Honor roll:Biography books of the 1980s
From AwardAnnals
Each of these Biography books has received at least one award nomination in the 1980s. They are ranked by honors received.
See also:
- Honor roll:Biography books: 1990s, full list.
- Honor roll:Biography authors.
- Category:Biography book awards.
- Works 1–10 of 97
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Parting the Waters: Volume 1 of America in the King Years, 1954-1963
- 1989 LATimes–Current Interest winner
- 1989 Pulitzer–History winner
- 1988 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 30.39
Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King’s rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.
Epic in scope and impact, Branch’s chronicle definitively captures one of the nation’s most crucial passages.
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
The climax of this humane account of 10 years in Boston that began with news of Martin Luther King’s assassination, is a watershed moment in the city’s modern history—the 1974 racist riots that followed the court-ordered busing of kids to integrate the schools. To bring understanding to that moment, Lukas, a former New York Times journalist, focuses on two working-class families, headed by an Irish-American widow and an African-American mother, and on the middle-class family of a white liberal couple. Lukas goes beyond stereotypes, carefully grounding each…
A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt
- 1990 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1989 NBCC–Biography winner
- 1990 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- Score: 26.4
In what is arguably his greatest book, written in 1979, America’s most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America’s prisons who—after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood—insisted on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.
Norman Mailer tells Gilmore’s story—and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad—with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore’s Utah.
The Executioner’s Song is a towering achievement, impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
Richard Ellmann, one of the greatest biographers of our time, found his most compelling protagonist in Oscar Wilde. The book’s emotional resonance, its riches of authentic color and conversation, and the subtlety of its critical illuminations give dazzling life to this portrait of the complex man, the charmer, the great playwright, the daring champion of the primacy of art. Drawing on a wealth of documentation, Ellmann reveals a Wilde greater and more moving than his legend has allowed, a Wilde who even today challenges our assumptions with his provocative intelligence and wit.
The biography sensitive to the tragic pattern of the story of a great subject: Oscar Wilde—psychologically and sexually complicated, enormously quotable, central to a alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.
Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life…Theodore Roosevelt
Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised.
The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail”, wrote The New York Times Book Review.
A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is…
Walter Lippmann and the American Century
The journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a magisterial figure who relished his role as an insider, an adviser to presidents, a shaper and sometime purveyor of government policy. Drawing on conversations with Lippmann and exclusive access to his private papers, Ronald Steel documents the broad flow of Lippmann’s career from his brilliant Harvard days and his role in helping formulate Wilson’s Fourteen Points in World War I to his bitter break with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. Written with clarity and objectivity, this definitive biography presents a commanding portrait of a complicated man and “guides its reader through the first three-quarters of this American century” (The New Yorker).
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number
The bestselling, classic personal chronicle of the Argentine publisher’s ordeal at the hands of the Argentine government—imprisoned and tortured as a dissenter and as a Jew—that aroused the conscience of the world.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
This is Morris’s highly acclaimed account of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, encompassing the years from Roosevelt’s birth to his service in the White House.
He was one of our most vibrant presidents; his image still haunts our past and our present. This fascinating and comprehensive biography of the extraordinary naturalist, adventurer, soldier, and politician, tells the improbable, but very real, story of a man determined to get what he wanted, an American who helped define our century and our very character.
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