Biographers and historians

Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc

Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc, also written Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, was a Nahua nobleman of Mexico-Tenochtitlan who wrote two chronicles of the Mexica past around 1600.

Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), Franco-English writer, historian, and Catholic polemicist; Liberal MP for Salford 1906-1910, author of about 150 books including The Servile State, and half of the 'Chesterbelloc' with G. K. Chesterton.

Ibn al-Balkhi

Ibn al-Balkhi (ابن البلخي) was a Persian author of the Fārs-nāma, the oldest comprehensive Persian history and geography of Fārs, written under Saljuq rule; he died in 1116 or 1117.

Īśvaradāsa Nāgara

Īśvaradāsa Nāgara (ઈશ્વરદાસ નાગર) was a seventeenth-century Brahmin from Patan, Gujarat, who served the Mughals and wrote the Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, a Persian history of Aurangzeb's reign.

Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton (1593–1683) was an English writer and biographer whose Compleat Angler (1653), a dialogue on fishing, became one of the most frequently reprinted books in English.

Jakob Wimpfeling

Jakob Wimpfeling (1450–1528) was a German humanist, historian, and poet from Schlettstadt in Alsace and a central figure of Upper Rhine humanism, called the "Schoolmaster of Germany" for shaping German education through his pedagogical writings.

James Boswell

James Boswell (1740–1795), ninth laird of Auchinleck, Scottish lawyer and diarist, author of the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785); his recovered journals were published by Yale from 1950.

Jan Morris

Jan Morris (1926–2020), born James Humphry Morris, Welsh travel writer, historian, and journalist; author of Pax Britannica, Venice, and the transition memoir Conundrum; reported the 1953 Everest first ascent for The Times.

João de Barros

João de Barros (c. 1496–1570) was a Portuguese historian and royal official who wrote the Décadas da Ásia, one of the earliest accounts of the Portuguese empire in Asia.

Joaquín García Icazbalceta

Joaquín García Icazbalceta (1825–1894) was a Mexican historian, bibliographer, and private printer who edited sixteenth-century New Spain documents and wrote the foundational bibliography of early Mexican printing.

John Foxe

John Foxe (1516/17–1587) was an English martyrologist and church historian whose Actes and Monuments, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, first printed in 1563, shaped English Protestantism.

John Malalas

John Malalas (Ἰωάννης Μαλάλας) was a sixth-century Greek-speaking chronicler born in or near Antioch, whose eighteen-book Chronographia, written in colloquial Greek, runs from the Creation to Justinian I.

Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham (born 1969) is an American presidential biographer and former Newsweek editor who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for American Lion and holds a chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.

José Fernando Ramírez

José Fernando Ramírez, often called Fernando Ramírez, was a Mexican lawyer, politician, and historian who held ministerial office and built a famed library of Mexican historical works.

José María Vigil

José María Vigil (1829–1909) was a Mexican liberal writer, journalist, and historian who directed the Biblioteca Nacional de México and led the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua from 1894.

Justin

Justin (Marcus Junianus Justinus) is the otherwise unknown Latin author of an Epitome of Pompeius Trogus' lost universal history, the main surviving source for the Hellenistic kingdoms.

Khvandamir

Khvandamir (خواندمیر), born Ghiyas al-Din ibn Humam al-Din al-Husayni, was a Persian historian of Herat who served Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal courts and wrote the universal history Habib al-Siyar.

Koryun

Koryun (Կորյուն, also Koriwn) was an Armenian vardapet and author, c. 380–450, whose Life of Mashtots is the earliest surviving biographical work in Armenian literature.

Lady Colin Campbell

Lady Colin Campbell (Georgia Ariana Ziadie, b. 1949), Jamaican-born royal biographer and socialite; title from 1974 marriage to Lord Colin Campbell; wrote Diana in Private (1992) and Meghan and Harry: The Real Story (2020).

Lee Israel

Lee Israel (Leonore Carol Israel, 1939-2014), American biographer of Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Estée Lauder who forged over 400 celebrity letters, was prosecuted by the FBI, and wrote the memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?.

Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey (Giles Lytton Strachey, 1880-1932), English biographer, critic, and founding Bloomsbury Group member; author of Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921), and Elizabeth and Essex (1928), pioneer of ironic modern biography.

Maciej Stryjkowski

Maciej Stryjkowski, also known as Motiejus Strijkovskis, was a Polish historian and poet whose 1582 Chronicle is the first printed history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Manning Clark

Manning Clark (Charles Manning Hope Clark, 1915–1991) was an Australian historian best known for the six-volume A History of Australia (1962–1987) and as a prominent public intellectual.

Manuel Rivera Cambas

Manuel Rivera Cambas (1840–1917) was a Mexican mining engineer and historian whose works include Los gobernantes de México and the illustrated México pintoresco, artístico y monumental.

Manuk Abeghian

Manuk Abeghian (Մանուկ Աբեղյան, 1865–1944) was an Armenian philologist and folklorist who led the 1921 reform of Armenian orthography and edited the national epic Daredevils of Sassoun.

Marc Fumaroli

Marc Fumaroli (1932–2020) was a French historian of rhetoric and 17th-century literature, a professor at the Collège de France and member of the Académie française.

Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo

Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856–1912) was a Spanish scholar, critic, and historian of ideas who won a literary chair at 21 and wrote the Historia de los heterodoxos españoles.

Marcin Bielski

Marcin Bielski, born Wolski (c. 1495–1575), was a Polish chronicler, poet, and soldier; his Kronika wszytkiego świata (1551) was the first universal history in Polish, continued by his son Joachim.

Mariano Picón Salas

Mariano Picón Salas (1901–1965) was a Venezuelan essayist, teacher, and diplomat, a major figure in the Latin American essay tradition who spent his formative years in Chile.