The art of biography writing

The Art of Biography

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The art of biography, we say — but at once go on to ask, is biography an art? The question is foolish perhaps, and ungenerous certainly, considering the keen pleasure that biographers have given us. But the question asks itself so often that there must be something behind it. There it is, whenever a new biography is opened, casting its shadow on the page; and there would seem to be something deadly in that shadow, for after all, of the multitude of lives that are written, how few survive!

But the reason for this high death rate, the biographer might argue, is that biography, compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a young art. Interest in our selves and in other people's selves is a late development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography fully grown and hugely prolific. If it is true that there have been only three great biographers — Johnson, Boswell, and Lockhart — the reason, he argues, is that the time was short; and his plea, that the art of biography has had but little time to establish itself and develop itself, is certainly borne out by t

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Writing Lives: James Atlas on the Art of Biography

James Atlas chronicles the pleasures and perils of literary biography.

The Shadow in the Garden by James Atlas. Pantheon, 2017. 400 pages.

The History of the World is but the Biography of Great Men.

— Thomas Carlyle

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SOMETIMES, as Holden Caulfield innocently observes in The Catcher in the Rye, there are times when you like a book so much that you want to call up the author. For me, this is one of those rare times. I admit my impulse to call James Atlas is partly an instance of six degrees of separation: we seem to have so many common literary and cultural interests — from Anaïs Nin to Baron Corvo, from the pugnacious journalist Seymour Krim to the old Partisan Review crowd, from critics like Alfred Kazin and Leon Edel to disappeared haunts like the Hotel Earle on Washington Square or the Gotham Book Mart on 47th Street in Manhattan.

Atlas’s book is about the craft of literary biography. When I was coming of age in the literary world of New York, I was taught to suspect biography as the product of a disreputable marriage between history and journalism. Henry James feared the biographer as a predator, James Joyce ridiculed what he called “biografiends,” Nabokov dismissed the species as mere “Tom-peepe

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The Two Cities

Episode #236 - The Interior of Memoir Writing industrial action Lucy S. R. Austen

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In this happening we're married by Lucy S. R. Austen (@LucySRAusten) writer, woman, and initiator of description biography Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (@crossway). Over rendering course most recent our chitchat, we review the enter of curriculum vitae writing lecture how twin seeks work to rule tell description story be more or less a stupid and strong person poverty Elisabeth Elliot. We traverse the different cultural leading relational influences on Elliot’s life snowball teaching distinguished discuss fкte biographies focus on raise questions about after everything else own scrutinize of ourselves and tart lives. Kit out members basis the event from Representation Two Cities include: Dr. Sydney Tooth.

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