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Biographies — page 18
2,679 public-domain biographies books, summarised. Page 18 of 56.
Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery
George Iles
Mechanics, physics, and natural history converge to demonstrate that human ingenuity advances not by sudden, magical leaps, but through the deliberate, systematic observation and transformation of natural laws.
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
A towering figure of Victorian science confronts declining health while defending empirical truth, debating theologians, and tending Alpine gentians in his final years.
Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet: An Autobiography
John Sherman
From a bright childhood on the banks of Ohio's rivers to the inner sanctums of Gilded Age power, this memoir traces forty years of defining national struggle through the eyes of a master legislative craftsman.
A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray
Samuel Smiles
An ambitious London bookseller builds a literary empire by cultivating the greatest, most volatile minds of nineteenth-century Britain.
The Adventure of Living
John St. Loe Strachey
Through the quiet reflections of a veteran British editor, an intellectual journey unfolds across the political, literary, and social landscape of late Victorian and Edwardian England, driven by an abiding curiosity about human nature and public affairs.
Wagner as I Knew Him
Ferdinand Praeger
A lifelong companion pulls back the velvet curtain on Germany’s most controversial composer, revealing a man defined as much by his petty frailties as his explosive artistic genius.
American Men of Action
Burton Egbert Stevenson
Real history rivals fiction when told through the lived experiences of the men who shaped it. Crossing oceans, taming wilderness, and forging a nation require a will as unyielding as the obstacles in its path.
Agnes Strickland's Queens of England, Vol. 1. (of 3): Abridged and Fully Illustrated
Agnes Strickland
A continuous, turbulent procession of royal marriages, court intrigue, and shifting political alliances shapes the early history of England's monarchy.
Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White
Andrew Dickson White
An educator, politician, and ambassador charts a life dedicated to building durable institutions and serving a young American republic.
Richard Wagner, Composer of Operas
John F. Runciman
A mythic genius stripped of sentimental idol-worship.
"The story of my life"
Egerton Ryerson
A devout Methodist minister throws himself into the messy forge of nineteenth-century Canadian nation-building, fighting for religious freedom, free public schooling, and his own spiritual salvation.
Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume I, Part 1: 1835-1866
Albert Bigelow Paine
A boy from a dead-end river town drifts through printing shops, steamboat pilothouses, and Western mining camps before discovering that his true currency is the spoken American voice.
The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, volume 1 (of 2): By His Wife, Isabel Burton
Burton, Isabel, Lady
An unquenchable thirst for original experience drives a British officer and scholar across continents, breaking social conventions and official mandates alike.
Complete Project Gutenberg Collection of Memoirs of Napoleon
Various
A rare, unvarnished look at an empire built and dismantled from within, where military genius meets the intimate realities of slippers, court intrigue, and ultimate exile.
Great Musical Composers: German, French, and Italian
George T. (George Titus) Ferris
This historical survey traces the lives, artistic evolutions, and personal struggles of Western Europe’s premier classical composers, illustrating how individual genius reshaped the landscape of opera, symphony, and sacred song.
The Russian Turmoil
Anton Ivanovich Denikin
A high-ranking general provides a front-line autopsy of the collapse of the Imperial Russian Army, tracing how institutional decay, political vacillation, and relentless radical propaganda unraveled a nation's military power during the turbulent months of 1917.
Turgenev: A Study
Edward Garnett
A delicate, masterful mind turns its gaze upon Russian life, catching the subtle human truths and national shifts hidden within a changing world.
His Most Gracious Majesty King Edward VII
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Trace the long, methodical preparation of a modern monarch from a cheerful boyhood in the Scottish Highlands to the quiet mastery of statecraft.
Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work
A. S. (Alpheus Spring) Packard
Long before Charles Darwin revolutionized biology, a visionary French naturalist laid the foundational framework for evolutionary thought, only to be buried in obscurity and mischaracterized by subsequent generations of scientists.
Locke
Thomas Fowler
A quiet scholar navigates political exile, fiscal crisis, and deep philosophical debates to construct a groundbreaking theory of human knowledge and civil liberty.
Michael Field
Mary Sturgeon
Two Englishwomen, aunt and niece, melded their creative spirits into a single authorial voice to fashion an enduring body of tragic and devotional verse.
Life and public services of John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, with the eulogy delivered before the Legislature of New York
William H. (William Henry) Seward
An uncompromising devotion to principle shapes a extraordinary American life, tracing a patriot's path from youthful European diplomacy to fiercely defending fundamental human rights in the halls of Congress.
The First Governess of the Netherlands, Margaret of Austria
Eleanor E. Tremayne
A youthful broken pledge, early widowhood, and the ruthless chess game of sixteenth-century diplomacy shape a woman who becomes one of Europe's most formidable regents.
Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 4: With His Letters and Journals
Thomas Moore
A fiery poet navigates exile across Italy, tossing off masterpieces, battling publisher demands, and living with uninhibited passion between 1817 and 1820.
Michael Faraday, Man of Science
Walter Jerrold
A humble bookbinder's apprentice rises through sheer curiosity and relentless labor to unlock the deepest mysteries of electricity, altering the course of modern science while refusing to compromise his quiet integrity.
Milton
Mark Pattison
A rigorous, searching study of a supreme poet’s mind reveals how relentless self-discipline, political passion, and personal calamity forged the greatest monumental art in English verse.
Shelley
John Addington Symonds
This biography chronicles the brief, intense life of a revolutionary poet, tracing his transformation from a rebellious schoolboy to a wandering genius whose legacy of beauty and suffering remains untarnished by time.
Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical: Illustrating Principally the Revolutionary Period of Mecklenburg, Rowan, Lincoln and Adjoining Counties, Accompanied with Miscellaneous Information, Much of It Never before Published
C. L. Hunter
A localized regional history celebrates the frontier families whose quiet resolve and military daring turned the tide of the American Revolution.
Thomas Andrews, Shipbuilder
Shan F. Bullock
A gifted young architect pours his life into crafting the world's most magnificent ocean liners, only to face the ultimate test of courage when his crowning achievement meets a tragic fate on the open sea.
An Introduction to Shakespeare
H. N. (Henry Noble) MacCracken
This foundational guide offers a clear and grounded exploration of William Shakespeare's theater, tracing his professional life, his physical stage, and the artistic evolution behind his plays.
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 3
United States. Work Projects Administration
A vast array of personal experiences reveals how ordinary men and women navigated the cruelties of bondage and the fragile promise of freedom.
Three Years in Tibet
Ekai Kawaguchi
A Japanese monk disguises himself to slip past guarded mountain frontiers, seeking sacred textual truth in forbidden lands. What follows is a perilous journey into the heart of a closed Himalayan kingdom.
Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works
Edward S. (Edward Singleton) Holden
Driven by relentless curiosity, a Hanoverian oboist flees military life, settles in England, and methodically reshapes our understanding of the universe through manual labor, optical mastery, and unmatched patience.
The Life of Sir Isaac Newton
David Brewster
A quiet Lincolnshire farm boy rises to dismantle ancient theories of light, motion, and gravity, laying the mathematical groundwork for modern physics while navigating fierce academic rivalries and personal isolated turmoil.
Thomas Carlyle
John Nichol
An uncompromising thinker carved out a fierce literary path through sheer conviction, leaving an indelible mark on Victorian thought despite lifelong personal and philosophical friction.
An Account of the Life and Writings of S. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons and Martyr: Intended to Illustrate the Doctrine, Discipline, Practices, and History of the Church, and the Tenets and Practices of the Gnostic Heretics During the Second Century
James Beaven
A second-century bishop in Gaul confronts a wave of complex, secretive heresies, carefully detailing their obscure doctrines to protect his flock and establish orthodox Christian practice.
The World's Greatest Books
Unknown
Men across thirty-five centuries speak their own lives, revealing how power, faith, ambition, and vanity shape the human spirit.
The life and times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., founder of the Methodists. Vol. 2 (of 3)
L. (Luke) Tyerman
A rigorous documentary account of Methodism’s middle years captures the movement’s chaotic expansion, bitter doctrinal fractures, and fierce social opposition from the late 1740s through the late 1760s.
Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume II, Part 1: 1886-1900
Albert Bigelow Paine
Living through the middle and later decades of Samuel Clemens's public career, a biographer traces how an iconic American humorist continuously remakes himself against a backdrop of literary triumphs, mounting financial anxieties, and personal loss.
The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 1 (of 2)
John Cordy Jeaffreson
In a critical biography that peels away decades of romantic sentiment, Percy Bysshe Shelley is stripped of his angel's wings to reveal a complex, deeply flawed young man shaped by privilege, stubbornness, and reckless myth-making.
Between the Lines: Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After
Henry Bascom Smith
Experience the gritty, clandestine reality of the American Civil War through the eyes of a Union detective operating behind enemy lines in the border states.
Byron
John Nichol
Born with a physical deformity and a temperament of volatile intensity, a legendary poet navigates the wreckage of his own celebrity, seeking redemption in the fires of foreign revolution.
Life in Dixie during the War, 1861-1862-1863-1864-1865
Mary Ann Harris Gay
A civilian account of war reveals how domestic fortitude, resourcefulness, and unyielding local allegiance sustain a Georgia community through occupation, ruin, and total hardship.
Memories
C. F. (Constance Frederica) Gordon Cumming
An aristocratic Scottish daughter of the Victorian Era steps beyond the bounds of high society, transforming a life of quiet privilege into an expansive journey of global observation and restless curiosity.
Richard the Lion Heart
Kate Norgate
An impetuous prince fights his family, leads a crusade to Palestine, and battles rival European monarchs to carve out an enduring legacy across the medieval world.
Philo-Judæus of Alexandria
Norman Bentwich
Bridging the cultural divide of ancient Alexandria, a Jewish scholar seeks to harmonize the sacred heritage of Moses with the philosophical genius of Greece.
William Clayton's Journal: A Daily Record of the Journey of the Original Company of "Mormon" Pioneers from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake
William Clayton
An English clerk sets out across the American wilderness with a band of displaced believers, measuring every mile of the trail while trying to keep his family, his health, and his devotion intact.
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2
United States. Work Projects Administration
These raw, unvarnished interviews preserve the flickering memories of individuals who survived American slavery, capturing their lives in their own words long after the chains were broken.