# Legendary Biographies > Legendary Biographies: 244 unauthorised literary biographies, each titled for one concrete thing out of the life rather than for the subject's name. 116 are in print as 6 × 9 in paperbacks, 244 as unabridged audiobooks, and 243 as DRM-free EPUB. Books are sold direct and shipped worldwide. Every title publishes its full table of contents and its opening chapter free: 244 samples, 1,047,750 words. Each book also has a plain-Markdown version at data/books/.md. ## Start here - [The shop](shop.html): all 244 titles, filterable by shelf and format - [The Index](the-index.html): every title set against the life it is about, the naming rule, and its exceptions - [Subjects A-Z](subjects.html): every person the house has published - [Writers](writers.html): the 49 writers and their beats - [Sets](shelves.html): the complete set of 116 printed titles, which carries every ebook and audiobook free - [The edition and delivery](printing.html): specification, price ladder, zones, returns - [The house](the-house.html): what is published and how it is sourced - [Machine-readable catalogue](data/catalog.json) ## Shelves - [Music](shelves/music.html): 56 titles — Hip-Hop, R&B & Soul, Rock, Pop, Jazz, Folk & Songwriting, Latin, World, Afrobeat - [Screen & Stage](shelves/screen.html): 24 titles — Film, Performing Arts - [Letters & Ideas](shelves/letters.html): 15 titles — Literature, Philosophy - [Art & Design](shelves/art.html): 12 titles — Visual Art, Fashion, Architecture - [Science](shelves/science.html): 14 titles — Science - [Power & Politics](shelves/power.html): 47 titles — American Politics, World Politics, History - [Movements](shelves/movements.html): 20 titles — Civil Rights, Social Issues, Dissidents & Whistleblowers - [Crime](shelves/crime.html): 16 titles — Crime, White-Collar Crime - [Technology & Money](shelves/industry.html): 24 titles — Technology, Media Business, Internet Culture - [Sport](shelves/sport.html): 16 titles — Basketball, Football, American Football, Boxing, Tennis, Track & Field, Cycling, Gymnastics, Mixed Martial Arts ## Titles - [The Honduran Crash](volumes/001-the-honduran-crash.html) — Lisa Nicole Lopes. A literary biography of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes — rapper, songwriter, and the most volatile member of TLC — tracing her path from a strict, music-saturated Philadelphia childhood… - [The Hand-Sold Cassettes](volumes/002-the-hand-sold-cassettes.html) — Robert Earl Davis Jr.. A biography of DJ Screw — the Houston DJ whose chopped-and-screwed sound defined a decade of Texas rap and whose codeine habit killed him at twenty-nine. - [The Days Inn Room 158](volumes/003-the-days-inn-room-158.html) — Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. Esperanza Villalobos's biography follows Selena Quintanilla from the family band of her South Texas childhood to the brink of her English-language crossover, drawing on new… - [The Buffalo Funk](volumes/004-the-buffalo-funk.html) — James Ambrose Johnson Jr. (Rick James). A biography of Rick James — the Buffalo-born Motown punk-funk pioneer whose Super Freak sample built half a generation of hip-hop and whose 1981 Street Songs tour was the… - [The Marsh Harbour Charter](volumes/005-the-marsh-harbour-charter.html) — Aaliyah Dana Haughton. A biography of Aaliyah Dana Haughton, the singer who reshaped R&B through restraint and intimacy before her death at twenty-two. Tariah Robinson follows her career from Detroit… - [The USC Film School](volumes/006-the-usc-film-school.html) — John Daniel Singleton. A biography of John Singleton — the South Central LA filmmaker whose Boyz n the Hood, made at twenty-three on a Spielberg scholarship, made him the youngest Oscar-nominated… - [The Nightmare Man](volumes/007-the-nightmare-man.html) — Wesley Earl Craven. A biography of Wes Craven — the philosophy-trained Baptist college professor who became the most consequential American horror director of his generation. - [Apartment Five C](volumes/008-apartment-five-c.html) — Adrienne Levine (Adrienne Shelly). A biography of Adrienne Shelly — the indie-film actress and writer-director of Waitress, killed in her West Village office at forty by a construction worker she had asked to keep… - [Room 607](volumes/009-room-607.html) — Vickie Lynn Hogan (Anna Nicole Smith). A biography of Anna Nicole Smith — the Mexia, Texas teenager who became the 1993 Playmate of the Year, the widow of an eighty-nine-year-old oil billionaire, and the U.S. Supreme… - [The Fastest Woman](volumes/010-the-fastest-woman.html) — Florence Delorez Griffith Joyner. A biography of Florence Griffith Joyner — the fastest woman ever to run, whose Seoul 1988 100- and 200-metre records still stand, and who died in her sleep at thirty-eight. - [The Anthem](volumes/011-the-anthem.html) — Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (born Chris Wayne Jackson). A biography of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf — the LSU scoring champion and Denver Nuggets point guard whose 1996 national-anthem refusal ended an NBA career still ahead of him. - [Friendly Fire](volumes/012-friendly-fire.html) — Patrick Daniel Tillman. A biography of Pat Tillman — the Arizona Cardinals safety who left a $3.6 million NFL contract for the Army Rangers and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004. - [The Bypass Transfusion](volumes/013-the-bypass-transfusion.html) — Arthur Robert Ashe Jr.. A biography of Arthur Ashe — the Richmond-born U.S. Open, Australian Open, and Wimbledon champion who became, after a 1983 blood transfusion, the most prominent HIV-positive man… - [Buttons](volumes/014-buttons.html) — Patrick Kelly. A biography of Patrick Kelly — the Vicksburg-born fashion designer who arrived in Paris with $200 and became, in 1988, the first American admitted to the Chambre Syndicale. - [Street Couture](volumes/015-street-couture.html) — Willi Donnell Smith. A biography of Willi Smith — the Philadelphia-born fashion designer whose WilliWear street-couture line was, at his death in 1987, the most successful Black-owned fashion company… - [The Download](volumes/016-the-download.html) — Aaron Hillel Swartz. A biography of Aaron Swartz — programmer, activist, and co-founder of Reddit — who took his life in 2013 at twenty-six while facing federal charges for the bulk download of… - [Frequency](volumes/017-frequency.html) — Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr). A biography of Hedy Lamarr — the Austrian-born MGM star and co-inventor of the frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system that every modern cellphone now uses. - [The Gap Year](volumes/018-the-gap-year.html) — Apple Bay Martin (Apple Amelio). A biography of Apple Martin Amelio — the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, born famous in May 2004 and the subject of two decades of Anglo-American tabloid coverage. - [The First Cast](volumes/019-the-first-cast.html) — Gilda Susan Radner. A biography of Gilda Radner — the original Saturday Night Live cast member whose comedy made her beloved and whose late diagnosis of ovarian cancer made her, in death, a movement. - [The Scream](volumes/020-the-scream.html) — Samuel Burl Kinison. A biography of Sam Kinison — the Pentecostal preacher's son whose scream redefined the 1980s alt-comedy stage and who was killed at thirty-eight in a Highway 95 wreck five days… - [The Eight-Week March](volumes/021-the-eight-week-march.html) — Bayard Taylor Rustin. A biography of Bayard Rustin — the openly gay Quaker socialist who organised the 1963 March on Washington in eight weeks and whose name the Civil Rights Movement spent two… - [The Castro Camera Storefront](volumes/022-the-castro-camera-storefront.html) — Harvey Bernard Milk. Edward Forrester's biography of Harvey Milk traces the camera-shop owner turned San Francisco supervisor from his closeted East Coast youth to the Castro Street campaigns that… - [The Hudson River Body](volumes/023-the-hudson-river-body.html) — Malcolm Michaels Jr. (Marsha P. Johnson). A biography of Marsha P. Johnson — the Black drag-queen activist who co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera, fought at Stonewall, and was found in the Hudson in July 1992 in a death… - [The Chairman](volumes/024-the-chairman.html) — Frederick Allen Hampton Sr.. A biography of Fred Hampton — the twenty-one-year-old Black Panther chairman whose Chicago Rainbow Coalition the FBI killed him in his sleep to prevent. - [The Encino Hills](volumes/025-the-encino-hills.html) — Donald Cortez Cornelius. A biography of Don Cornelius, the broadcaster and entrepreneur who created Soul Train and ran it as sole proprietor for more than three decades. Sterling Aldridge traces… - [The Lanai Purchase](volumes/026-the-lanai-purchase.html) — Lawrence Joseph Ellison. A biography of Larry Ellison — the dropout son of an unwed Bronx teenager who turned a $1,200 stake in 1977 into Oracle, a half-trillion-dollar database company, and a Hawaiian… - [The Little Saint James](volumes/027-the-little-saint-james.html) — Jeffrey Edward Epstein. A documentary biography of Jeffrey Epstein, drawn from federal filings, congressional testimony, survivor accounts, and the court records unsealed between 2023 and 2026. Roland… - [The Vertical](volumes/028-the-vertical.html) — Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. A multilingual biography of Vladimir Putin, drawing on Russian, German, Ukrainian, Chinese, and English sources to trace his path from a Leningrad communal apartment to the… - [The Bunker Selfie](volumes/029-the-bunker-selfie.html) — Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky. Ostap Bilyk follows Volodymyr Zelensky from a Jewish childhood in Kryvyi Rih through the Moscow comedy circuit, the Servant of the People phenomenon, and a landslide election to… - [The Bargain](volumes/030-the-bargain.html) — Orenthal James Simpson. Bernard Pell's biography of O. J. Simpson follows its subject from the San Francisco projects to the USC Heisman, the Buffalo Bills, the Hertz commercials, the Brentwood murders… - [The Catskills Camp](volumes/031-the-catskills-camp.html) — Michael Gerard Tyson. A biography of Mike Tyson — the Brooklyn-born youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history, the 1992 Indianapolis convict, and the twenty-first-century elder the sport's… - [The Chicago Compound](volumes/032-the-chicago-compound.html) — Robert Sylvester Kelly. A biography of the R&B singer R. Kelly, from his childhood on Chicago's South Side through three decades atop American popular music to his federal convictions for sex… - [The Alderson Sentence](volumes/033-the-alderson-sentence.html) — Martha Helen Kostyra (Martha Stewart). A biography of Martha Stewart — the Polish-American Jersey City stockbroker's daughter who built a billion-dollar domestic-lifestyle empire and served five months at Alderson for… - [The Bunker Hours](volumes/034-the-bunker-hours.html) — Richard Bruce Cheney. A biography of Dick Cheney — the most powerful vice president in American history, whose post-9/11 architecture of the Iraq war and the enhanced-interrogation program the country… - [The Sixth Floor](volumes/035-the-sixth-floor.html) — Roger Eugene Ailes. A biography of Roger Ailes — the Warren, Ohio hemophiliac TV producer who advised Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bushes, launched Fox News in 1996, and remade American conservative… - [The Playbook](volumes/036-the-playbook.html) — Harvey LeRoy Atwater. A biography of Lee Atwater — the South Carolina political consultant who built the Willie Horton ad, ran George H. W. Bush's 1988 campaign, and died at forty of brain cancer… - [The Texas Cyclist](volumes/037-the-texas-cyclist.html) — Lance Edward Armstrong (born Lance Edward Gunderson). A biography of Lance Armstrong — the seven-time Tour de France winner stripped of every title in 2012 for the most sophisticated doping program in the history of professional… - [The Stadium Detentions](volumes/038-the-stadium-detentions.html) — Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte. Mateo Salazar's life of Augusto Pinochet follows the Chilean general from an unremarkable military career to the 1973 coup, the seventeen-year dictatorship that followed, and the… - [The Last King](volumes/039-the-last-king.html) — Idi Amin Dada Oumee. A biography of Idi Amin — the colonial-army-trained Ugandan military dictator whose 1971-1979 personal rule killed an estimated 300,000 Ugandans and who spent twenty-four years… - [The Girl from the Garage](volumes/040-the-girl-from-the-garage.html) — Imelda Remedios Visitación Romuáldez Marcos. Liwayway Sanchez's biography follows Imelda Marcos from a childhood spent in a Manila garage to the Malacañang Palace and the long aftermath of the 1986 exile. Drawing on… - [The Apology](volumes/041-the-apology.html) — Louis Székely (Louis C.K.). A biography of Louis C.K. — the Mexico-City-born Newton, Massachusetts stand-up whose autobiographical FX series Louie won six Emmys and whose 2017 misconduct admissions removed… - [The Wyoming Sessions](volumes/042-the-wyoming-sessions.html) — Ye (born Kanye Omari West). A biography of the twenty-first century's most influential and most divisive musician, organized around the death of his mother in 2007 and the fifteen albums that followed.… - [The Quaalude Tablets](volumes/043-the-quaalude-tablets.html) — William Henry Cosby Jr.. A biography of Bill Cosby — the most popular Black entertainer in American television history, the 2018 Norristown convict, and the subject of accusations from sixty different… - [The Thirteen-Year Conservatorship](volumes/044-the-thirteen-year-conservatorship.html) — Britney Jean Spears. A biography of Britney Spears that traces her path from a Louisiana childhood and the Mickey Mouse Club through global pop stardom, the 2007 unraveling captured by the tabloid… - [The Compton Tycoon](volumes/045-the-compton-tycoon.html) — Eric Lynn Wright. A biography of Eric Wright — Eazy-E — the Compton hustler who founded Ruthless Records, assembled N.W.A, and built the commercial blueprint for gangsta rap before dying of… - [Suite 434](volumes/046-suite-434.html) — Whitney Elizabeth Houston. Yvette Childress's biography of Whitney Houston traces the distance between the Newark church choir where her mother trained her and the global industry that made her the… - [The Annina Nosei Gallery](volumes/047-the-annina-nosei-gallery.html) — Jean-Michel Basquiat. A biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat that traces the artist's path from the streets of late-1970s New York to the center of the international art world. Drawing on unpublished… - [The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk](volumes/048-the-lake-forest-park-sidewalk.html) — Octavia Estelle Butler. A biography of Octavia Butler — the Pasadena-born science-fiction writer who became the first African-American woman to win the Hugo and the Nebula and the first science-fiction… - [A Body Made of Earth](volumes/049-a-body-made-of-earth.html) — Ana Maria Mendieta Oti. A biography of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, whose earth-and-body works of the 1970s and early 1980s reshaped contemporary art before her death at thirty-six. Inés… - [Passing the Torch](volumes/050-passing-the-torch.html) — Mary Yuriko Nakahara Kochiyama. A biography of Yuri Kochiyama — the Nisei activist who survived internment, befriended Malcolm X, and spent fifty years organising at the seam between the Asian-American, Black… - [The Charwoman Photograph](volumes/051-the-charwoman-photograph.html) — Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks. A biography of Gordon Parks — the Fort Scott, Kansas sharecropper's son who became the first Black staff photographer at Life magazine and the first Black director of a Hollywood… - [The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House](volumes/052-the-saint-paul-de-vence-house.html) — James Arthur Baldwin. A biography of James Baldwin, from the Harlem pulpit and the Greenwich Village rooming houses to Paris, Istanbul, and Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Calvin Renard traces the four early… - [The Detroit Apartment](volumes/053-the-detroit-apartment.html) — Grace Chin Lee Boggs. A biography of Grace Lee Boggs — the Bryn Mawr-trained Chinese-American philosopher whose Detroit organising spanned every American social movement of the second half of the… - [The Turner Station Address](volumes/054-the-turner-station-address.html) — Henrietta Pleasant Lacks. A biography of Henrietta Lacks — the thirty-one-year-old Black mother of five whose Johns Hopkins cervical-cancer cells became the first immortal human cell line, used in every… - [The Slauson Crenshaw Lot](volumes/055-the-slauson-crenshaw-lot.html) — Ermias Joseph Asghedom. Solomon Treadway's biography of the rapper and entrepreneur Ermias Asghedom — Nipsey Hussle — follows his path from the Rollin' 60s of South Central Los Angeles to his… - [The 1972 Florida Primary](volumes/056-the-1972-florida-primary.html) — Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm. A biography of Shirley Chisholm — the Brooklyn-born first Black congresswoman, first Black woman to seek a major-party presidential nomination, and seven-term U.S. House member. - [The Nine Hundred and Eighteen](volumes/057-the-nine-hundred-and-eighteen.html) — Jim Warren Jones (Peoples Temple). Frederick Saxby's group biography of the nine hundred and eighteen men, women, and children who died at Jonestown in November 1978. Drawing on FBI recordings, Peoples Temple… - [Father and Son](volumes/058-father-and-son.html) — Lee Jun-fan (Bruce Lee) and Brandon Bruce Lee. A joint biography of Bruce Lee and his son Brandon Lee — the martial-artist founder of Jeet Kune Do and the actor son who died on the Crow set, twenty years apart, neither… - [Star](volumes/059-star.html) — Ray Rivera Mendoza (Sylvia Rivera). A biography of Sylvia Rivera — the Bronx-born Latina trans woman at Stonewall, co-founder of STAR with Marsha P. Johnson, and front-line organiser whose work the gay liberation… - [The Papers](volumes/060-the-papers.html) — Daniel Ellsberg. A biography of Daniel Ellsberg — the RAND analyst whose 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers ended the Vietnam War's information monopoly and established the modern American… - [The Body and the Brush](volumes/061-the-body-and-the-brush.html) — Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón. A biography of Frida Kahlo that follows her from a Coyoacán childhood through polio, the 1925 bus accident, her marriage to Diego Rivera, the affair with Trotsky, and her death… - [The Kalakuta Compound](volumes/062-the-kalakuta-compound.html) — Fela Anikulapo Kuti (born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti). A biography of Fela Kuti — the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer whose Kalakuta Republic compound the army burned to the ground in 1977 and whose anti-military protest catalogue… - [The Chief](volumes/063-the-chief.html) — Wilma Pearl Mankiller. A biography of Wilma Mankiller — the first woman Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, whose ten-year tenure tripled enrolment and remade tribal self-governance in the United… - [The Birkbeck Years](volumes/064-the-birkbeck-years.html) — Rosalind Elsie Franklin. A biography of Rosalind Franklin — the Anglo-Jewish crystallographer whose Photo 51 made the Watson-Crick double helix possible and whose death at thirty-seven took her name off… - [The People's Grocery](volumes/065-the-people-s-grocery.html) — Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. A biography of Ida B. Wells — the Holly Springs-born investigative journalist whose 1892 Southern Horrors and 1895 Red Record documented the names of 728 lynchings and founded… - [The Eighty-One Days](volumes/066-the-eighty-one-days.html) — Ai Weiwei. Wei Tao's biography of Ai Weiwei follows the Chinese artist and dissident from his childhood in internal exile through his New York years, his return to a rapidly changing… - [The Correspondent](volumes/067-the-correspondent.html) — Rubén Salazar Mariscal. A biography of Rubén Salazar — the Los Angeles Times columnist and KMEX news director killed by a Sheriff's tear-gas round during the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. - [The Ogoni Nine](volumes/068-the-ogoni-nine.html) — Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa. A biography of Ken Saro-Wiwa — the Nigerian writer and Ogoni environmentalist hanged with eight MOSOP colleagues by the Abacha military government on November 10, 1995. - [The Consulate](volumes/069-the-consulate.html) — Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi. A biography of Jamal Khashoggi — the Washington Post columnist killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, on orders the CIA attributes to… - [Compound S](volumes/070-compound-s.html) — Percy Lavon Julian. A biography of Percy Julian — the grandson of slaves and DePauw valedictorian whose patents on cortisone, physostigmine, and progesterone synthesis built half of… - [The Theater Kid](volumes/071-the-theater-kid.html) — Tupac Amaru Shakur. A literary biography of Tupac Shakur that reframes the rapper as a classically trained theater kid — a Baltimore School for the Arts student raised on ballet, Shakespeare, and… - [The St. Croix Years](volumes/072-the-st-croix-years.html) — Audrey Geraldine Lorde. Naima Beauford's life of Audre Lorde follows the poet and essayist from a near-silent Harlem childhood through the Village in the fifties, motherhood, her years in St. Croix, and… - [The Estadio Chile](volumes/073-the-estadio-chile.html) — Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez. A biography of Víctor Jara — the Chilean Nueva Canción folk musician tortured and killed in Santiago's Estadio Chile during the September 1973 Pinochet coup. - [The Heir](volumes/074-the-heir.html) — Benazir Bhutto. A biography of Benazir Bhutto — Pakistan's two-time prime minister, Harvard and Oxford graduate, and daughter of an executed prime minister, assassinated in Rawalpindi on… - [The Subway Chalk Years](volumes/075-the-subway-chalk-years.html) — Keith Allen Haring. A biography of Keith Haring — the Kutztown-born New York graffiti artist whose 1980s subway-station chalk drawings built the most democratically distributed body of imagery in… - [The Opening](volumes/076-the-opening.html) — François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture. A biography of Toussaint Louverture — the formerly enslaved Bréda plantation coachman who led the Haitian Revolution and was captured, deported, and killed in a French Jura… - [The Green Belt](volumes/077-the-green-belt.html) — Wangari Muta Maathai. A biography of Wangari Maathai — the first East African woman to earn a Ph.D., the 2004 Nobel Peace laureate, and the founder of the Green Belt Movement that has planted… - [The Bletchley Park Hut](volumes/078-the-bletchley-park-hut.html) — Alan Mathison Turing. A biography of Alan Turing that braids the mathematics and the man: the schoolboy grief that shaped a lifelong inquiry into mind, the universal machine conceived in a Cambridge… - [The Havana Exile](volumes/079-the-havana-exile.html) — Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso. A biography of Celia Cruz — the Havana-born Queen of Salsa who left Cuba in 1959 for a life in exile, recorded with Sonora Matancera and Fania All-Stars, and built the central… - [The Sixty-Second Speech](volumes/080-the-sixty-second-speech.html) — Marie Louise Cruz (Sacheen Littlefeather). A biography of Sacheen Littlefeather — the Apache and Yaqui activist who refused Marlon Brando's 1973 Best Actor Oscar in protest of Hollywood's treatment of American Indians… - [The Twelve Adopted Children](volumes/081-the-twelve-adopted-children.html) — Freda Josephine McDonald (Josephine Baker). A biography of Josephine Baker — the St. Louis-born vaudeville chorus girl who became the toast of 1920s Paris, served in the French Resistance, and was inducted into the… - [The Thirty-Year Exile](volumes/082-the-thirty-year-exile.html) — Zenzile Miriam Makeba. A biography of Miriam Makeba — the Mama Africa stripped of her South African citizenship in 1960, exiled for thirty-one years, and returned in 1990 at Nelson Mandela's invitation. - [The East End Boy](volumes/083-the-east-end-boy.html) — Lee Alexander McQueen. A biography of Alexander McQueen — the East End taxi driver's son whose fifteen-year ascent through European fashion remade the runway and who hanged himself in his Mayfair… - [The Azteca Quarterfinal](volumes/084-the-azteca-quarterfinal.html) — Diego Armando Maradona. A cradle-to-grave biography of Diego Armando Maradona, tracing his ascent from the dirt pitches of Villa Fiorito through Boca, Barcelona, Napoli, and the 1986 World Cup, into the… - [Conductor](volumes/085-conductor.html) — Araminta Ross (Harriet Tubman). A biography of Harriet Tubman — the Maryland-born Underground Railroad conductor who led seventy enslaved people to freedom and became the first woman to lead an armed Civil War… - [The Biafra Broadcasts](volumes/086-the-biafra-broadcasts.html) — Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe. A biography of Chinua Achebe — the Nigerian novelist whose 1958 Things Fall Apart sold twenty million copies, defined modern African literature, and ended in a March 1990 Lagos… - [The Voluntary Hospital](volumes/087-the-voluntary-hospital.html) — Yayoi Kusama. A biography of Yayoi Kusama — the polka-dot Japanese artist who left Matsumoto for New York at twenty-nine and has lived and worked, voluntarily, in a Shinjuku psychiatric… - [Seventy-Two Days](volumes/088-seventy-two-days.html) — Patrice Émery Lumumba (born Élias Okit'Asombo). Aubin Kalonji's biography follows Patrice Lumumba from provincial clerk to first prime minister of the independent Congo, and through the seventy-two days of his government to… - [The Kaysersberg Hotel](volumes/089-the-kaysersberg-hotel.html) — Anthony Michael Bourdain. A literary biography of the chef, writer, and television traveler whose 1999 essay transformed him overnight from an unknown line cook into a global figure. Drawing on his books… - [The Hare Krishna Years](volumes/090-the-hare-krishna-years.html) — Marianne Joan Elliott-Said (Poly Styrene). A biography of Poly Styrene — the Brixton-raised Somali-Scottish-Irish frontwoman of X-Ray Spex, the first Black woman to front a British punk band, and a longtime Hare Krishna… - [The Hollywood Caricature](volumes/091-the-hollywood-caricature.html) — Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha. A biography of Carmen Miranda — the Portuguese-Brazilian musical star who became, by 1944, the highest-paid woman in the United States, and who collapsed on Jimmy Durante's NBC… - [The Curve](volumes/092-the-curve.html) — Zaha Mohammad Hadid. A biography of Zaha Hadid — the Baghdad-born Iraqi-British architect and first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, whose curvilinear buildings remade twenty-first-century… - [The Curtis Rejection](volumes/093-the-curtis-rejection.html) — Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone). A biography of Nina Simone — born Eunice Waymon in segregated North Carolina, trained for the classical concert stage, and remade in an Atlantic City bar into one of the… - [The Letter from Madras](volumes/094-the-letter-from-madras.html) — Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar. A biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan — the self-taught Madras Brahmin port-trust clerk whose January 1913 letter to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge brought him to Trinity and whose… - [The Groundings](volumes/095-the-groundings.html) — Walter Anthony Rodney. A biography of Walter Rodney — the Pan-Africanist historian and author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana on June 13, 1980 in a… - [The Jamaican Renaissance](volumes/096-the-jamaican-renaissance.html) — Festus Claudius McKay. A biography of Claude McKay — the Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet whose 1919 sonnet If We Must Die became the anthem of the New Negro movement and whose 1928 Home to Harlem… - [Room 619](volumes/097-room-619.html) — Bantu Stephen Biko. Sandile Mokoena's biography traces the life and thought of Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, from his student years in apartheid South Africa to his death… - [The Konigsberg Origin](volumes/098-the-konigsberg-origin.html) — Johanna 'Hannah' Arendt. A biography of Hannah Arendt — the German-Jewish political philosopher who fled Germany in 1933, survived the Gurs camp, and wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in… - [The Strike](volumes/099-the-strike.html) — Larry Dulay Itliong. A biography of Larry Itliong — the Filipino-American farmworker leader whose September 1965 Delano grape strike forced Cesar Chavez to the table and built the United Farm Workers. - [The Fossil Hunter](volumes/100-the-fossil-hunter.html) — Mary Anning. A biography of Mary Anning — the Dorset cabinetmaker's daughter whose ichthyosaur and plesiosaur finds, made between the ages of twelve and forty, remade the picture of deep time. - [The Five-Day Firing](volumes/101-the-five-day-firing.html) — Samuel Harris Altman. A biography of Sam Altman — the Stanford-dropout founder of Loopt, former president of Y Combinator, and CEO of OpenAI through the ChatGPT launch and the November 2023 five-day… - [The Black Turtleneck](volumes/102-the-black-turtleneck.html) — Elizabeth Anne Holmes. A biography of Elizabeth Holmes — the Stanford-dropout founder of Theranos whose claimed fingerstick blood-testing device did not exist and who is now serving an 11¼-year federal… - [The Glen Park Library](volumes/103-the-glen-park-library.html) — Ross William Ulbricht. A biography of Ross Ulbricht — the Austin-born Dread Pirate Roberts founder of Silk Road, sentenced to two life terms in 2015 and pardoned by Donald Trump on January 21, 2025. - [Satoshi](volumes/104-satoshi.html) — Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym; identity unconfirmed). A biography of Satoshi Nakamoto — the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, whose October 2008 white paper and January 2009 genesis block opened the cryptocurrency era and whose… - [The Caroline Testimony](volumes/105-the-caroline-testimony.html) — Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried. A biography of Sam Bankman-Fried — the MIT-trained Jane Street trader whose FTX cryptocurrency exchange collapsed in November 2022 and who is serving twenty-five years in federal… - [The Manifesto](volumes/106-the-manifesto.html) — Theodore John Kaczynski. A biography of Ted Kaczynski — the Harvard mathematician turned domestic terrorist whose seventeen-year mail-bomb campaign as the Unabomber was solved by his own brother in… - [The Border Sentry Towers](volumes/107-the-border-sentry-towers.html) — Palmer Freeman Luckey. A biography of Palmer Luckey — the homeschooled Long Beach teenager who built the Oculus Rift in his garage, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion at twenty-one, and founded the… - [The Harvard Sophomore](volumes/108-the-harvard-sophomore.html) — Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. A biography of Mark Zuckerberg — the Harvard-dropout founder of Facebook (now Meta Platforms), whose acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus made the company the dominant… - [The Two Companies](volumes/109-the-two-companies.html) — Jack Patrick Dorsey. A biography of Jack Dorsey — the St. Louis-born co-founder of Twitter and founder of Square (now Block), whose two-decade career has held the seat at the center of social media… - [On the Run](volumes/110-on-the-run.html) — John David McAfee. A biography of John McAfee — the British-American antivirus-software founder whose 1990s IPO fortune funded a Belize compound and two Libertarian Party presidential campaigns… - [The Founder](volumes/111-the-founder.html) — Charles James Kirk. A biography of Charlie Kirk — the suburban-Chicago college-dropout who co-founded Turning Point USA at eighteen and built it into the largest American youth-political… - [Blexit](volumes/112-blexit.html) — Candace Amber Owens Farmer. A biography of Candace Owens — the Stamford-born Black conservative commentator whose 2017 pivot to right-wing politics built the Candace podcast and whose 2024 Daily Wire firing… - [The Fifty Million Dollar Man](volumes/113-the-fifty-million-dollar-man.html) — David Khari Webber Chappelle. A biography of Dave Chappelle that begins with his 2005 departure from Comedy Central and works outward — to a Washington childhood among Black intellectuals, a teenage… - [The Monopolist](volumes/114-the-monopolist.html) — Peter Andreas Thiel. A biography of Peter Thiel — the German-born American venture capitalist, PayPal co-founder, Palantir co-founder, first outside Facebook investor, and architect of the alliance… - [The Quad Studios Shooting](volumes/115-the-quad-studios-shooting.html) — Christopher George Latore Wallace. A biography of Christopher Wallace — the Brooklyn rapper known as The Notorious B.I.G. — from the Brevoort projects and the Bedford-Stuyvesant corners through his discovery by… - [The Long Game](volumes/116-the-long-game.html) — Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.. A biography of Snoop Dogg — the Long Beach-born Death Row debut artist of 1993's Doggystyle, whose thirty-year second act has made him one of the most ubiquitous American… - [The Siege Mentality](volumes/117-the-siege-mentality.html) — Benjamin Netanyahu. A biography of Benjamin Netanyahu that traces his life from a Jerusalem childhood steeped in Revisionist Zionism through his years as soldier, diplomat, and Israel's… - [The Birmingham Foundry](volumes/118-the-birmingham-foundry.html) — John Michael Osbourne. Roderick Penraith's biography of John Michael Osbourne traces the singer's path from a Birmingham factory floor to the founding of Black Sabbath, the solo years, and the… - [The Howard Years](volumes/119-the-howard-years.html) — Sean John Combs. A biography of Sean Combs — the Harlem-born founder of Bad Boy Records and Sean John fashion, convicted in 2025 on two federal transportation-to-engage-in-prostitution counts and… - [The Pretoria Childhood](volumes/120-the-pretoria-childhood.html) — Elon Reeve Musk. A biography of Elon Musk — the Pretoria-born founder of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and xAI; owner of Twitter (now X); 2025 head of DOGE; and the richest person… - [The Re-Recordings](volumes/121-the-re-recordings.html) — Taylor Alison Swift. A biography of Taylor Swift — the West Reading-born singer-songwriter whose two-decade catalog, four re-recording project, and $2-billion Eras Tour reshaped American pop music… - [The Mar-a-Lago Storeroom](volumes/122-the-mar-a-lago-storeroom.html) — Donald John Trump. A biography of Donald Trump — the Queens real-estate developer, Apprentice host, twice-impeached, twice-elected forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United States. - [The Counting Video](volumes/123-the-counting-video.html) — James Stephen Donaldson (MrBeast). A biography of MrBeast — the Greenville, North Carolina YouTube creator whose 350-million-subscriber channel and a16z-backed Beast Industries have made him the most-watched… - [The Bucharest Compound](volumes/124-the-bucharest-compound.html) — Emory Andrew Tate III. A biography of Andrew Tate — the seven-time kickboxing world champion and online-manosphere influencer indicted on human-trafficking and rape charges in Romania (December 2022)… - [The Compton Pulitzer](volumes/125-the-compton-pulitzer.html) — Kendrick Lamar Duckworth. A biography of Kendrick Lamar — the Compton-born Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper whose To Pimp a Butterfly, DAMN., and the 2024 Drake-feud track Not Like Us defined the music of… - [The Akron Origin](volumes/126-the-akron-origin.html) — LeBron Raymone James Sr.. A biography of LeBron James — the Akron-born NBA player whose twenty-three-year career has produced the league's all-time scoring record, four championships, and the long-form… - [The Calabasas Hills](volumes/127-the-calabasas-hills.html) — Kobe Bean Bryant. A biography of Kobe Bryant — the Philadelphia-Italian Lakers shooting guard whose twenty-year career and Calabasas helicopter death made him the most studied basketball figure of… - [The Riverdale Block Parties](volumes/128-the-riverdale-block-parties.html) — Lance Taylor (Afrika Bambaataa). A biography of Afrika Bambaataa — the South Bronx-born founder of the Universal Zulu Nation and electro-hip-hop pioneer whose 1982 Planet Rock defined a global aesthetic, and… - [The Long Form](volumes/129-the-long-form.html) — Joseph James Rogan. A biography of Joe Rogan — the Newark-born stand-up comedian, UFC commentator, and host of The Joe Rogan Experience, the most-listened-to podcast in the world. - [The Loudest Man in the Room](volumes/130-the-loudest-man-in-the-room.html) — Alexander Emerick Jones. A biography of Alex Jones — the Rockwall, Texas conspiracy broadcaster and InfoWars founder whose decade of Sandy Hook denialism produced $1.49 billion in defamation judgments… - [The Lunatic](volumes/131-the-lunatic.html) — Kwon Do-hyung. A biography of Do Kwon — the Stanford-educated co-founder of Terraform Labs whose Terra-Luna stablecoin ecosystem collapsed in May 2022, taking an estimated $40 billion of… - [The Mogul](volumes/132-the-mogul.html) — Keith Rupert Murdoch. A biography of Rupert Murdoch — the Australian-born American media magnate whose seventy-year career assembled News Corp, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal. - [The Toronto Voice Memo](volumes/135-the-toronto-voice-memo.html) — Aubrey Drake Graham. A biography of Drake — the Toronto Degrassi-actor-turned-rapper whose post-2010 streaming-era catalog has produced more Billboard Hot 100 entries than any artist in history. - [The San Juan Stadium](volumes/137-the-san-juan-stadium.html) — Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. A biography of Bad Bunny — the Vega Baja, Puerto Rico-born Spanish-language rapper whose 2018-2025 catalog has made him the most-streamed musician in the world and the headliner… - [The Highland Park Bedroom](volumes/138-the-highland-park-bedroom.html) — Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell. A biography of Billie Eilish — the Highland Park bedroom songwriter who swept the 2020 Grammys at eighteen and redrew the visual and sonic grammar of mainstream pop. - [The Boy from Rosario](volumes/140-the-boy-from-rosario.html) — Lionel Andrés Messi Cuccittini. A biography of Lionel Messi — the Rosario-born Barcelona and Argentina footballer whose eight Ballons d'Or, ten La Liga titles, four Champions League titles, 2022 World Cup, and… - [The Madeira Cliffs](volumes/141-the-madeira-cliffs.html) — Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro. A biography of Cristiano Ronaldo — the Madeira-born Portuguese footballer at Sporting, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus, and Al Nassr, whose five Ballons d'Or and… - [The Industrial Park Murder](volumes/142-the-industrial-park-murder.html) — Aaron Josef Hernandez. A biography of Aaron Hernandez — the Bristol, Connecticut-born New England Patriots tight end convicted of murder in 2015 and found dead in his prison cell in April 2017, his… - [The Twisties](volumes/143-the-twisties.html) — Simone Arianne Biles Owens. A biography of Simone Biles — the Spring, Texas-born most decorated American gymnast in history, Nassar survivor whose Senate testimony produced the 2020 Empowering Athletes Act… - [The Crumlin Plumber](volumes/144-the-crumlin-plumber.html) — Conor Anthony McGregor. A biography of Conor McGregor — the Crumlin, Dublin-born first simultaneous two-division UFC champion whose career remade MMA economics and whose November 2024 Dublin civil… - [The West Adams Bullet](volumes/145-the-west-adams-bullet.html) — Marvin Pentz Gay Jr.. A biography of Marvin Gaye — the Motown singer of What's Going On and Sexual Healing, shot dead by his father in his West Adams house on the day before his forty-fifth birthday. - [Procurer](volumes/146-procurer.html) — Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell. A biography of Ghislaine Maxwell — the British socialite and longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, convicted in December 2021 on five federal counts of sex trafficking minors… - [El Chapo](volumes/147-el-chapo.html) — Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera. A biography of El Chapo — the Sinaloan cartel boss who escaped Mexican prison twice and is now serving life without parole at the Florence ADX after his February 2019 federal… - [The Moscow Exile](volumes/149-the-moscow-exile.html) — Bashar Hafez al-Assad. A biography of Bashar al-Assad — the British-trained ophthalmologist who ruled Syria from 2000 until the December 2024 collapse, fled to Moscow with his family, and presided over… - [The Tomsk Flight](volumes/150-the-tomsk-flight.html) — Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny. Pavel Stepanov's biography of Alexei Navalny — from the Yale fellowship through the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Novichok hospitalisation, and the prison-letter samizdat… - [The Ecuadorean Embassy](volumes/151-the-ecuadorean-embassy.html) — Julian Paul Assange. A biography of Julian Assange — the Australian co-founder of WikiLeaks who spent seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and five years at HM Prison Belmarsh before… - [The Mira Hotel](volumes/152-the-mira-hotel.html) — Edward Joseph Snowden. A biography of Edward Snowden — the NSA contractor whose June 2013 disclosures revealed the architecture of the post-9/11 American surveillance state and who has lived in Russian… - [Beneath the Surface](volumes/153-beneath-the-surface.html) — David Keith Lynch. A biography of David Lynch — the Missoula-born American auteur behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, who died in January 2025 at seventy-eight. - [The Lewy Body Diagnosis](volumes/154-the-lewy-body-diagnosis.html) — Robin McLaurin Williams. A biography of Robin Williams — the Bloomfield Hills-born comedian and Academy Award-winning actor whose four-decade career ended in suicide at sixty-three from undiagnosed Lewy… - [The Hidden Hills Estate](volumes/155-the-hidden-hills-estate.html) — Kimberly Noel Kardashian. A biography of Kim Kardashian — the Calabasas-born reality-television and shapewear empire-builder whose Skims is valued at $4 billion and whose four federal pardons have… - [Problem Children](volumes/156-problem-children.html) — Logan Alexander Paul and Jake Joseph Paul. A joint biography of Logan and Jake Paul — the Westlake, Ohio brother-act whose YouTube-to-boxing arc has remade the American creator economy. - [4](volumes/157-4.html) — Dávid Julián Dobrík. A biography of David Dobrik — the Slovak-American YouTube creator whose Vlog Squad and 4:20-second vlogs redefined Gen Z online video before a 2021 sexual-assault allegation… - [The Houston Trio](volumes/167-the-houston-trio.html) — Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter. A biography of Beyoncé — the Houston-born Destiny's Child lead and solo artist whose post-2000 catalog has produced thirty-two Grammys, the 2016 Lemonade visual album, and the… - [The Camden Flat](volumes/168-the-camden-flat.html) — Amy Jade Winehouse. A biography of Amy Winehouse — the Southgate-born British soul singer of Frank and Back to Black, found dead at twenty-seven in her Camden Square flat of alcohol poisoning. - [The Aberdeen Origin](volumes/169-the-aberdeen-origin.html) — Kurt Donald Cobain. A biography of Kurt Cobain — the Aberdeen, Washington-born singer-guitarist of Nirvana, the 1991 Nevermind and 1993 In Utero albums, and the 27 Club suicide in his Seattle guest… - [The Trench Town Origin](volumes/170-the-trench-town-origin.html) — Robert Nesta Marley. A biography of Bob Marley — the Nine Mile-born Jamaican Rasta singer whose Wailers and solo albums made reggae a global music and who died of metastatic melanoma at thirty-six. - [The Body and the Court](volumes/174-the-body-and-the-court.html) — Serena Jameka Williams. A biography of Serena Williams — the Compton-born youngest of the Williams sisters and twenty-three-Grand-Slam champion who retired after the 2022 U.S. Open at forty. - [The Stolen Bicycle](volumes/175-the-stolen-bicycle.html) — Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.). A biography of Muhammad Ali — the Louisville Olympic gold medallist who won the heavyweight title at twenty-two, refused induction at twenty-five, took it back in Kinshasa at… - [The Punahou Years](volumes/182-the-punahou-years.html) — Barack Hussein Obama II. A biography of Barack Obama — the Honolulu-born forty-fourth President of the United States and first Black president in American history, whose two terms reshaped American… - [The Fifth Helena Drive Bedroom](volumes/187-the-fifth-helena-drive-bedroom.html) — Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe). Vivien Beauchamp reads Marilyn Monroe's life as the labour history that golden-age Hollywood spent fifty years insisting was a fairy tale. From the contract at Fox in 1946 to the… - [The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel](volumes/188-the-pont-de-l-alma-tunnel.html) — Diana Frances Spencer. A biography of Princess Diana — the Sandringham-born Princess of Wales killed in a Paris tunnel on August 31, 1997 after fifteen years as the most-photographed woman in the world. - [The Hayvenhurst Years](volumes/189-the-hayvenhurst-years.html) — Michael Joseph Jackson. A biography of Michael Jackson — the Gary, Indiana-born King of Pop, the best-selling solo recording artist in history, and the subject of the most thoroughly documented… - [Berlin](volumes/190-berlin.html) — David Robert Jones (David Bowie). Edmund Halloran writes the David Bowie biography that takes the middle, not the ascent — Hansa Studio One, Visconti, Eno, Iggy in the spare room. The Berlin trilogy as the actual… - [The Bedroll](volumes/193-the-bedroll.html) — Cleopatra VII Philopator. A biography of Cleopatra VII — the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, whose alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and whose 30 BCE death in Alexandria ended a three-century… - [The Burkhan Khaldun](volumes/194-the-burkhan-khaldun.html) — Temüjin (Genghis Khan). A biography of Genghis Khan — the Onon River-born Mongol khan who unified the steppe and built the largest contiguous land empire in human history before dying on campaign in the… - [The Saint Helena Exile](volumes/195-the-saint-helena-exile.html) — Napoleon Bonaparte (born Napoleone Buonaparte). A biography of Napoleon Bonaparte — the Corsican-born French Emperor whose fifteen years of military command redrew the political map of Europe and who died on the British prison… - [The Wardenclyffe Tower](volumes/196-the-wardenclyffe-tower.html) — Nikola Tesla. A biography of Nikola Tesla — the Serbian-American inventor of the polyphase alternating-current motor and the Wardenclyffe Tower, who died alone in the New Yorker Hotel in 1943. - [The Paris Radium Institute](volumes/197-the-paris-radium-institute.html) — Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie. A biography of Marie Curie — the Warsaw-born French physicist and chemist who isolated polonium and radium, won Nobel Prizes in two sciences, and died of aplastic anaemia from… - [The Santa Fe Gate](volumes/216-the-santa-fe-gate.html) — Eugene Allen Hackman. A biography of Gene Hackman — the San Bernardino-born two-time Academy Award winner whose forty-year film career ended in a quiet 2004 retirement and a February 2025 Santa Fe… - [The Pecos River Years](volumes/217-the-pecos-river-years.html) — Val Edward Kilmer. A biography of Val Kilmer — the Chatsworth-born Juilliard-trained actor of Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, Heat, and Batman Forever, whose voice the throat cancer took before the… - [The Toronto Second City](volumes/218-the-toronto-second-city.html) — Catherine Anne O'Hara. A biography of Catherine O'Hara — the Toronto-born Second City Television founding cast member, Beetlejuice and Home Alone mother, and Schitt's Creek Moira Rose who won the 2020… - [The Auvers Wheatfield](volumes/219-the-auvers-wheatfield.html) — Vincent Willem van Gogh. A biography of Vincent van Gogh — the Zundert-born Dutch post-impressionist painter who produced two thousand works in ten years, sold one, and shot himself in an Auvers-sur-Oise… - [The Fitzroy Road Kitchen](volumes/220-the-fitzroy-road-kitchen.html) — Sylvia Plath. A biography of Sylvia Plath — the American poet of Ariel and The Bell Jar, who killed herself in a Primrose Hill flat at thirty after the September 1962 separation from Ted Hughes. - [The Plaza Hotel Party](volumes/221-the-plaza-hotel-party.html) — Truman Streckfus Persons (Truman Capote). A biography of Truman Capote — the Monroeville-born author of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and In Cold Blood, whose 1975 La Côte Basque, 1965 publication… - [The Synthesizer Voice](volumes/222-the-synthesizer-voice.html) — Stephen William Hawking. Eleanor Whitlock's biography of Stephen Hawking refuses the inspirational-overcomer framing in favour of the work itself. From the singularity-theorems thesis through the 1974… - [The Freehold Origins](volumes/223-the-freehold-origins.html) — Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen. A biography of Bruce Springsteen — the Freehold, New Jersey-born songwriter whose fifty-three-year catalog and twenty-one studio albums have remade American rock-and-roll. - [The Mount Baldy Monastery](volumes/225-the-mount-baldy-monastery.html) — Leonard Norman Cohen. A biography of Leonard Cohen — the Montreal-born Canadian poet, novelist, and songwriter of Hallelujah and Famous Blue Raincoat, who was ordained a Rinzai Zen monk at Mount Baldy… - [The Owl Farm](volumes/226-the-owl-farm.html) — Hunter Stockton Thompson. A biography of Hunter S. Thompson — the Louisville-born Rolling Stone contributing editor and inventor of gonzo journalism whose 1971 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas remade… - [The Elysee Hotel](volumes/227-the-elysee-hotel.html) — Thomas Lanier Williams III (Tennessee Williams). A biography of Tennessee Williams — the Mississippi-born American playwright of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, found dead in a… - [The Halleys Comet Lifetime](volumes/228-the-halleys-comet-lifetime.html) — Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). A biography of Mark Twain — the Hannibal, Missouri-born Mississippi steamboat pilot and author of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi, whose life ran from… - [The Tuckahoe Origins](volumes/229-the-tuckahoe-origins.html) — Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (Frederick Douglass). A biography of Frederick Douglass — the Talbot County, Maryland-born abolitionist, orator, three-time memoirist, and U.S. Minister to Haiti whose escape from slavery in September… - [The Princeton Seminar](volumes/230-the-princeton-seminar.html) — Chloe Ardelia Wofford (Toni Morrison). A biography of Toni Morrison — the Lorain, Ohio-born American novelist of The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz, the 1993 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and the… - [The Stamps Arkansas](volumes/231-the-stamps-arkansas.html) — Marguerite Annie Johnson (Maya Angelou). A biography of Maya Angelou — the Stamps, Arkansas-raised author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, calypso singer, SCLC coordinator, Pulitzer-nominated poet, and reciter of On… - [The Cinecitta Studios](volumes/233-the-cinecitta-studios.html) — Federico Fellini. A biography of Federico Fellini — the Rimini-born Italian director of La Dolce Vita, 8½, and Amarcord, five-time Academy Award winner and foundational post-neorealist filmmaker… - [The Orthogonians](volumes/234-the-orthogonians.html) — Richard Milhous Nixon. A biography of Richard Nixon — the only American president to resign — arguing that the statesman who opened China and the criminal who ordered the Fielding break-in were one man… - [A Thousand and Thirty-Six Days](volumes/235-a-thousand-and-thirty-six-days.html) — John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy governed for a thousand and thirty-six days while concealing a disease, and sixty-three years later his file is still being declassified in batches. This biography sets… - [Eighty-Seven Votes](volumes/236-eighty-seven-votes.html) — Lyndon Baines Johnson. A biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson — the Texas congressman who took a Senate seat in 1948 by eighty-seven votes out of 988,295, and spent it on the Civil Rights Act, the Voting… - [Nine Counties](volumes/237-nine-counties.html) — Hiram Ulysses Grant (Ulysses S. Grant). A biography of Ulysses S. Grant — the Ohio tanner's son who took Lee's surrender at Appomattox and served two terms as President, built on the two documents that bear his… - [The Valuations](volumes/239-the-valuations.html) — Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson enlarged American democracy and presided over the largest forced deportation in the nation's history, and this book argues those were the same project rather than… - [One Hundred and Sixty-Seven](volumes/240-one-hundred-and-sixty-seven.html) — Theodore Roosevelt Jr.. A biography of Theodore Roosevelt built around the 167 Black soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry he discharged without honor in 1906 — no trial, no evidence, and the… - [Places of Public Accommodation](volumes/243-places-of-public-accommodation.html) — Martin Luther King Jr.. The life of Martin Luther King Jr. told through the archive his enemies built. A federal judge sealed the FBI's tapes of him for fifty years in 1977, using the language of King's… - [Forty-Eight Years](volumes/244-forty-eight-years.html) — John Edgar Hoover. For forty eight years J. Edgar Hoover ran one American agency, outlasting eight presidents who could each have removed him. This biography argues that his power was… - [Natural Causes](volumes/245-natural-causes.html) — Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara. Thomas Sankara diagnosed the machinery that kept Burkina Faso poor with more precision than any African leader of his generation, and built nothing capable of surviving him for a… - [Emancipation](volumes/247-emancipation.html) — Prince Rogers Nelson. Prince kept his songs and lost his records. The life of a man who was right about everything except the paperwork, told from the contracts, the court files, and the vault. - [One Dollar and One Percent](volumes/248-one-dollar-and-one-percent.html) — James Marshall Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix signed away his exclusive recording services for one dollar. A London court was still construing the paperwork in 2026. A biography built from the contracts. - [The Invention of Pearl](volumes/249-the-invention-of-pearl.html) — Janis Lyn Joplin. Pearl was not a mask the world put on Janis Joplin. She built it herself in Port Arthur, years before anyone was paying — and it never once failed her, which was the problem. - [A Man He Never Shot](volumes/250-a-man-he-never-shot.html) — John R. Cash. Johnny Cash never served a day of a sentence and never shot anybody. The outlaw was a costume — assembled, sold, and finally impossible to take off. A biography from the documents. - [The Note She Declined](volumes/251-the-note-she-declined.html) — Aretha Louise Franklin. Aretha Franklin left four handwritten pages in a couch cushion and five years of probate. This is the case that her silence was a technique and not a symptom — the same refusal… - [What Could Be Seen](volumes/252-what-could-be-seen.html) — Farrokh Bulsara. A saleroom emptied his house in six sessions and produced the only inventory of him that exists. The case that Freddie Mercury was not hiding — he was designing, for twenty-one… - [In Front of Witnesses](volumes/253-in-front-of-witnesses.html) — John Winston Ono Lennon. He told a journalist he had been a hitter, and that this was why he was always on about peace. The case that the two were one mechanism — that John Lennon's peace was addressed… - [No Second Voice](volumes/254-no-second-voice.html) — Miles Dewey Davis III. He told us what he did — in his own book, under his own name, and nobody made him. A cross-examination of the one document every account of Miles Davis has been built on, now… - [The Card](volumes/255-the-card.html) — Billie Holiday. Eleven days out of prison she filled Carnegie Hall, and for the twelve years left to her she could not work a single New York nightclub. The police had taken her cabaret card… - [The Shelf](volumes/256-the-shelf.html) — John William Coltrane. A San Francisco church made him a god in 1969 and, in 1982, formally reduced him to a saint. Not whether John Coltrane was one, but who needed him to be, and what they had to… - [A Third of Heartbreak Hotel](volumes/257-a-third-of-heartbreak-hotel.html) — Elvis Aaron Presley. To be recorded by Elvis Presley you gave up a share of your song, and the arrangement ran for a decade. The two charges against him, that he took Black music and that his manager… - [Two Words](volumes/258-two-words.html) — Anna Mae Bullock, known as Tina Turner. A stage name picked in 1960 because it rhymed with Sheena, and a 1978 decree in which she kept the name and surrendered the catalog. The escape comes in the middle of this book… - [Eighteen Months](volumes/259-eighteen-months.html) — Sam Cooke. He was dead in ninety seconds and dispossessed in eighteen months. A coroner's jury closed the killing in five days; what happened to the companies he built has never been… - [Not Acceptable Material](volumes/260-not-acceptable-material.html) — Francis Albert Sinatra. In 1943 an Army examiner found him not acceptable material from a psychiatric viewpoint, and the finding was kept from him for the rest of his life. The Bureau watched him for… - [The Sole Beneficiary](volumes/261-the-sole-beneficiary.html) — Ray Charles Robinson. Ray Charles left each of his twelve children a trust and a waiver to sign, and all twelve signed. Seven of them later filed to take back the songs, and the foundation that… - [Track Thirteen](volumes/262-track-thirteen.html) — Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor. The thirteenth track on Am I Not Your Girl? was unlisted, spoken, and about the abuse of children, so nobody played it and nobody asked her about it. Nineteen days later she said… - [The Scrapbooks](volumes/263-the-scrapbooks.html) — Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (George Michael). Sixteen years of controlling how he was seen ended in four minutes in a Beverly Hills restroom. The only contemporaneous archive of any of it is fifty scrapbooks a schoolfriend's… - [Back to Mono](volumes/264-back-to-mono.html) — Harvey Philip Spector. The Wall of Sound was never a sound. It was a procedure for making an object out of many people from which no individual could be recovered, and the forensic apparatus that… - [The Clause](volumes/265-the-clause.html) — Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. The charity and the terror were one campaign with a single objective: stopping Colombia from extraditing its nationals to the United States. He surrendered to a prison he had… - [January 17](volumes/266-january-17.html) — Alphonse Gabriel Capone. Prohibition came into force on his twenty-first birthday, while he was keeping books for a construction firm in Baltimore. What convicted him eleven years later was a gambling… - [Nobody Called](volumes/267-nobody-called.html) — Bernard Lawrence Madoff. The SEC had his account number at the central securities depository, and one telephone call would have shown the positions did not exist. Nobody called — the fraud was not… - [Top Echelon](volumes/268-top-echelon.html) — James Joseph Bulger Jr.. The FBI did not fail to catch James Bulger. It bought him, under a program that is still operating and still paying people who kill. - [The Coupon](volumes/269-the-coupon.html) — Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi, known as Charles Ponzi. A coupon bought in Italy for the equivalent of a penny redeemed in Boston at American face value, and the spread was real. Ponzi's crime was discovering that the business would… - [Eight Cigarette Butts](volumes/270-eight-cigarette-butts.html) — D.B. Cooper. Eight cigarette butts from seat 18-E were the only material that could have carried his DNA, and the Bureau destroyed them. The space they left filled with families claiming… - [The Fish](volumes/271-the-fish.html) — Victor Lustig. No French police report, no item in any Paris daily, no source of any kind before 1961. The most famous confidence trick in history may itself be one, and the documented crime is… - [Twenty-Seven](volumes/272-twenty-seven.html) — Herman Webster Mudgett, known as H. H. Holmes. The confession to twenty-seven murders was written in a cell to a syndicate's length and deadline, and he was paid for it. Twenty-seven was never a count; it was a price. - [Twenty-Eight and Three](volumes/273-twenty-eight-and-three.html) — Ernest Henry Shackleton. Twenty-eight men came off Elephant Island alive. Three died on the far side of the same continent, laying depots for a crossing that had already become impossible, and this book… - [The Flying Laboratory](volumes/274-the-flying-laboratory.html) — Amelia Mary Earhart. Press releases called the Electra a flying laboratory, and no experiment, instrument list or finding was ever published. Earhart's fame and her disappearance came out of the same… - [Eleven Dogs Came Home](volumes/275-eleven-dogs-came-home.html) — Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen. Fifty-two dogs left the Bay of Whales and eleven came home. The Pole was won six years earlier in a harbour on King William Island, where the Netsilingmiut taught him everything… - [Grounded](volumes/276-grounded.html) — Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin. The first man in space spent the next seven years preparing other men for the work he was not permitted to do. The Soviet Union did not select a cosmonaut in 1961, it cast one… - [Another Man's Handwriting](volumes/277-another-man-s-handwriting.html) — Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati al-Tanji, called Ibn Battuta. Twenty-nine years of travel and not one page written at the time. The book everyone reads is a court commission, dictated at fifty to a professional stylist who supplied the… - [The Black Spot](volumes/278-the-black-spot.html) — George Herbert Leigh Mallory. Noel Odell watched a black spot move on a snow crest, and the cloud closed. That interval, which nobody timed, is the whole of the evidence, and the question built on it has been… - [Vacated](volumes/279-vacated.html) — J. Robert Oppenheimer. The same file cleared him in 1943 and again in 1947, then took his clearance away in 1954. Nothing had been added to it; he had simply stopped being useful. - [No Recantation](volumes/280-no-recantation.html) — Fritz Jakob Haber. Half the nitrogen atoms in a living human body came from his reaction. So did the chlorine opened into the French line at Ypres, and he never retracted a word of it. - [Nature Cannot Be Fooled](volumes/281-nature-cannot-be-fooled.html) — Richard Phillips Feynman. Ten seconds with a C-clamp and a glass of ice water is the most famous thing he ever did. His charm was a working instrument, and the one direction it never turned was inward. - [Note A](volumes/282-note-a.html) — Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. The quarrel over the first computer programmer has run since 1970, and both sides argue from the wrong page. Note A is where the general-purpose machine gets written down, and… - [The Ballot](volumes/283-the-ballot.html) — Carl Edward Sagan. The National Academy of Sciences blackballed him in 1992 and handed him its Public Welfare Medal two years later. The profession that voted him down now creates professorships in… - [Mould Juice](volumes/284-mould-juice.html) — Sir Alexander Fleming. A pathologist in Sheffield cured newborn babies with crude penicillin filtrate in 1930, and nothing happened. The eleven years the mould sat unused were not one man's failure of… - [The Burnt Archive](volumes/285-the-burnt-archive.html) — Alexander III of Macedon. Alexander burned Persepolis in 330 BC and baked the Persian empire's administrative archive hard enough to survive. This book counts what the campaign cost, city by city, and… - [The Third Person](volumes/286-the-third-person.html) — Gaius Julius Caesar. Caesar wrote about himself as Caesar, never as I. What is documented about the war in Gaul is documented because the man who caused it reported it himself. - [The Twelve Articles](volumes/287-the-twelve-articles.html) — Joan of Arc. A commission of theologians cleared her at Poitiers in 1429; a court at Rouen convicted her of heresy in 1431, working from the same canon law by the same procedure. The doctrine… - [The Bronze Tablet](volumes/288-the-bronze-tablet.html) — Hannibal Barca. Sixteen years in Italy winning battles, while Carthage lost the war in Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Africa. The story of the jealous Council that starved him of men and money… - [Arrivals, Not Acts](volumes/289-arrivals-not-acts.html) — Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. Killed in December 1916 by men who meant to save the monarchy, which outlived him by ten weeks. The police ledgers kept on his staircase are the most detailed documentation of… - [These Lands](volumes/290-these-lands.html) — Musa I of Mali, called Mansa Musa. Both halves of the sentence everyone knows are wrong: he was not measurably the richest man who ever lived, and the pilgrimage did not wreck Egypt's economy. The king supposedly… - [Souls](volumes/291-souls.html) — Catherine II of Russia, born Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst. The Guards put her on the throne in June 1762, and she was paying them in serfs before the crown was on her head. Her Enlightenment and her serfdom were one transaction, and she… - [No Off Switch](volumes/292-no-off-switch.html) — Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor. He turned the night he shot up his wife's car into a routine, and the night he set himself on fire into an album. Confession was the technique, and it had no off switch. - [The Pronoun](volumes/293-the-pronoun.html) — George Denis Patrick Carlin. Everybody remembers the seven words; the routine that went to the Supreme Court was a different one. The change that mattered was a pronoun, and the audience he called we became… - [The Transfer](volumes/294-the-transfer.html) — Stanley Kubrick. For forty years the record books said one scene in The Shining took 127 takes. The production's own paperwork says sixty-six, and the question was never the number but who could… - [No Papers](volumes/295-no-papers.html) — Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE. No birth certificate has ever been produced, and in forty years of American residence he never took citizenship. When the re-entry permit was cancelled while he was at sea, all… - [The Option](volumes/296-the-option.html) — Frances Ethel Gumm, professionally Judy Garland. Thirty times an office picked up her option; the thirty-first time nobody did, and she was twenty-eight. Almost nobody at MGM was cruel to her, which this book treats as the… - [Thirty Months](volumes/297-thirty-months.html) — George Orson Welles. A twenty-four-year-old who had never made a feature was handed a production unit and final cut at a major studio. He held those terms for about thirty months, then spent forty…