|                  Sponsored by Cambridge University Press            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. 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            Samuel Boswell More on Biographies in The New York ReviewHermione Lee | 
jueves, 14 de agosto de 2025
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