Biography
An Annotated Bibliography
To M. Thomas Inge
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: Biographers on Biography
Chapter 2: Historical and Critical Studies
General Studies
Greco-Roman Biography
Latin/Medieval Biography
English Biography Before 1700
Eighteenth Century
Nineteenth Century
Chapter 3: Johnson and Boswell
Chapter 4: Leon Edel
By Edel
About Edel
Chapter 5: Psychobiography
Chapter 6: Feminist Biography
Chapter 7: Innovation in Biography
Chapter 8: Biography in Fiction
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
The growing public fascination with biography and the increasing number of academic studies of the genre seem to have coincided in the last two decades. Scholars from many different disciplines have been attracted to biography as a way of dealing with social, political, cultural, and psychological issues and of reaching an audience of readers far larger than the one available to them in the academy. At the same time, biography itself has attracted much attention, and several journals have devoted issues to the genre and have organized their contents around biographical approaches. Several book-length collections of articles by biographers have also appeared.
This is the first bibliography to organize and to annotate the literature on biography. All the annotated items are in English and have been published in the United States. England and the United States have the richest biographical traditions, though an annotated bibliography of biography in France would produce a substantial number of items, and certain French writers—most notably Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve—have had a strong influence on Anglo-American biography.
I have tried to be objective in my annotations, giving the gist of an article or book in 75 to 125 words. I have not tried to rank items in terms of quality, usually leaving most judgments of that kind to readers. A certain amount of repetition is unavoidable in a work of this size, but it is my hope that the same points formulated in different ways will kindle the broadest possible thinking about biography. Sometimes it is necessary to read the same point put six different ways before its contours and complexities are fully revealed. The repetitions also convey a sense of tradition, of the universe, so to speak, in which biographical thinking has taken place. When a new idea, method, or technique is introduced, it can be appreciated all the more because of a sense of what has gone before it.
In selecting items for annotation I have tried to include as many as possible while excluding those items that seem to concern only specialists. I have not included book reviews of biographies, except in those unusual cases where the reviewer raises important issues about biography itself. A vast number of book reviews of biographies appear each year, and I have not made a systematic attempt to locate the minute number contributing to an understanding of the genre.
Chapter 1 annotates biographers’ comments on biography, including the brief statements sometimes made at the beginning of biographies. The annotations of these statements are meant to be no more than a sampling; doubtless, readers will find other examples, but I think my specimens are fairly representative. Prefatory statements about biography itself are relatively rare in published biographies and usually result from the biographer’s awareness of having departed from conventions, from a desire to quarrel with those conventions, or from the need to explain first principles because the biographer is uneasy with the form or believes a new method is being advanced.
As a biographer, I have become acutely conscious of the way biographers begin their books. Most often, biographies begin as a story, plunging the reader into the events of an individual’s life, or as a history, giving a birth date, ancestry, and other background information. As story or history, such biographies express confidence in the genre; it is taken for granted. The biographer may not want to call attention to the mechanics of narrative and the details of research because it is assumed that what the reader wants is an entertaining, lively account resembling a novel. Most readers come to biography for the subject, not for the biographer, and it is a brave biographer indeed who insists, like Norman Mailer, that he or she is a vital part of the story.
Yet when biographers write about biography, when their essays are published in collections about the genre, they often become personal and confess, in Paul Murray Kendall’s words, that in every biography there is an autobiography. Like autobiography, biography is dominated by storytelling conventions, and it is therefore difficult to become analytical, to stop the narrative and engage in theory and in speculation, unless the theory and speculation are somehow integrated in the narrator’s voice throughout the biography—as they are, for example, in James Gindin’s The English Climate: An Excursion into a Biography of John Galsworthy (1979). Most readers, at any rate, seem to resent the intrusive, animadverting biographer (to paraphrase James Boswell’s favorite term).
Those biographers who do address the nature of biography fall roughly into two categories: One assumes that his or her experience is typical and feels comfortable in generalizing about certain aspects of biography; the other believes biography is such a personal enterprise that the biographer can speak only about his or her experience. As Elinor Langer puts it, every biography generates its own theory.
Chapter 2 annotates historical and critical studies of biography, most of which have been produced by scholars since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Roger North, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson provided earlier critical definitions of biography, but it was not until after Boswell’s time that a few critics began to consider it a genre deserving separate study. Scholars have begun to rectify the dearth of writing about biography that Leon Edel has lamented. Dennis W. Petrie’s study of contemporary biographers, noting how they organize narrative, point of view, and documentation, stands virtually by itself. Biography is seldom taught as an art in the academy, where the nonfiction focus is upon autobiography. At best, biography is used as an adjunct to studies of writers or of historical periods. For many scholars, it cannot be otherwise because they do not believe there is a body of first-rate biography comparable to that found in autobiography, fiction, drama, and poetry. Chapter 2, however, demonstrates that there is a body of work in biography that can be called “great,” and that at the very least biography should be recognized as an area for legitimate and worthwhile study. It remains true that in comparison with the novel and other genres, biography has received scant attention.1
Chapter 3 annotates a portion of the enormous literature on Johnson and Boswell. I have tried to produce a representative selection of those articles and books frequently cited and of the most recent work. One indication of the greatness of Johnson and Boswell is the amount of fresh critical comment they can still inspire. In part, that may be because of the extremes of biographical form that they encompass. Johnson is the master of the biographical essay; no writer has surpassed his ability to summarize a life in such brief compass and reveal its essence. Boswell is the virtuoso of the long form, believing that only in great length can he capture the dimensions of a great life. Both biographers have had their detractors—one for his sloppiness with details, the other for his inordinate love of them. It is doubtful that every word of Boswell’s biography can be successfully defended, but he was right in supposing that the volume of words turned Johnson into a presence more memorable than any that had heretofore appeared in a biography.
Both kinds of biography are needed, for as Lytton Strachey, the modern-day master of the short form, suggested, if the biographer cannot grasp his subject in a word, he may as well be elaborate. If certain readers have been impatient with Boswell’s length, however, it is not surprising that contemporary biographers are so often chastised for producing encyclopedic lives. Perhaps contemporary biographers err in not instilling a love of biography itself, the drama of it, a sense of the biographer snagging every elusive detail, which Boswell, who knew that how one serves the meal is as important as its ingredients, cunningly conveys. Boswell understood how to whet an appetite.
Chapter 4 annotates works by and about Leon Edel. I have selected Edel as a case study because, more than any other contemporary biographer, he deserves comparison with Johnson and Boswell. Like Johnson, he has been an influential theorist of biography. Like Boswell, he has produced a work that has changed the features of biography. Other biographers have written an occasional essay, even a book, on the genre, but no one has rivaled Edel in persistently pursuing a poetics of biography. He has his critics, but he has been generally acknowledged as producing one of the great biographies of the twentieth century. Anyone interested in biography must confront his work and study his revisions of the Henry James biography from five volumes to two volumes to one volume. He has advocated and refined the use of certain psychoanalytical principles and has practiced them with uncommon sophistication.
Most important, Edel’s thinking has evolved, and he has called attention to the changes in his approach. Though he is best known for his five-volume life of James, it should be mentioned that he is also a master of the short form and has probably been influenced as much by Strachey as by Sigmund Freud. As he wrote to me, he believes in a “becoming brevity … though my five volumes might seem a contradiction. I could demonstrate they are also brief.”2 I have not annotated all Edel’s books and articles but have preferred instead to concentrate on the James biography as a case study not only of Edel but also of reviewers’ and critics’ perceptions of biography.
Chapter 5 annotates the burgeoning field of psychobiography, a term that came into common use shortly after the publication of Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History in 1958. The term had been used much earlier, dating back to Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910, but Erikson’s elegant employment of both psychoanalysis and historical method stimulated a whole generation of biographies modeled after his. Still considered rather dubious by many historians and biographers, psychohistory has nevertheless had an enormous impact on the writing of biography, since virtually no biographer can avoid dealing with a subject’s psychology, whether or not psychoanalytical principles are adopted. It is difficult, for example, not to explore the subject’s unconscious behavior; since the mid-nineteenth century, much literature has been produced positing the unconscious as a powerful way of explaining why human beings are not fully in control of their actions and why their actions often contradict their stated intentions. Yet, the claim that psychobiography is a new science, that it has established itself as a new genre, seems extravagant, for there is no general agreement on principles or practice, though in recent years psychobiographers have made improvements in methodology based on acute self-criticism.
In a few cases, I have included biographers (Frederick Karl is a good example) who do not rely on psychoanalytic principles but who nevertheless have a definite psychological method. In most cases, I have not included psychobiographical studies of individuals unless the book or article explicitly addresses the general principles, problems, and practice of psychobiography or has been distinguished as a classic or groundbreaking work by psychobiographers.3
Chapter 6 annotates the recent literature on feminist biography. I have included only those books and articles that explicitly explore feminism and gender as constituting a new way of researching and writing biography. As several feminist biographers observe, the first phase of feminist biography concentrated on finding those female subjects who had been overlooked and denigrated by mainstream male (and sometimes female) biographers. The difficulty with this first phase was that certain feminists wanted to be programmatic: dictating to each other which figures were suitable (feminist enough) for biographical study. This approach made several feminists uncomfortable, particularly the historians, who did not care for this cheerleading type of biography that would skew the complexity of the past and suggest that there were only certain approved ways of being a feminist.
The second phase has shifted focus to the feminist biographer, to her confrontation with her subject and her struggle to find a personal—and often a first-person—point of view, replacing the muted narrative voice of male-dominated biography. In the hands of a first-rate writer such as Langer, this new feminist biography is exciting because it fulfills the biographer’s wish to present both sides of the story: the autobiography and the biography. Langer’s experience of rejection at an academic conference suggests that the prejudice against the first person in academic writing is deeply ingrained. It also suggests how difficult it will be to engage in nontraditional forms of biographical narrative, especially since recent critical theory has been dominated by attacks on the concept of authorship—an issue that several feminist biographers annotated in this chapter address.4
Chapter 7 annotates several more attempts at innovation in biography. Almost always, the innovation has something to do with interrupting the flow of the narrative. Peter Ackroyd, for example, takes the opportunity in Dickens (1990) to conduct dialogues with his subject and to present dialogues between Charles Dickens and Ackroyd’s previous biographical subjects. Some readers find the insertions of these dialogues pretentious and irritating; others may interpret them as Ackroyd’s effort to integrate his work as a biographer and novelist from one book to the next and to make readers more conscious of biographical narrative and how the biographer creates it. An earlier experiment, A. J. A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1940), is a genial, engaging search for an elusive author, in which the biographer takes his readers into his confidence, explaining his difficulties, his good and bad luck, and the loose ends of his narrative. It is often cited as a classic, although recently A. O. J. Cockshut has faulted Symons for not coming to more of a closure and for using the theme of the quest to compensate for failing to understand his subject. Andrew Field tries to make a virtue out of necessity in structuring his biography as a dialogue between himself and an increasingly wary Vladimir Nabokov, so that the reader is apprised of the contest between the biographer and the subject—a theme that usually surfaces only in novels about biographers. Similarly, Ian Hamilton and Mark Harris, faced with reluctant and hostile living subjects, decide to cast their narratives in the manner of The Quest for Corvo, showing readers how the biographer researches a subject and often finds himself cut off from the evidence. Richard Holmes, however, maintains a conventional narrative in his biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge but uses footnotes as asides, as a third point of view mediating between the subject and the biographer. Peter Stephen Jungk does something more radical in appending to the narrative of each chapter an italicized passage reflecting the biographer’s present, in which he visits places and people and seeks to re-create the subject’s past while also measuring the distance between himself and his subject. Jean-Paul Sartre, with the savoir faire of a great writer, feels free to discourse on the mental life of Gustave Flaubert, speaking to the great one mind-to-mind, so to speak, as though language can conjure the reality of a past inner life even where the evidence is meager.
By the standards of modernist experimentation in fiction, innovation in biography seems rather timid. Perhaps biography has, by and large, attracted writers less talented and less adventurous than those writing novels. Yet Virginia Woolf’s timidity in writing the life of her friend, Roger Fry, suggests that it is the experience of dealing with real people that makes biography a more conservative form than the novel. Woolf was concerned about hurting Fry’s friends, about doing him justice, and about getting her facts straight and could not free herself for the inventive flights of fantasy that characterize her fictional biography, Orlando: A Biography (1960), which is annotated in chapter 8. Biographers must worry about invading peoples’ privacy, about getting permission from subjects or their estates to reproduce unpublished material, and in general about their subject’s reputation in ways that do not concern novelists. In short, biographers almost never tell the whole truth—for legal, moral, ethical, and political reasons. Innovation is possible in biography, but it proceeds slowly. When there have been two or three or a dozen biographies of the same subject, certain biographers begin to experiment with their form, knowing that the basic facts are now in the public domain.
Chapter 8 annotates that small group of fictional works that focus on biography and the biographer. Almost all of them explore the relationship between biographer and subject, the very thing most biographers do not discuss—except for a few in their fugitive prefaces. The novels and stories seem written to prove that indeed in every biography there lurks an autobiography. Julian Barnes’s novel is a meditation on literary biography and on why biographers seem obsessed with their subjects. A. S. Byatt casts her novel into the form of a detective story with a couple, male and female lovers/biographers in the present, questing after the true relationship of a pair of male and female poets/lovers in the Victorian past. Amanda Cross (the feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun) employs her female detective as a feminist biographer simultaneously uncovering her subject’s past and rectifying the skewed male literary canon. Another slant is provided by Alison Lurie, who charts the growth of a feminist biographer in terms of the phases discussed by several feminist biographers in chapter 6.
Representations of the biographer in fiction may represent the novelist’s revenge on the biographer, as in William Golding’s portrait of the biographer as snoop and garbage picker, but Golding also shows that writers have in curious ways collaborated with their academic “biografiends”—as James Joyce called them. Similarly, Henry James, though attracted to biographical speculation himself, wrote stories that admonished biographers and questioned the morality of revealing the writer’s private life. Two of the most amusing parodies of literary biography are Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), which twits both Boswell and Edel, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s mock biography of a Romantic poet, written so much like what one would expect in such a biography that one is tempted to search for Andrew Marbot in literary reference works to make absolutely sure he did not exist. Hildesheimer’s point, surely, is that biographies, like all other narratives, are engines of words. They drive readers forward and convince them of a reality that is largely a writer’s construct. It is curious that philosophical questions about biography should be raised outside the form itself by novelists and by biographers’ later meditations on their practice. Students and writers of biography might examine this small body of fiction as a way of thinking about how the narrator of a biography should make his or her voice not merely the conduit of fact but also the fullest expression of another’s life.
The List of Biographical Subjects indexes all the biographical subjects mentioned in the annotated entries. The general index lists the authors annotated in the bibliography, and can also serve other purposes, particularly if the reader has a more narrow assignment. For example, a student of nineteenth century biography may turn to the Contents page and find a section on the nineteenth century, but the index should also be checked for references to nineteenth century biography in the General Studies section of chapter 2 and in some of the other chapters. Similarly, a student of Strachey, for example, will find most references to him in the General Studies section of chapter 2, but the index also lists references to him in other chapters. The same is true for other subjects such as feminist biography, psychobiography, authorized biography, and so forth.
Perhaps a word should be said about how the form of this bibliography evolved, for a capsule history might suggest other ways of looking at biography that this work does not encompass. My original plan was to have a section of case studies of important biographical figures—for example, Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë, and Marilyn Monroe—a constellation of literary, historical, political, and popular culture figures about whom several biographies have been written. The annotations of these figures would give readers insights into how the same subject was treated differently by biographers. Yet I dropped this section for two reasons. First, it would be cumbersome, within the scope of this bibliography, to handle the quantity and quality of the material on the subjects I chose and there was no compelling rationale for picking some figures but not others. Second, I found that the St. James Guide to Biography (1991) had already accomplished part of my purpose in its critical articles on biographies of noteworthy figures.
I also planned separate sections on political biography, military biography, biographies of artists, and so forth. Yet I discovered that there is almost no literature on these subjects. Most of the criticism is about literary biography. Historians and scholars in other disciplines have been virtually silent on biography as a form of knowledge. Feminist historians show promise of breaking this silence, as have the psychohistorians. Without their prodding, most of the historical profession and the other disciplines would feel perfectly comfortable in ignoring biography. I suspect that it is because biography is quirky, idiosyncratic, personal, and hard to discuss in terms of the cold, neutral language of the social sciences. Biographers have claimed to be objective, but biography has been regarded by the disciplines as inherently subjective, and rightly so. Feminist historians have challenged the codes of objectivity, which have forced scholars to use the disembodied voice and the characterless comment. Feminist historians writing biography have found that it is not only history, it is art, and it must be shaped by a distinctive sensibility. No wonder, then, that the biographers called to comment on the genre have usually been literary biographers; biographers who have been praised for their style (such as Barbara Tuchman); or biographers who, like Justin Kaplan, have aspired to make the form of biography literary whether or not it concerns a literary subject.
ENDNOTES
1. Think for a moment what it would mean for scholars, especially English professors, to engage in sustained studies of biographies. With a novel, the academic critic considers only the work itself and perhaps the published critical and biographical literature pertaining to the author. With a biography, a scholar/critic needs to investigate both the primary and secondary sources on the subject. If one is a scholar of contemporary biography and is evaluating the field—studying the major biographical works on Hemingway, Faulkner, Frost, and several others that have appeared in recent years—how would one go about mastering and evaluating the enormous volume of data presented by the biographer? To discuss biography as an art, the scholar should attend not only to the narrative but to the raw materials (including recorded interviews) out of which the biography was crafted. How many scholars may have thought of tackling the field of biography and then withdrawn from it not knowing how to encompass it? Even worse, a thorough scholar of biography could not limit the field to literary biography, for surely recent biographies of Truman, Roosevelt, Nixon and other political and social figures are also a part of the “field.” Feminist historians’ concern with biography as a form may advance the study of biography as a genre, especially since many of them openly discuss how they select and interpret their sources. I have found male biographers, as a group, to be much more reticent. Biographers have recently begun to deposit their papers in university archives, yet these materials have been ignored. Perhaps in the next generation or two, scholars will begin to examine these papers—as Donald Sheehy does in his study of Lawrance Thompson (annotated in chapter 2).
2. Leon Edel to Carl Rollyson, August 26, 1991.
3. This last point should be emphasized. Psychohistory and psychobiography are still viewed with much skepticism by many historians. In Shrinking History, David E. Stannard reports that when he discussed the Georges’ psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson with Arthur Link, the distinguished historian and author of the definitive biography of Wilson, Link observed that he knew of no historian who took the Georges’ book seriously. Yet the Georges have been repeatedly acclaimed in psychohistorical studies.
4. Certain feminists reject biography altogether—insofar as they view it as celebrating heroic individuals and thereby denigrating the achievements of masses of women. To lionize an individual, a “great woman,” is to put out of reach for most women a sense of “empowerment”—to use the current cant. To these feminists, the focus should be on groups of women who have worked for change and on the underprivileged and the underclass. Virtually all biographies of “great women” are disappointing to this brand of feminist because the subject is shown to have been less than perfect, to have compromised principles, and even to have ambivalent feelings about feminism itself. These issues are most effectively dealt with in The Challenge of Feminist Biography.
Chapter 1
BIOGRAPHERS ON BIOGRAPHY
Aaron, Daniel, ed. Studies in Biography. Harvard English Studies 8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Essays by four biographers and seven scholars on the biographer’s concept of a “core personality,” the limitations of psychological approaches to biography, how the act of writing determines biographical interpretation, the nature of authorized biographies, the conventions of eighteenth and nineteenth century biography, Romanticism and biography, the difficulties of researching obscure lives, and the variety of sources that biographers use. Biographical subjects include Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Henry James, Walt Whitman, W. H. Auden, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Alice James, and Thomas Shepard. Biographers include Justin Kaplan, Edward Mendelson, John Clive, and Jean Strouse.
Ackerman, Robert. J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
In his introduction, “Frazer and Intellectual Biography,” Ackerman argues that although Frazer is no longer regarded as an important anthropologist and that his “approach to religion is virtually meaningless in terms of contemporary practice,” his influence on writers has been extraordinary. Frazer, he suggests, has provided them with important metaphors, and his impact on a general audience has been significant in shaping the “modern spirit.” This kind of intellectual biography becomes, in effect, “an essay in rehabilitation,” providing a rationale for the study of a figure otherwise rejected by the strict canons of modern academic scholarship.
Alexander, Paul. “Holy Secrets.” The Nation, March 23, 1992, 385–387.
Alexander, a biographer of Sylvia Plath, details his own experience with her psychiatrist and discusses the ethical issues concerning the release of psychiatric evidence. He rehearses the controversy over Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of the poet Anne Sexton (which used recordings of Sexton’s psychiatric sessions). Alexander argues for a case by case evaluation of the use of psychiatric evidence, carefully noting that both he and Middlebrook took into account their subjects’ attitudes toward revealing such information as well as the psychiatrists’ reasons for relinquishing confidentiality.
Atlas, James. “Choosing a Life.” The New York Times Book Review, January 13, 1991, 1, 22–23.
Citing numerous examples (including his own biography of Delmore Schwartz), Atlas supports the view that the best biographies are founded on “the biographer’s unconsciously realized opportunity for self-expression.” Rather than liking the subject, the biographer must be “possessed,” fully committed to the strenuous task of discovering and interpreting the evidence. Many biographies fail when the biographer, out of sympathy with the subject, turns against the biographical enterprise, either abandoning the form or attacking the subject.
Bair, Deirdre. “The ‘How-To’ Biography.” In Biographers at Work, edited by James Walter and Raija Nugent. Nathan, Queensland, Australia: Institute for Modern Biography, 1984.
A useful discussion of different types of biography: authorized (controlled by the subject, the subject’s heirs, or the subject’s estate), designated (similar to the authorized biography, except that “no authority over the final published manuscript” is exercised), independent (written without the sanction of the subject or of the heirs and the estate), and bowdlerized (a miscellaneous, tendentious collection of data sometimes found in popular biographies). Bair also offers good advice on copyright issues and insight into her biographical work on living figures.
__________. “Reflections on Life: ‘Working’ with Simone De Beauvoir.” Pequod 14, (1987): 43–53.
“Working” is what de Beauvoir called her sessions with her biographer Bair, which gradually became more intense—almost a collaboration between them, with Bair at one point suggesting that de Beauvoir help her write a new kind of biography, one that inserted the subject’s comments in the biographer’s narrative. De Beauvoir died before this scheme could be essayed. Never exactly intimates (de Beauvoir showed little interest in the biographer’s personal life), they nevertheless became joined in arguing (often disagreeing) about the significance of de Beauvoir’s biography.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977.
Rejects the radical split between literary biography and literary criticism begun in the 1930’s and 1940’s. No other form of biography separates the man from his work: “[O]nly with writers was it assumed that there should be a division of labor,” with the biographer enjoined to “stay clear of critical discussion of the writer’s works” and the critic to “tiptoe around biography and history.… If we are to find our way into the inner life of a great writer, we must heal this split between ‘biography’ and ‘criticism,’ and remember that a very large part of the ‘inner life’ of a writer—what deeply preoccupied him, and made him a great writer—was his concern and effort, his hope and fear, in what he wrote.”
Berthoud, Roger. The Life of Henry Moore. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987.
In his prelude, Berthoud describes the process of researching his biography of the sculptor during Moore’s last days, the countless interviews, Moore’s efforts to be helpful and yet to remain aloof from the biographical query. Berthoud remarks on the “strange sensation” of writing on the life of a living subject while knowing that the subject is “unlikely to be in a fit state to read the end product, and might well not survive to see its publication, as indeed he did not.” Consequently, the biographer develops a “double relationship” with the subject, sociable and friendly, and yet “clinical and critical.”
Blotner, Joseph. “On Having Known One’s Subject.” In Leon Edel and Literary Art, edited by Lyall H. Powers. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988.
Blotner knew his subject, William Faulkner, for the last seven years of Faulkner’s life. This relationship provided Blotner with enormous advantages, since he had a “visual memory” of his subject, of how he comported himself and spoke on different occasions. With the sanction of Faulkner’s family, Blotner could approach sources in full confidence and gain their trust. Yet he admits that authorized biographers are sometimes shunned because it is assumed they are writing to please the subject’s family. Friendship with Faulkner’s family did prevent Blotner from asking certain intimate questions that a later biographer thought to ask. An unusually thoughtful essay about the way the biographer becomes implicated in his subject and how he or she struggles—not always successfully to attain a proper sense of proportion and discrimination.
Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
At the beginning of his biography, Boswell establishes his method. Quoting liberally from Johnson’s writing on biography, Boswell aims to allow his subject to speak in his own words rather than “melting down my materials.” Boswell’s offers a life, “not a panegyrick,” revealing Johnson in his conversation as a great, but not perfect, man. Boswell’s portrait is composed of innumerable details (“minute particulars”)—a necessity he believed would reveal human character, which Plutarch (whom Boswell quotes) recognized when he said that a short saying or jest often expressed another’s virtues and vices better than anything else. First published in 1791.
Bowen, Catherine Drinker. Adventures of a Biographer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959.
A lively account of the research, the travels, and the interviews Bowen conducted for her biographies of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein, Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr., John Adams, and Sir Edward Coke. Bowen is excellent in evoking how a biographer researches a subject. Her own method is from “the outside in,” reading generally in the period of her subject before dealing with the specific events of the subject’s life. See especially the chapter entitled “On Interviewing and Evidence: Boston and Holmes.”
__________. Biography: The Craft and the Calling. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.
A sensible, incisive discussion of how biographies are plotted and shaped, how biographers create opening and concluding scenes, the biographer’s relationship with the subject, the use of sources and other quoted material, and “techniques of revealing the hero’s thought.” Bowen draws on her biographical research and shrewdly uses examples from other biographers to demonstrate how they handled research problems and matters of style and documentation. She explains not only her successes but also her false starts and other mistakes that required considerable rewriting. Not a scholar, she presents the case for popular biography and the biographer’s need to entertain as well as inform.
Bradford, Gamaliel. American Portraits. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922.
In his preface, Bradford considers the difficulties in dealing with contemporaries and figures from the recent past. There are prejudices and “secondary associations” to overcome, the inclination to “please somebody, or to spare somebody, or to annoy somebody.” Even great writers such as Sainte-Beuve have been unjust with their contemporaries. Bradford has also had to contend with the appearance of new material that makes him wonder whether his attempt to incorporate it after writing his portrait is sufficient or whether with such information beforehand his portrait might have been shaped differently. Most difficult is evaluating reports of the subject, which are always flawed: The “turn of a sentence may alter the light on a man’s soul! Of such materials is biography made.”
__________. “The Art of Biography.” The Saturday Review of Literature 1, May 23, 1925, 769–770.
Reviews the major issues and concerns for biographers: maintaining a critical attitude toward sources (including the subject’s self-confessions), shaping facts into a coherent, literary style, the scrupulous control of anecdotes that often clutter a biographical narrative and make it diffuse, and an overall sense of balance, weighing the demands of a chronological account with the structure of the work as a whole. The primary goal of the biographer is to render character; all other elements of the work must be subordinated to this rendering of essential personality traits.
__________. Bare Souls. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924.
Psychographies of Voltaire, Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, William Cowper, Charles Lamb, John Keats, Gustave Flaubert, and Edward FitzGerald. In “A Clue to the Labyrinth of Souls,” Bradford discusses the difficulty of interpreting the inner selves of his subjects, how he looks for telling details in “minor, insignificant actions,” sifts through the reports of others, and analyzes his subject’s writing (published works, diaries, and letters) in order to dissect and penetrate the core of the self. Some kinds of evidence are better than others. Bradford favors diaries and letters, which may be more spontaneous than retrospective works such as autobiographies and memoirs. The “naturalist of souls” must learn to distinguish between the subject’s poses and determine which evidence is most self-revealing.
__________. Biography and the Human Heart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932.
A collection of biographical studies of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Walpole, and others. In his first and last chapters, Bradford speculates on the “universal interest in biography,” noting the “desire to get out of ourselves and into the lives of others” and the need for readers to understand their own lives by assimilating the knowledge obtainable from biography. On the one hand, biography reminds readers of what they share with great subjects, the themes of love, ambition, and money that figure in most lives. On the other hand, biography is “the study of difference,” the effort to understand lives that are quite beyond the ordinary. Modern biography must have a critical focus (even an iconoclastic one) if it is to acquire knowledge and be educational.
__________. The Journal of Gamaliel Bradford, 1883–1932. Edited by Van Wyck Brooks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933.
Scattered comments on biographers, biography, the impact of the subject’s life on the biographer, working methods, the merits of longer and shorter biographies, the importance of structure and style, and the disadvantages of authorized biography.
__________. Lee the American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.
“Psychography,” the “portrayal of a soul,” aims to concentrate on the subject without “general prejudices,” eschewing “personal affection” and a tendency to form fixed opinions. Noting how easily documents can mislead—including an instance in which Robert E. Lee’s handwriting has been misinterpreted—the psychographer must resist assuming that he or she has the truth, since so much is lost (how the subject smiled or gestured, for example) and cannot be recovered. Taking Sainte-Beuve as his model, Bradford concentrates on character and learns to love his subjects, correcting, he believes, Sainte-Beuve’s one weakness: a bitterness that prevented him from fully revealing his subjects.
__________. The Letters of Gamaliel Bradford, 1918–1931, edited by Van Wyck Brooks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
Bradford defines and defends his conception of life-writing, attacking the biographer’s reliance on chronology, which necessitates the incorporation of extraneous detail and detracts from a unified view of the subject. Bradford’s medium is the seven-thousand-word portrait of a personality, although he prefers the term psychography because it suggests his systematic approach to biography, his attempt to find the essence of a personality and its spiritual character. Although he believes his method is scientific and based on a rigorous evaluation of sources, Bradford aspires to write as an artist, aiming for the intense insight of poetry.
__________. “Psychography.” In A Naturalist of Souls: Studies in Psychography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917.
Distinguishes psychography from the biographical portrait, arguing that the psychographer “endeavours to grasp as many particular moments as he can and to give his reader not one but the enduring sum total of them all.” Making an analogy to the naturalist who “spends years in studying the life of a bird, or a frog, or a beetle,” Bradford suggests that the psychographer’s study of individual human characters is “inexhaustible” and “absorbing,” requiring the identification of “certain elements that are far more significant than others.” “A naturalist of souls” searches for the “deep and hidden motives and passions of the soul” regardless of chronological sequence. Psychography is often weakened, however, by its “dependence upon generalisations, usually hasty and never complete.”
Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
In a preface, “Auden and Biography,” Carpenter addresses Auden’s view that “biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste,” that the “raw ingredients” of a writer’s life do not explain “the peculiar flavour of his verbal dishes,” and that his private life is of “no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends.” Yet Auden had a more complex view of biography than his “dogmatic attitude” seemed to countenance. He made exceptions (Carpenter lists them) to justify biographies of certain writers, reviewed without compunction collections of writers’ letters, allowed selections of his own correspondence to be published, and wrote autobiography. Carpenter champions an approach that Auden approved: A writer’s work “may throw light upon his life.”
Clark, Axel. “A Mongrel Task: Writing the Life of a Writer.” In Biographers at Work, edited by James Walter and Raija Nugent. Nathan, Queensland, Australia: Institute for Modern Biography, 1984.
A biographer of Australian poet Christopher Brennan, Clark argues that not to see how the subject’s life and work shape each other is tantamount to producing a life of the Duke of Wellington with the dates of battles and no assessment of his military achievement. The “variable status” of the “I” in Brennan’s poems illuminates his life and sometimes even contradicts the evidence offered by his friends. Both the evidence of the poems and the life yield a range of possible motives that are not strictly separable from each other. The “I” of a poem, in other words, leads the reader both inside and outside the work, and it is this mixture of interpretation that defines the “mongrel task” of biography.
Clifford, James L. “A Biographer Looks at Dr. Johnson.” In New Light on Dr. Johnson: Essays on the Occasion of his Two-hundred-fiftieth Birthday, edited by Frederick W. Hilles. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959.
Using examples from incidents in the life of Johnson and from his own experience, Clifford illustrates the problems of dealing with conflicting or meager evidence. He argues that a biographer should select the material, describe the subject, and evoke the scenes of the latter’s life not only in accord with what can be verified but also in the light of the biographer’s total understanding of the subject’s life. Contending that biography must be subjective, Clifford says it has “no standing as history,” for the subject’s life depends on the “pattern that has been set up in the biographer’s mind.”
__________. Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1560–1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Discussions of biography by Francis Bacon, Johnson, Boswell, Coleridge, John Gibson Lockhart, Carlyle, Woolf, and many others. Of particular importance are John Dryden’s comments on biography’s treatment of great men, Edmund Gosse’s suggestion that “the first theoretical object of the biography should be indiscretion,” Lytton Strachey’s argument for the biographer’s “freedom of spirit” from the pieties and conventions of society, Robert Littell’s imaginary dialogue between novelist and biographer, Marchete Chute’s explanation of how to confront conflicting sources, and Bernard DeVoto’s attack on biographers’ reliance on the teachings of psychoanalysis and Edel’s sensitive defense of those teachings. Other essays document the history of opinion on biography, as do Clifford’s introduction and bibliography.
__________. From Puzzles to Portraits: Problems of a Literary Biographer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.
A biographer of Johnson and other eighteenth century figures, Clifford provides valuable insights into the way he and other biographers research and write their biographies. He includes chapters on the search for “outside” sources—evidence that cannot be found in libraries or in the secondary literature—on various methods of evaluating oral and written evidence, on different forms of biography and of narrative stances, on the biographer’s self-awareness (why he or she chooses certain evidence and interpretations), on the length and density of biographical details, on the ethical issues involved in revealing personal data, and on the psychoanalyzing of subjects. Especially revealing are Clifford’s interviews with other biographers and his analysis of Edel’s and Ellmann’s biographies.
Cole, John Y., ed. Biography and Books. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1986.
A symposium of biographers, with an address by Edmund Morris on the art of biography, a discussion by several biographers of the current status of biography, a publisher’s overview of the current range of biographies being published and the questions they raise, James Thomas Flexner on his biography of Washington and a television adaptation of Flexner’s work, biography in the city of Washington, D.C. by David McCullough, and a summary of biographers’ comments on how they choose and react to their subjects. Includes an annotated bibliography of recent work on the art and practice of biography.
Donald, David. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987.
In his preface, Donald describes his early reading of Wolfe, the uneven quality of his novels, and doubts about their literary value, even though they contain impressive social history. Donald has not intruded in the narrative, believing that readers do not want his moral judgments or psychoanalytic analyses any more than they would from a novelist. “I am not persuaded that anything would be gained if I interrupted my account of Wolfe’s attitudes toward Jews to announce that such bigotry is intolerable and uncivilized—as of course it is.” Similarly, labeling Julia Wolfe an “anal-retentive type” would not make his portrait more credible. David has interpreted and shaped Wolfe’s biography, but he has been careful not to reduce it to a “case study, whether psychological, literary, or sociological.”
Duberman, Martin. “On Becoming an Historian.” In The Uncompleted Past. New York: Random House, 1969.
Duberman reflects on his biography of Charles Francis Adams, noting how he confidently explained his subject’s reasons for becoming a lawyer and how he now doubts the “sufficiency, perhaps even the centrality of those reasons.” Missing evidence of relationships and episodes, not to mention a more rigorous inquiry into Adams’ psychology, might well have altered Duberman’s explanation. Biography tends to make life’s choices seem too neat, too easily accounted for, especially if the biographer does not examine his own motives for making certain interpretations.
Dunaway, David King. “The Oral Biography.” Biography 14 (Summer, 1991): 256–266.