If you want to know more about a writer, either before or after reading his or her books, here are some top-notch literary biographies.

Ever since I first read R. W. B. Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Edith Wharton: A Biography many years ago, I’ve thought that it set the gold standard for biographies: intensely readable, a page-turner, and a wonderful way to broaden and deepen one’s appreciation of this marvelous writer. If you’ve never tried a Wharton novel or short story, then start with these: “Xingu,” a little gem of a story about a women’s book group, and her most famous novel, The Age of Innocence. Lewis also wrote a biography of Henry James and his family, The Jameses: A Family Narrative.

But to learn the most about Henry James, you can’t do better than to read Leon Edel: either his magnificent five volumes about the author, or the one-volume abridgement, Henry James: A Life. The five are Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870; Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881; Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895; Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901; and Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916. Edel won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for the second and third volumes of his massive biography. (Henry James is also the subject of Colm Tóibín’s magnificent novel The Master and David Lodge's Author, Author.)

Most people think of Nathaniel Hawthorne only in terms of The Scarlet Letter, a book they were probably forced to read in high school. That’s a shame, as Brenda Wineapple makes clear in her Hawthorne: A Life, because Hawthorne was a complicated and complex individual who struggled with many contradictory impulses in his life: writing vs. a more public life, living in the North while supporting the South in the Civil War, and much more. He showed himself fully to no one, and died leaving many unanswered questions.

Maybe A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey will revive interest in Yates’s spare and crystalline prose, seen to perfection in the novels The Easter Parade and Revolutionary Road. The life of this sad, self-destructive writer can be read as a how-not-to manual for those aspiring to a career in fiction, but his legacy—he influenced the entire minimalist school of writers, including Richard Ford, Mary Robison, and Raymond Carver—is lasting.

Anyone who takes up the challenge of writing about a woman who changed lives and loves as fast and furiously as the writer Mary McCarthy did deserves a prize, so it’s fitting that Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World by Carol Brightman won the National Book Critics Award.

In The Singular Mark Twain, Fred Kaplan describes the life and development of a complex writer whose work includes some of the most popular (and controversial) books in the American canon, including, of course, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1951, was the first, and remains the best, biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a self-destructive but extremely talented writer who died at a ridiculously young age while hard at work on what probably would have been his best novel, The Last Tycoon.