
This biography chronicles the life of one of the 19th century’s most notorious figures, a woman who rose from a military childhood in India to captivate kings and stir revolutions across Europe.
Famous composers and their works, Vol. 3
Unknown
This volume serves as a scholarly survey of European musical history, profiling the lives, aesthetic struggles, and technical evolutions of composers from the late Renaissance through the late nineteenth century. It frames the development of Western classical music as a cumulative, often competitive, narrative of…
Far off things
Arthur Machen
This is a luminous, introspective memoir capturing the quiet isolation of a Welsh childhood and the wide-eyed, often bewildered arrival of a young writer in the bustling, uncaring heart of London during the 1880s.
The Exploits and Triumphs, in Europe, of Paul Morphy, the Chess Champion
Frederick Milnes Edge
A young American chess prodigy travels to Europe in 1858 to challenge the continent’s finest masters, dismantling their reputations with a style of play that is as swift and lethal as it is modest and gentlemanly.
Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words
Ludwig van Beethoven
This collection offers a rare, intimate encounter with a genius, capturing his unfiltered thoughts on art, morality, and the isolating burden of his own extraordinary mind.
Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life
Marion Harland
A prolific nineteenth-century domestic author reflects on a life shaped by the traditions of Old Virginia, the fractures of the Civil War, and the demands of a public literary career.
Michael Faraday, His Life and Work
Silvanus P. (Silvanus Phillips) Thompson
A man of profound simplicity and sage wisdom, Michael Faraday transformed our understanding of the invisible forces governing the natural world. He dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth, valuing the labour far above the wage.
The Authoritative Life of General William Booth, Founder of the Salvation Army
George S. (George Scott) Railton
This portrait of a religious firebrand chronicles the transformation of a single, uncompromising conscience into a worldwide movement that challenged the status quo and reached the forgotten corners of society.
Charles Dickens: A critical study
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The genius of Charles Dickens lies in his ability to transform the mundane into the mythical, proving that a truly vivid imagination can find the sublime in the most ridiculous corners of human life.
The Early History of the Airplane
Orville Wright
The dawn of human flight was not a sudden stroke of genius, but a methodical climb through failure, skepticism, and hard-won data. These accounts chronicle the transition from boyhood curiosity to the precise engineering of the first controlled, powered airplane.