Authors Like D.T. Max

Richard Preston

American · The Hot Zone (1994), The Demon in the Freezer (2002), Crisis in the Red Zone (2019)

The Hot Zone grew out of a New Yorker piece and tells the story of an Ebola-related virus appearing in a monkey house in suburban Virginia in 1989, alongside the earlier African outbreaks, in prose built for maximum dread. The Demon in the Freezer is about smallpox and the two official stocks of it that still exist; Crisis in the Red Zone returns to Ebola and the West African epidemic of 2014. He has been criticised for the intensity of his descriptions, which specialists say outruns the clinical record.

Rebecca Skloot

American · The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

Cells taken without consent from a Black tobacco farmer dying of cervical cancer in 1951 became the first human cell line to grow indefinitely, underpinned decades of medical research and were sold worldwide, while her family could not afford health insurance and did not know they existed. Skloot spent ten years on it, largely alongside Lacks's daughter Deborah. HBO filmed it in 2017, and in 2023 the family reached a settlement with a biotechnology company over the use of the cells.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee

Indian-American · The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), The Gene (2016)

The Emperor of All Maladies is a history of cancer by a practising oncologist, moving between ancient descriptions, the brutal early decades of chemotherapy, research politics and his own patients; it won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2011 and Ken Burns filmed it for PBS in 2015. The Gene braids the science of heredity with mental illness in his own family, and The Song of the Cell (2022) does the same for cellular medicine.

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Oliver Sacks

British-American · Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), On the Move (2015)

Sacks was a London-born neurologist in New York who wrote case histories as literature: patients frozen for decades by encephalitis lethargica and briefly woken by L-DOPA, a man who could not recognise faces, a surgeon with Tourette's. Awakenings became a 1990 film with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Disability scholars have long objected that his patients arrive as marvels rather than as people with lives, a criticism he engaged with in later work. His memoir On the Move appeared months before his death in 2015.

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Carl Zimmer

American · She Has Her Mother's Laugh (2018), Life's Edge (2021)

She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a six-hundred-page history of what people have believed about inheritance, from royal bloodlines and the American eugenics movement through mosaicism, chimeras and the microbes we pass on, with Zimmer having his own genome sequenced along the way. He has written a science column for The New York Times for years and has covered viruses, evolution and the definition of life itself.

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Hermione Lee

British · Virginia Woolf (1996), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), Tom Stoppard (2020)

Lee has written the standard lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard, the last with her subject alive and cooperating. She is unusually explicit about the biographer's problem — her book Body Parts is a set of essays on what biography can and cannot know — and she taught at Oxford, where she was President of Wolfson College. The Fitzgerald biography is often named the finest literary life of recent decades.

Mary Karr

American · The Liars' Club (1995), Lit (2009), The Art of Memoir (2015)

Karr is a poet who effectively restarted the American memoir with The Liars' Club, about a Texas oil-refinery childhood and a mother whose behaviour the book neither excuses nor flattens. Lit covers her drinking, her recovery and her conversion, and includes the period of her relationship with David Foster Wallace. The Art of Memoir comes out of decades teaching at Syracuse and is the best short book on how to write about real people.

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John McPhee

American · Coming into the Country (1977), Annals of the Former World (1998), Draft No. 4 (2017)

McPhee has written for The New Yorker since 1965 and taught the same writing course at Princeton since 1975. He has built books out of oranges, a headmaster, the geology of a single interstate highway, and the men who move freight; Annals of the Former World won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Draft No. 4 explains his methods, including how he structures a piece and what he does when a subject stops talking.

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Larissa MacFarquhar

American · Strangers Drowning (2015)

MacFarquhar has written New Yorker profiles for decades and Strangers Drowning collects her reporting on people whose moral commitments are so extreme that their families suffer for them: a couple who adopt twenty children, a man who donates a kidney to a stranger, activists who give away nearly everything. She takes their arguments seriously rather than treating them as curiosities, and lets the philosophy sit alongside the domestic damage.

Ian Hamilton

British · In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988), Keepers of the Flame (1992)

Hamilton set out to write a biography of J. D. Salinger, who sued to stop him quoting from unpublished letters held in university libraries. The courts ruled against Hamilton in 1987, and the book had to be rewritten into an account of the attempt itself, complete with the author arguing with an imagined version of his subject. Keepers of the Flame is his history of literary estates and the widows, sons and executors who have burned, edited and blocked the record.