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Looking for entertaining and well written biographies about someone with an interesting life
Life by Keith Richards. Very fun read. Maybe not as well written as some of these others, but fun
Stefan Zweig writes great biographies. His most well known is his biography on Marie Antoinette titled *Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman*.
Duff Cooper's Talleyrand - a remarkable life of a man who kept rising in position and kept his head attached to his body in france through the ancien regime, every phase of the revolution, the napoleonic era, the first burbon restoration, napoleon's 100 days, and the second burbon restoration. Also seconding Limonov: I found it to be a sympathetic but fair biography of a russian artist, aesthete, and radical. Agree with him or not, he lived an incredible life.
Limonov by Emmanuel Carrere - scumbag-turned-scumbagwriter-turned-failed(?)political actor whose life engages with the history of post WWII Russia
Act One by Moss Hart is an enjoyable book if you are into theatre and the boom of plays in the 1930s
Walter Isaacson gets mixed opinions these days for mythologizing his subjects too much and inventing corny phrases (demon mode like for real? come on), but his benjamin franklin one was amazing. Also Howard Hughes Life and Madness.
Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, by the aforementioned John F. Szwed Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon
Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra by John F. Szwed
Walt Whitman's America by David S Reynolds
I'm reading The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk (biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein) and it's really good