Neil Patrick Harris Books in Order

If you want the playful memoir first: Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography
If you want his middle grade series in order: The Magic Misfits → The Second Story → The Minor Third → The Fourth Suit
If you want the quickest taste of his fiction: The Magic Misfits → The Second Story
If you want the entertaining and hosting side: Both Sides of the Glass

Neil Patrick Harris was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on June 15, 1973, and grew up in Ruidoso. He started acting young, far from the usual Hollywood pipeline, and that offbeat beginning still fits the shape of his career. He has spent decades moving between television, stage work, hosting, memoir, and children's fiction.

A week at drama camp changed everything.

At a camp in Las Cruces, playwright Mark Medoff noticed him and cast him in Clara's Heart, his first film. Harris was still a teenager when that role brought him a Golden Globe nomination. Soon after, he became widely known as the teenage doctor on Doogie Howser, M.D., a part that made him famous very early and could easily have boxed him in.

It didn't. He kept zigzagging instead. Years later he found a huge second act on television as Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother, and he also took on darker, stranger material, including Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Onstage, he built a real Broadway track record with Cabaret, Assassins, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, winning the 2014 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for Hedwig.

He also became one of those rare awards-show hosts people actually remember. The Tony Awards fit him especially well, but he also hosted the Emmys and the 2015 Oscars. He can sing, tease, and keep a live room moving without looking too polished or too casual.

Another constant in his life is magic. Harris is not just someone who likes a card trick at a party. He served as president of the Academy of Magical Arts from 2011 to 2014, and that long-running fascination with illusion, puzzles, and performance shows up again and again in the way he works.

That showman streak runs through his books too.

His first book, Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography, came out in 2014 and swerved away from the usual celebrity memoir formula. Instead of telling his story in a straight line, he built it like a playful interactive adventure, sending readers through childhood memories, auditions, fame, relationships, and a few gloriously silly detours. The gimmick is real, but so is the candor, which is why the book tends to stick with people longer than a novelty premise might suggest.

Then he turned toward younger readers. When he announced The Magic Misfits, he said the series grew out of both his love of magic and his newer experience as a parent. Those books follow a group of kids in the New England town of Mineral Wells, mixing stage illusion, codes, local mysteries, and found family. Readers who click with them usually like the same things audiences have long liked about Harris on screen, quick timing, warmth under the joke, and the sense that being a little unusual might actually be your best tool.

He has kept writing in ways that match the rest of his career. In 2025, he and David Burtka published Both Sides of the Glass, a cocktail and mocktail book built for mixed groups of drinkers and nondrinkers. Off the page, he and Burtka married in 2014 and have twins, Gideon and Harper. That mix of family life, hospitality, humor, and performance feels like a pretty fair summary of the whole Neil Patrick Harris project.