National Book Critics Circle Award Biography Winners — Complete List (1983–2025)

• A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green

  2025NBCCBiography

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• Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr

  2024NBCCBiography

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• Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg

  2023NBCCBiography

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• G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

  2022NBCCBiography

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  All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

  2021NBCCBiography

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  Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley

  2020NBCCBiography

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  The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin

  2019NBCCBiography

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• Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous by Christopher Bonanos

  2018NBCCBiography

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  Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

  2017NBCCBiography

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  Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

  2016NBCCBiography

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  Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

  2015NBCCBiography

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  Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

  2014NBCCBiography

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  Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch

  2013NBCCBiography

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• The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro

  2012NBCCBiography

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  George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

  2011NBCCBiography

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  How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell

  2010NBCCBiography

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• 
  Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey

  2009NBCCBiography

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  The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French

  2008NBCCBiography

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• Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal

  2007NBCCBiography

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• 
  James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips

  2006NBCCBiography

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• American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai BirdandMartin J. Sherwin

  2005NBCCBiography
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  de Kooning: An American Master by Mark StevensandAnnalyn Swan

  2004NBCCBiography

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• 
  Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman

  2003NBCCBiography

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  Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II by Janet Browne

  2002NBCCBiography

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  Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman

  2001NBCCBiography

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  Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

  2000NBCCBiography

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  The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek

  1999NBCCBiography

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• A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

  1998NBCCBiography

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  Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II by James Tobin

  1997NBCCBiography

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  Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

  1996NBCCBiography

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  Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito

  1995NBCCBiography

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  Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

  1994NBCCBiography

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• Genet by Edmund White

  1993NBCCBiography
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  Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World by Carol Brightman

  1992NBCCBiography

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  Patrimony: A True Story by Philip Roth

  1991NBCCBiography

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• Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. II by Robert A. Caro

  1990NBCCBiography

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  A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffrey C. Ward

  1989NBCCBiography

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  Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann

  1988NBCCBiography

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  Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World by Donald R. Howard

  1987NBCCBiography

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  The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902-1941 by Arnold Rampersad

  1986NBCCBiography

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  Henry James: A Life by Leon Edel

  1985NBCCBiography

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  Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 by Joseph Frank

  1984NBCCBiography

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  Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson

  1983NBCCBiography

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