Why Read Literary Biography?

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 isn’t a writer’s work; it’s the writer’s life. And, though the gods of capitalism may grumble at my saying this, an artist’s work and life are radically separate things. The art comes alive only when it meets another mind, like desert seeds that wait patiently until a freak rainfall wakes them, flowering, from sleep. A life, however, is made of baser stuff, such as breakdowns in grocery-store checkouts, simmering humiliations too banal to record, deeply questionable habits of hygiene. Any smart reader understands that no biography could possibly reveal its subject’s true life, which is to say the humming, prismatic, spiky interior one that gives rise to the writer’s works. We readers are only voyeurs, at a remove from a unique imagination, trying to peep in. The best that literary biographies can do is build a good simulacrum: a scrupulously explicated version of events that happened, a valiant attempt at a filled-in outline.

Still, a window into a famous person’s birth-to-death story may offer enormous and sometimes prurient satisfactions. We can embed ourselves in the subject’s network of famous friends and feel glamorous enough to sit at), or history of mental illness (), or sexual identities previously hidden. In his biography of Lytton Strachey, published in the late 1960s, Michael Holroyd , decisively shifting the genre’s focus from public to private concerns, it has been said. Some biographies earnestly explore how writers could have been so brilliant on the page but so defeated by life that they took their own (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace). Such portrayals can end up burning nearly as bright in our collective memory as the art does, because the sensational makes for a good story.