Current Biography contains profiles of people in the news and includes politicians, athletes, businessmen, and entertainers.
They are typically produced by consulting previously published press accounts and occasionally by conducting interviews with the subjects.
Wilson Company began publishing an annual sister volume, Current Biography International Yearbook, which focuses on people living outside the United States.
Articles in Current Biography are often used and listed as supplemental material in obituaries that appear in major media outlets.
From 1998 to 2011, the editor-in-chief was Clifford Thompson, winner of a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award for nonfiction for Love for Sale and Other Essays and author of Twin of Blackness: A Memoir as well as a novel, Signifying Nothing.