100 biographies to read in your lifetime

jamelah/Flickr

Whether they provide a glimpse into the past or capture the life of a contemporary icon, biographies and memoirs let us walk in someone else's shoes.

The Amazon Books editors compiled a list of the 100 biographies and memoires that everyone should read in their lifetime.

A few of the titles are admittedly novels (or "authors shrouding their experiences within the cloak of fiction," as the Amazon editors put it) while others are classic biographies, but all of the books are essential reading on some of the world's most famous politicians, comedians, musicians, chefs, freedom fighters, and artists.

From the autobiographies of Malala Yousafzai and Barak Obama to the storied lives of historical titans like Winston Churchill and Frederick Douglass, keep scrolling to see the 100 biographies you should add to your reading list.

1. "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers
2. "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah
3. "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway
4. "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson
5. "American Caesar" by William Manchester
6. "American Lion" by Jon Meacham
7. "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird
8. "American Sniper" by Chris Kyle
9. "American Sphinx" by Joseph J. Ellis
10. "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt
11. "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank
12. "Autobiography of a Face" by Lucy Grealy
13. "Autobiography of Mark Twain" by Mark Twain
14. "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton
15. "Black Boy" by Richard Wright
16. "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin
17. "Born Standing Up" by Steve Martin
18. "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall
19. "Bossypants" by Tina Fey
20. "Cash" by Johnny Cash
21. "Catherine the Great" by Robert K. Massie
22. "Chronicles" by Bob Dylan
23. "Churchill: A Life" by Martin Gilbert
24. "Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice" by Phillip Hoose
25. "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" by William Styron
26. "De Profundis and Other Prison Writings" by Oscar Wilde
27. "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" by Alexandra Fuller
28. "Dorothy Parker" by Marion Meade
29. "Dreams from My Father" by Barack Obama
30. "Drinking: A Love Story" by Caroline Knapp
31. "Dust Tracks on a Road" by Zora Neale Hurston
32. "E=mc~2" by David Bodanis
33. "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert
34. "Endurance" by Alfred Lansing
35. "Everybody Was So Young" by Amanda Vaill
36. "Helen Keller: The Story of My Life" by Helen Keller
37. "I Am Malala" by Malala Yousafzai
38. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
39. "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer
40. "Just Kids" by Patti Smith
41. "Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain
42. "Knock Wood" by Candice Bergen
43. "Life" by Keith Richards
44. "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela
45. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
46. "Mortality" by Christopher Hitchens
47. "My Life in France" by Julia Child
48. "Naked" by David Sedaris
49. "Napoleon" by Andrew Roberts
50. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" by Frederick Douglass
51. "Night" by Elie Wiesel
52. "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin
53. "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
54. "Open" by Andre Agassi
55. "Out of Africa" by Isak Dinesen
56. "Personal History" by Katharine Graham
57. "Robert A. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson" by Robert A. Caro
58. "Running with Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs
59. "Savage Beauty" by Nancy Milford
60. "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
61. "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher" by Timothy Egan
62. "Speak, Memory" by Vladimir Nabokov
63. "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson
64. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman
65. "Tennessee Williams" by John Lahr
66. "The Agony and the Ecstasy" by Irving Stone
67. "The Andy Warhol Diaries" by Andy Warhol
68. "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein
69. "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Malcolm X
70. "The Basketball Diaries" by Jim Carroll
71. "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
72. "The Color of Water" by James McBride
73. "The Complete Maus" by Art Spiegelman
74. "The Complete Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi
75. "The Diary of Anais Nin" by Anais Nin
76. "The Diary of Frida Kahlo" by Carlos Fuentes
77. "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls
78. "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
79. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
80. "The Kid Stays in the Picture" by Robert Evans
81. "The Last Lone Inventor" by Evan I. Schwartz
82. "The Liars' Club" by Mary Karr
83. "The Motorcycle Diaries" by Ernesto Che Guevara
84. "The Professor and the Madman" by Simon Winchester
85. "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris
86. "The Soul of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder
87. "The Tender Bar" by J. R. Moehringer
88. "The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston
89. "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion
90. "This Boy's Life" by Tobias Wolff
91. "Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr." by Ron Chernow
92. "Touching the Void" by Joe Simpson
93. "Travels with Charley in Search of America" by John Steinbeck
94. "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand
95. "Under the Tuscan Sun" by Frances Mayes
96. "Updike" by Adam Begley
97. "Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)" by Stacy Schiff
98. "West with the Night" by Beryl Markham
99. "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang
100. "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

Courtesy