LITERARY biography — the lives of writers — is a form of literature clearly deserving a very judicious survey; yet even within the confines of the English language, there has up to now, so far as I am ...
In her stunning After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, Chris Kraus wrote not of theory but of writing, creativity, and the depth a writer has to go to form an identity. She discusses Kathy Acker as ...
Not unrelated to the trends in literary biography, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982, recently published by Ecco, offers insight here. While there is some value in reading about the ...
Time: I Was a Teenage Samuel Beckett: Or, My Literary Biography Problem
What strange beasts literary biographies are, how mixed their reasons for existing. The desire to read one must come from admiration for the writer’s work, but a literary biographer’s central concern ...
The Economist: Mark Twain was a literary celebrity with a moral compass
Henry James, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden did not want to endure a biography, and tried desperately but vainly to prevail against predatory life-writers. In his essay on the French novelist George Sand, ...
In many cases, the literary wife is in fact a literary midwife, a valuable helpmate whose care and attention pull books out to see the light of day. Several male writers have depended entirely on ...