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Title page from a 1676 edition of Plutarch’s second-century The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

“Biographer, know thyself!” So Hermione Lee condensed the argument of one of several books about the genre of biography that she reviewed for us in 2001. “The message extends, dauntingly, to every stage of the decision-making process. What are your motives in writing your book? What ethical position do you propose to adopt? What tone of voice will you select?” Lee, an acclaimed biographer in her own right, concludes, “If you were thinking of starting on a biography, this book would surely make you want to give up at once.” A few years earlier, John Updike opened his own consideration of literary biography with the question “Why do we need it at all?”

Whatever obstacles they might face, biographers remain undaunted (though for further discouragement, we can offer April Bernard’s 1985 poem “Against Biography”). A search on The New York Review’s website for “biography” turns up over four hundred pages of results, so here are some highlights—by no means comprehensive.

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It’s perhaps no surprise that reviewers want to write about the lives of writers: Lee and Tim Parks have both taken up George Eliot biographies; William Gass looked at William Faulkner; David Lodge wrote on Muriel Spark; Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare; Joyce Carol Oates on Joan Didion; Darryl Pinckney on Ralph Ellison; Rachel Donadio on Nathalie Sarraute; Robert Martin on Anthony Trollope; John Bayley (Iris Murdoch’s widower) on Charles Dickens; Frances Wilson on Iris Murdoch; and Richard Ellman on Samuel Beckett.

But writers aren’t the only people immortalized in prose: For a bit of New York tragicomedy, try James Wolcott’s review of Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s biography of Edie Sedgwick. In a review of the first biography of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel since 1844, Anthony Quinton posited that the relative disinterest in the philosopher’s life came down to “the fact that he does not seem to have had a functioning first name”; Queen Victoria, David Cannadine noted, is “more the mother of her children than the mother of her people, not so much a national icon as a brass-tacks queen”; a biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was written, W.H. Auden declared in 1965, by “an anal madman”; and the folkoric image of Abraham Lincoln plowing fields and splitting fence rails, cultivated by the president as much as by his biographers, is, wrote James McPherson, “a powerful symbol of what Americans want to believe about social mobility and the opportunity to get ahead in their society.

Frontispiece and title page from a 1568 edition of Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

At a certain point, the lives of people start to run together, and a trend for biographies of places emerged: London (“the thesis is that however much London changes, it remains in essence the same”), Brazil (“if we were to think of Brazil as a person rather than a country…it would be someone who, at the moment, seems schizophrenic”), Ancient Rome (“the ancient Roman Forum is one of the most frustrating tourist sites in the world”), and Jerusalem (“Jerusalem has for so long incited fantasy that the geographical city may come as a shock”). There was also a trend of biographies of, for lack of a better word, things, such as the Bhagavad Gita, or the Tamil language. Or the vagina. Or God. After you’ve read about the peacocking life of J.A.M. Whistler, you can read the “cultural biography” of “the extravagant expression of Victorian chinoiserie that would become known as the Peacock Room.” When you’re through with the biography of London, you can get the story of its famous fog (“those who knew London fogs never forget the taste of them, acrid but also faintly sweet and cloying”).

Whatever the subject, the essence of the biography might be the desire to catalog. As Elizabeth Hardwick described it in a 1969 review of another life of Ernest Hemingway: “The genre rises out of a vast collection of papers, letters, interviews, and junk, and is itself, in the end, still an accumulation, sorted, labeled, and dated, but only an accumulation, a heap.” She asks: “Is a life truly the same as A Life of…?”

—Lauren Kane

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Samuel Boswell

More on Biographies in The New York Review

Hermione Lee
Tracking the Untrackable

Questions about the health of biography and impatience with its long life have succeeded those cries we used to hear about the death of the novel. But by an intriguing cultural irony, this is happening just as biography has started to be analyzed in theoretical books and university courses, where, for a long time, there was no place for this popular, heterogeneous, impure form. Academe distrusted a genre that ignored the “death of the author,” structuralism, and deconstruction, which blurred and muddled T.S. Eliot’s powerfully influential separation between the work and the personality of the author, and relied heavily on the conventions and traditions of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

—April 12, 2001

John Updike
One Cheer for Literary Biography

We read, those of us who do, literary biographies for a variety of reasons, of which the first and perhaps the most worthy is the desire to prolong and extend our intimacy with the author—to partake again, from another angle, of the joys we have experienced within the author’s oeuvre, in the presence of a voice and mind we have come to love.

—February 4, 1999

Hermione Lee
A Wider Devotion

“The biographer Clare Carlisle aims to turn George Eliot’s real and fictional marriages into an examination of her philosophy of life.”

—November 2, 2023

William H. Gass
Mr. Blotner, Mr. Feaster, and Mr. Faulkner

“Anyone who ever saw Faulkner in the street, sat beside him in the classroom, sometimes had a conversation or a drink, is dutifully reported here, is cited, is described: little Myrtle Ramey, for example, who had a delicate throat, and who remembers how well Billy Faulkner folded paper into cubes.”

—June 27, 1974

David Lodge
The Prime of Muriel Spark

“Some acquaintances regarded her as a kind of white witch gifted with preternatural insight. Most found her eccentric and unpredictable, and some thought she was a little mad—an insinuation that, if she ever found them out, would cause their excommunication from her friendship.”

—August 19, 2010

Stephen Greenblatt
Shakespeare in No Man’s Land

“By the time someone—the biographer and editor Nicholas Rowe, in 1709—thought to investigate, anyone who might have seen Shakespeare on stage was long dead, and even family memories, passed down from generation to generation, had faded.”

—December 17, 2009

Joyce Carol Oates
Joan Didion: Risk & Triumph

“It is rare to find a biographer so temperamentally, intellectually, and even stylistically matched with his subject as Tracy Daugherty…is matched with Joan Didion; but it is perhaps less of a surprise if we consider that Daugherty is himself a writer whose work shares with Didion’s classic essays a brooding sense of the valedictory and the elegiac, crushing banality and heartrending loss in American life.”

—October 8, 2015

Darryl Pinckney
The Visible Man

“Ralph Ellison was the first black writer since Jean Toomer to transfer to prose some of the tasks of poetry.”

—June 14, 2007

Richard Ellman
The Life of Sim Botchit

“Of all modern writers, the one presumed to be least likely to permit a biography of himself to be written has been Samuel Beckett.”

—October 8, 2015

James Wolcott
R.I.P.

“In life, Edie Sedgwick may have been the crowning ornament of the Warhol entourage, but in death she’s being elevated into the company of Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Jimi Hendrix—that pop cavalcade of the beautiful slain.”

—July 15, 1982

David Cannadine
The Brass-Tacks Queen

“This biography is the first to demonstrate the full extent of Victoria’s inordinate selfishness. No one was ever allowed to inconvenience her, and nothing could stand in the way of her regular migrations to Windsor, Osborne, and Balmoral.”

—April 23, 1987

W. H. Auden
Mozart in the Stacks

“That such a compilation as this should have been made is not surprising—obsessive collectors have existed in all ages—but that it should have found both publishers and translators is an alarming symptom of a grave cultural disease.”

—August 5, 1965

James Fenton
Ghost Town

“The reader is entitled to know how many impossible things he is expected to believe before breakfast. For the book is a collation of details, in support of the thesis that is repeated in almost every chapter. The thesis is that however much London changes, it remains in essence the same…. The pagan Londoner carving his idol in Dagenham four millennia ago is to be thought of as much the same being as, for instance, the auto worker at Ford’s of Dagenham today.”

—January 17, 2002

Zoë Heller
Pride and Prejudice

In Naomi Wolf’s new “biography” of the vagina, she warns that her subject is in danger of being trivialized by its cultural ubiquity. The vagina, properly understood, is, “part of the female soul” and the medium for the “meaning of life itself.” In order to free female sexuality from patriarchal calumny, pornographic distortion, and some of the damaging myths of second-wave feminism, it is essential, she argues, that women reclaim the “magic” of the vagina and restore it to its rightful place at “the center of the universe.”

—September 27, 2012

John Barton
A God’s Life

It is usually assumed that the God of whom the Bible speaks is unchanging; indeed, the Bible itself says so. “I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6). The idea that God has a biography, and that this biography can be extracted from the Bible, is therefore paradoxical. But Jack Miles demonstrates in his new book that the paradox is only an apparent contradiction, that the picture of God in the Hebrew Bible changes and develops, and that it is the dogma of divine immutability that must go once we start to read the Bible with close attention.

—November 30, 1995

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