Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
This volume is concerned exclusively with biography as a narrative art, comprising essays by ten people who have actually practiced the form.
Library Journal
In this volume ten distinguished biographers discuss the principles and practices of their craft. The literary biographersPaul Mariani (William Carlos Williams), Mark Schorer (Sinclair Lewis), and Leon Edel (Henry James)stress the importance and the difficulty of locating a subject's inner life. The historians are more cautious. Barbara Tuchman frets about risking personal involvement with her subject; Frank Vandiver bristles at those who rummage in the unconscious. All agree that scholarship should be rigorous and exhaustive, choice of details selective, and subjects dramatized in the theater of their own time. Although omitting music, art, and science, this is a useful book whose statements are often graceful and occasionally impassioned. Arthur Waldhorn, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY