--- title: Every Living Thing Won the 2025 Pulitzer for Biography With Two Rivals Who Tried to Name All Life on Earth description: "Jason Roberts's Every Living Thing won the 2025 Pulitzer for Biography: Linnaeus, Buffon and the race to name all life. The writer and the book." author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-04T12:02:37.652Z updated: 2026-11-04T12:02:37.676Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/every-living-thing-pulitzer-2025 image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-6966593.webp categories: Author Journeys content_type: Profile region: Americas publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Jason Roberts description: "Jason Roberts is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Northern California. His book Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His earlier book, A Sense of the World, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award." jobTitle: Writer and author sameAs: - https://www.pulitzer.org/node/22866 --- You probably picture science as a steady march of discovery, each generation building on the last. Jason Roberts's *Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life* shows you a contest. In the 18th century, two men born in the same year set out to identify and describe every living thing on Earth. They never met, they disagreed about almost everything and history ended up crowning the one who got more of it wrong. ### Book: Every Living Thing *The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life* By Jason Roberts Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Jason Roberts follows Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, two 18th-century rivals who set out to identify every living thing on Earth, and shows how their opposing views of nature still shape science today. [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/every-living-thing/jason-roberts/9781529400489) The book won the [2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography](https://www.pulitzer.org/node/22866). The Pulitzer board called it 'a beautifully written double biography' of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, contemporaries whose work still shapes how you understand the natural world. Random House published it in 2024, and The Economist named it one of its books of the year. ## A Swedish doctor with tidy boxes and a French count with none Linnaeus was a pious Swedish doctor with a showman's flair, and he believed life belonged in neat, fixed categories. Buffon was an aristocratic polymath who ran the King of France's garden in Paris, and he saw life as constant, messy change. Both began by assuming the planet held only a few thousand species, about as many as might fit on Noah's Ark. Both were overwhelmed by what they found. Linnaeus gave you words you still use every day: mammal, primate and *Homo sapiens*. He also denied that species change and spread racist pseudoscience about human beings. Buffon sketched early versions of evolution and genetics, warned of a changing climate and spoke out against prejudice. In their lifetimes Buffon looked like the winner. After their deaths, the reputations reversed. ## Apostles sent to the ends of the Earth The 'deadly' in the subtitle is literal. Linnaeus sent young followers he called his apostles around the world to collect specimens, and only about half of them came home alive. Roberts follows them through fevers, hardship and long voyages, and these chapters read like adventure stories. The book then carries the rivalry forward through three centuries, as the two men's successors fought over the new science that became biology. By the final chapters you see how the choices made by two 18th-century naturalists still shape the names in every field guide and natural history museum, and the way science thinks about race. ## A storyteller who spent more than a decade on two lives Roberts writes fiction and nonfiction and lives in Northern California. His earlier book, *A Sense of the World*, told the life of James Holman, a blind 19th-century Englishman who travelled further than anyone of his era, and it was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for McSweeney's and The Believer, won the Van Zorn Prize for fiction founded by Michael Chabon and edited the bestselling *642 Things to Write About* series. He spent more than ten years researching *Every Living Thing*. The scholarship stays under the surface: the book reads with the pace of a novel, full of vanity, feuds and odd details from the salons and gardens of the Enlightenment. ![The gold Pulitzer Prize medal, showing Benjamin Franklin in profile with the words Honoris Causa.](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pulitzer-medal-obverse-svg.webp) *Photo: Medal design by Daniel Chester French. Illustration: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 public domain* ## Two finalists who also wrote about famous lives The 2025 shortlist held two other biographies. David Greenberg reached the final three with *John Lewis: A Life*, on the civil rights leader and congressman, and Amy Reading with *The World She Edited*, the story of Katharine S. White, the editor who shaped The New Yorker's fiction for decades. ## A year later the prize went to two sisters in Hamilton's shadow The 2026 Pulitzer for Biography went to Amanda Vaill for *Pride and Pleasure*, a double portrait of Angelica and Eliza Schuyler. Rich Books Magazine covers it in its daily series on the 2026 winners: [Pride and Pleasure Won the 2026 Pulitzer for Biography by Bringing the Schuyler Sisters Out of Hamilton's Shadow](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/pride-and-pleasure-pulitzer-2026). Two years running, the prize has gone to a pair of 18th-century lives told side by side. ## What stays with you after the last chapter You will never read a Latin name on a museum label the same way again. Behind every *Homo sapiens* and *Felis catus* sits a quarrel between two very different men, and *Every Living Thing* leaves you wondering how much of what you take as settled science began as one person's taste for tidy boxes. **Read it if** you love narrative science writing, you enjoy rivalries and the history of ideas, or you want a Pulitzer winner that reads like an expedition. ### Buy the book [Every Living Thing on Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/every-living-thing/jason-roberts/9781529400489) / [Every Living Thing on Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/9781984855206) ### Also in this piece A Sense of the World on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/a+sense+of+the+world+jason+roberts) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/a+sense+of+the+world+jason+roberts) John Lewis: A Life on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/john+lewis+a+life+greenberg) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/john+lewis+a+life+greenberg) The World She Edited on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/the+world+she+edited) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/the+world+she+edited) **About Jason Roberts** Writer and author Jason Roberts is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Northern California. His book Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His earlier book, A Sense of the World, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. *Next in the series: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography.*