John Steinbeck just might be the novelist for our time. In his sprawling epic The Grapes of Wrath, he captured Americans’ peculiar yearning for a life not their own, the promise of wealth beyond the veil of desolation and the wretched impossibility of such a promise. Steinbeck’s other epic, East of Eden, illustrates the ragged desperation of human nature, wreaking destruction rather than carrying hope. William Souder’s bracing Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck vividly portrays the brooding and moody writer who could never stop writing and who never fit comfortably in the society in which he lived.

Souder, whose biography of John James Audobon was a Pulitzer finalist, traces Steinbeck’s love of story and storytelling to his childhood. As a teenager, Steinbeck immersed himself in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which he translated later in life, and in adventure tales and classics such as Treasure Island, Madame Bovary and Crime and Punishment. This early reading gave him glimpses into the shadowy corners of the human heart and provided him with models for telling tales of people engaged in heroic struggles against the injustices of their eras.

Steinbeck was a born storyteller, a writer who was not happy unless he was working, a novelist a bit out of step with his times (many of his social realist novels appeared during the innovations of modernism) and a reticent man who would rather write than talk publicly about his writing. Steinbeck’s greatest virtue, according to Souder, was his “ability to live inside other cultures, other races; he brought people to life who were otherwise invisible and voiceless.” The first Steinbeck biography since Jay Parini’s more psychological John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995), Mad at the World vibrantly illuminates the life and work of a writer who is still widely read and relevant today.

These days, Sylvia Plath is often considered part of the intense realm of the teenage girl. Her name comes up again and again alongside figures such as Lana del Rey in articles referencing the “sad girl aesthetic.” When my daughter saw my copy of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath lying bricklike by my chair, she reacted with surprise: “Oh! They sing about her in the Heathers musical!” Somehow this poet, named a genius in her lifetime, is now deemed “confessional” and relegated to a literary space where intellectuals raise their eyebrows knowingly and dismiss her work to 16-year-old-girl-land. (There is, of course, the larger question of why we label art consumed by teenage girls as unintelligent and lesser.)

Biographer and Plath scholar Heather Clark lifts the poet’s life from the Persephone myth it has become and examines it in all its complexity. In the massive effort that is Red Comet, Clark admirably identifies and resists the morbid tendency to look at every moment, every work, as a signpost on the way to Plath’s tragic suicide. She also liberates the supporting cast of Plath’s life from the damning and one-dimensional roles they often occupy as part of the death-myth of Plath’s life. Her husband, Ted Hughes; his lover, Assia Wevill; Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath—they are not villains but people who created art of their own, who loved and fought with Plath, who were not always good or right.

Clark’s detailed, multidimensional treatment gives Plath’s life and work its dignity, character and sense of interiority. We get the full scope of Plath’s incredible talent here, rightfully established as complicated, radiant and worthy of deep consideration. Plath was a genius. She was a woman living in a time of great social restriction for women. She had complicated and human relationships. She was mentally ill, and this mental illness both illumined her work and colored her perspective. All of these things are held alongside one another without conflict in Clark’s book.

Considering Plath in this complexifying light, Clark unlooses some of the bonds that have held back this incomparable artist. Neither a wronged icon nor a goddess of perpetual angsty teenagerhood, Plath is presented to us as a complicated woman who achieved great things both despite and because of those complications, who had meaningful and loving relationships, who could sometimes be difficult, who struggled and who overcame as often as she faltered. Red Comet allows Plath to emerge from the shadows, shining in all her intricacy and artistry.

Is there room on the shelf for another book about Charles Dickens? The great novelist has been endlessly scrutinized by critics and biographers, bowdlerized on stage and screen, and lionized by generations of readers since his death 150 years ago. A.N. Wilson, the celebrated British biographer of many eminent Victorians (including Queen Victoria herself), now lends his expertise and singular perspective in The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

Rather than providing a straightforward, linear biography, Wilson explores Dickens’ life and work through the prism of seven “mysteries” that shaped the elusive writer. “Dickens, as an actor and a novelist, and as a man, was a man of masks,” Wilson suggests, “who probably never revealed himself to anyone; quite conceivably, he did not reveal himself to himself.” The rich narrative begins with Dickens’ ultimate public deception: Even in the throes of death from a stroke in June 1870, he diligently kept the existence of his long-term extramarital relationship with actress Nelly Ternan from the adoring eyes of the public. Next, Wilson looks at the mysteries of Dickens’ parents—his problematic relationship with his father and his fraught feelings toward his mother—and how the depiction of childhood in his fiction reflects an ideal rather than a reality. Similarly, his disastrous marriage was marked by private cruelty that belied his magnanimous public persona. The writer’s considerable acts of charity, performed largely anonymously, were complicated as well. Wilson suggests that Dickens likely partook in the services of prostitutes even as he supported organizations tasked with setting these women on the straight and narrow.

It has long been acknowledged how much Dickens’ fiction drew on real life, both his own and the wider world he observed, but Wilson convinces readers that Dickens’ beloved fictional vision, both comic and condemning, was a creation of the writer’s imagination, not grounded in realism like Balzac. It is a romanticized picture of 19th-century reality. Wilson brings dazzling, far-reaching erudition to this study, drawing on unexpected, sometimes arcane sources to paint a portrait with impressive depth and nuance.

During his lifetime, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was one of America’s most highly regarded poets, a phenomenally successful bestselling writer both here and abroad. An author of stories and essays, a translator of Dante and an editor of a multivolume anthology of poetry from around the world, he played a major role in shaping middle-class culture during the 1800s. As the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, he brought a cosmopolitan vision to his writing and was influential in bringing European culture to the U.S. and dramatizing American themes overseas. (He is still the only American to have a bust of his likeness in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.) His many literary friends included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe and Charles Dickens.

Longfellow and his times are brought vividly to life by Nicholas A. Basbanes in his authoritative and wonderfully readable Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He traces the poet’s life from Maine, where Longfellow knew early on that he wanted to be a professional writer, to becoming a major literary presence. Basbanes draws on a rich abundance of correspondence, diaries, journals and notebooks and gives readers generous excerpts from Longfellow and many others.

At the heart of the book is the relationship between Longfellow and his second wife, Frances Appleton Longfellow. Fanny, as she was called, was educated, multilingual and skilled as an artist. She was remarkably well read and wrote very well herself, and her relationship with Longfellow thrived on intellect as much as romance. Describing their relationship, a friend once remarked, “Of all happy homes theirs was in many ways the happiest.”

Longfellow usually preferred not to be involved in controversial issues but was a noted antislavery advocate who decried war and violence of any kind. His best friend was Charles Sumner, a noted abolitionist who almost lost his life for the cause of abolition when he was attacked in the U.S. Senate. Long before that incident, Longfellow published Poems on Slavery at Sumner’s request.

Basbanes uses his sources well, transporting readers beautifully to the world of a poet who is often overlooked. If you enjoy literary biography, this is a book to savor.

Books by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard aren’t likely on many readers’ nightstands these days. After all, titles such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Repetition and The Concept of Anxiety don’t exactly inspire a desire to dig deeper into their contents (even though the latter title sounds at least like it might be fitting for our unsettling times.) Yet, as Clare Carlisle demonstrates in the absorbing and captivating Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, reading Kierkegaard is much like reading a good novel or a thoughtful poem. Above all, his work struggles artistically with what it means to be human and what it means to love, expressing these concerns in rhetorical styles that seduce the reader into complex philosophical sketches about aesthetics, ethics and religion.

Carlisle, Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London, eschews the contours of traditional biography, focusing instead on Kierkegaard’s growth and development as a writer through a careful look at his publications. Writing became the fabric of Kierkegaard’s existence, says Carlisle—the “most vibrant love of his life.” (“All his other loves flowed into it, and it swelled like the ocean that crashed against his native land.”) Among these other loves, Carlisle deftly illustrates the ways that Kierkegaard’s breakup with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, haunted him through all his life, weaving itself in some fashion or another through all of his writings. Carlisle points out that Kierkegaard’s work of “soul-searching, exploring his own anxiety and suffering,” deepens “his understanding of being human, and [gives] his philosophy a power to affect others.”

Philosopher of the Heart does what the best biographies do: It sends us back to Kierkegaard’s time so we can see for ourselves the beauty, intricacy and literary artistry of what he accomplished. Carlisle’s meticulous reading of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre reveals that his work deserves a wider audience for its insights into what it means to be human. This penetrating introduction will encourage us to put Fear and Trembling or Stages on Life’s Way on our nightstands.

Henry Kissinger’s approach to American foreign policy continues to be a subject of controversy, even though he’s been out of government since the 1970s. Regarded as a brilliant statesman by many, he has also been called an appeaser, a villain and a war criminal. What was it that caused people to view him so differently? Are there lessons for today we can learn from him? 

Barry Gewen, a longtime editor at the New York Times Book Review, explores these and other questions in his meticulously researched, consistently stimulating and deeply insightful intellectual biography, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World. Through detailed analyses of Kissinger’s policy decisions on Vietnam and Chile, the influence of his personal life on his professional worldview, and the views of other Jewish European refugee intellectuals, Gewen offers a better understanding of Kissinger’s ability to challenge people to rethink their assumptions.

Kissinger always loved the U.S. but remained skeptical about democracy. Although he downplayed the influence of his youth in Weimar Republic Germany during the rise of Hitler, who could forget that the leader of the Nazi Party came to power primarily by democratic means? Kissinger believed not in grand dreams but in dealing with realities. Peace is not the natural condition of humankind, he said, and democracy will not guarantee global peace and stability. A balance of power is essential. All of these ideas were controversial, of course, but probably nothing caused him more trouble than believing that we should accept evil in the world rather than trying to eradicate it. As he put it, “Nothing is more difficult for Americans to understand than the possibility of tragedy.”

This beautifully written and engaging gem is an exciting, exhilarating must-read for anyone interested in international relations, American foreign policy or the ideas of Kissinger, whether you agree with him or not.