Some of my favorite nonfiction books to recommend to teenagers are collective biographies, which provide information about different people who were famous for different reasons.  They’re good for homework, good for browsing, and good for spontaneously discovering people you’ve never heard of before.

Some people were famous for being positive role models, or for being negative examples, or for ruling, exploring, inventing, and many other reasons.  If you’d like to browse the shelves of your local library for collective biographies, start by browsing through the 920s section.  But you’ll also find books containing different famous people throughout the nonfiction section—under true crime, or sports, or music, or literature, or science, or history, or … well, you get the idea.

Here are just a few of the collective biographies that you can find on our shelves.  Browse through these to read the true stories of people who were famous and infamous for lots of different reasons!

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott

Biographies of the New World: Leif Eriksson, Henry Hudson, Charles Darwin, and More edited by Michael Anderson

Can I See Your ID?  True Stories of False Identities by Chris Barton

101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History edited by Michele Bollinger and Dao X. Tran

How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous by Georgia Bragg

How They Choked: Failures, Flops and Flaws of the Awfully Famous by Georgia Bragg

Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists by Kerrie Logan Hollihan

The Dark Game: True Spy Stories From Invisible Ink to CIA Moles by Paul B Janeczko

“Scribbling Women”: True Tales From Astonishing Lives by Marthe Jocelyn

Goners: The Final Hours of the Notable and Notorious by Gordon Kerr

Extraordinary African-American Poets by Therese Neis

Shout, Sister, Shout!  Ten Girl Singers Who Shaped a Century by Roxanne Orgill

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas by Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks

The Big Book of Dummies, Rebels, and Other Geniuses by Jean-Bernard Pouy

Hidden Like Anne Frank: Fourteen True Stories of Survival by Marcel Prins and Peter Henk Steenhuis

Legends, Icons & Rebels: Music That Changed the World by Robbie Robertson

Girls Rebel!  Amazing Tales of Women Who Broke the Mold by Heather E. Schwartz

Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone

Open the Unusual Door: True Life Stories of Challenge, Adventure, Achievement, and Success by Black Americans edited and with an introduction by Barbara Summers

Bad Girls: Sirens, Jezebels, Murderesses, Thieves, and Other Female Villains by Jane Yolen and Heidi E.Y. Stemple