Biography: An Annotated Bibliography

By Carl Rollyson

This is the only comprehensive, annotated bibliography of writing about biography. Rollyson, a biographer and scholar of biography, includes chapters on the history of biography (beginning in the Greco-Roman period and concluding with biographers such as Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann). Ample sections on psychobiography, the new feminist biography, and on biographers who appear in works of fiction, are also included. Cited in many recent books on the genre of biography, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography, is an essential research tool as well as a clearly written work for those wishing to browse through the commentary on this important genre.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504029896

Carl Rollyson

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

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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,