Historical Personages to Read About

The prompt at LongAndShortReviews asked for a "favorite historical personage to read about." 

Do I have to pick just one?

I like diaries, memoirs, and biographies. I particularly like reading the biographies other people wrote about the authors of good diaries and memoirs. 

I remember going through a real Helen Keller "reading phase" in middle school just because so many editions of her first book, plus other people's books about her and Anne Sullivan, came out around that time. Then there were Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Anne Frank, C.S. Lewis, Sylvia Plath, and by that time I was in college and didn't schedule enough free reading time to devour everything by and about a particular writer any more. I still enjoy comparing what people wrote about their own inward experience and what other people wrote about their more outward lives, though. 

There are people who wrote a great deal about their work and wrote very little about their personal lives. I like that about them. They knew that their thoughts on art or science or politics were more valuable to humankind than their personal lives were. Books by Martin Luther or John James Audubon or Thomas Jefferson are very different from books about them. Nevertheless, when somebody like Albert Einstein wrote a book that was all about mathematics, phsyics, and politics with never a chapter about the writer as an individual, that also was a statement about the writer as an individual. 

At the moment, while and because I've been reading about butterflies, I'm feeling interested in the old naturalists like Linnaeus; this week I've found James Duncan's Foreign Butterflies, and I'd be interested in reading more about him. 

But, "favorite"? My favorites come and go depending largely on what I've found about them. The historical personage I admire most is Jesus of Nazareth. No one else comes close. Many people have, however, had interesting lives, and my favorite this week may be Alexander, because I have a good book about him for sale. Next week it might be Harriet Tubman, or Lillian Moller Gilbreth, or my sense of "favorite" might go all the way back to Helen Keller.