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Due Considerations

Essays and Criticism
Chapter One: Everything Considered

On Literary Biography
(A talk given on November 13, 1998, at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, in honor of the two hundredth volume produced by the Dictionary of Literary Biography. A less discursive version appeared in The New York Review of Books, January 21, 1999.)

There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his notebooks

Poets don’t have biographies. Their work is their biography.
–Octavio Paz, “A Note to Himself”

The main question concerning literary biography is, surely, Why do we need it at all? When an author has devoted his life to expressing himself, and, if a poet or a writer of fiction, has used the sensations and critical events of his life as his basic material, what of significance can a biographer add to the record? Most writers lead quiet lives or, even if they don’t, are of interest to us because of the words they set down in what had to have ... read full excerpt from Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism ebook