The first edition of Essays in Biography was published in 1933. It was almost wholly composed from a number of essays and shorter fragments that Keynes had written over a considerable period. The earliest derived from passages he had finally decided to omit from the Economic Consequences of the Peace. A number of them, including those on Bonar Law, Asquith and Edwin Montagu, were short articles or notes that he wrote for The Nation and Athenœum. Others again, including ‘The Great Villiers Connection’, the two notes on Winston Churchill, that on Trotsky and that on Frank Ramsey as a philosopher, started as book reviews. Of the essays on economists, almost all began as obituary notices in the Economic Journal, where Keynes as editor felt a responsibility for serious appraisal of those who then represented the older generation. In the 1933 edition the one exception was his essay on Malthus. Keynes had been working on this in 1932. His correspondence about it survives among his papers and the printers set the 1933 edition from his manuscript.

The second printing, also of 1933, made a few minor corrections, but was otherwise unchanged. But through the last thirteen years of his life Keynes continued, both in the Economic Journal and elsewhere, to add to his writings of this character. In 1951, after Keynes's death, Rupert Hart-Davis reprinted the volume and, with the help of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, added three of the more important of Keynes's later writings—the essays on Stanley Jevons and Newton and his charming biography of Mary Marshall, to whom, in the first edition, Lives of Economists had been dedicated.