National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography — Complete Winners List

43 years of winners · National Book Critics Circle · Since 1975 · ← Back to award page

Year	Title	Author	Publisher
2024	Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar	Cynthia Carr	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2023	Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage	Jonny Steinberg	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2022	G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century	Beverly Gage	Viking
2021	All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler	Rebecca Donner	Little, Brown
2020	Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World	Amy Stanley	Scribner
2019	The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth	—	Little, Brown
2018	Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous	—	Henry Holt
2017	Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder	Caroline Fraser	Metropolitan Books
2016	Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life	—	Liveright Publishing
2015	Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley	—	Random House
2014	Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh	—	W. W. Norton
2013	Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World	—	Yale University Press
2012	The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV	Robert Caro	Knopf
2011	George F. Kennan: An American Life	John Lewis Gaddis	Penguin Press
2010	How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer	—	Other Press
2009	Cheever: A Life	Blake Bailey	—
2008	The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul	Patrick French	—
2007	Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer	Tim Jeal	—
2006	James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon	Julie Phillips	—
2005	American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer	Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin	—
2004	de Kooning: An American Master	Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan	—
2003	Khrushchev: The Man and His Era	William Taubman	—
2002	Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II	Janet Browne	—
2001	Boswell's Presumptuous Task	Adam Sisman	—
2000	Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan	Herbert P. Bix	—
1999	The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White	Henry Wiencek	—
1998	A Beautiful Mind	Sylvia Nasar	—
1997	Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II	James Tobin	—
1996	Angela's Ashes	Frank McCourt	—
1995	Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson	Robert Polito	—
1994	Shot in the Heart	Mikal Gilmore	—
1993	Genet	Edmund White	—
1992	Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World	Carol Brightman	—
1991	Patrimony: A True Story	Philip Roth	—
1990	Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. II	Robert A. Caro	—
1989	A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt	Geoffrey C. Ward	—
1988	Oscar Wilde	Richard Ellmann	—
1987	Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World	Donald R. Howard	—
1986	The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902-1941	Arnold Rampersad	—
1985	Henry James: A Life	Leon Edel	—
1984	Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859	Joseph Frank	—
1983	Minor Characters	Joyce Johnson	—