Leon Edel has recently noted that there exists, I am sorry to say, no
criticism of biography worthy of the name. Reviewers and critics have
learned how to judge plays, poems, novels--but they reveal their
helplessness in the face of a biography. The Biographer's Art, by
concentrating on the aesthetics of the genre, responds to the need for
serious criticism of life-writing. This book is both a history of the
genre and a substantial analysis of the great literary biographies from
Johnson's Life of Savage (1744) and Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791)
through Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and Symons' The Quest for
Corvo (1934) to the three greatest biographies of the mid-twentieth
century: Ellmann's James Joyce (1959), Painter's Marcel Proust (1959,
1965), and Edel's monumental Henry James (1953-72). The masterful
biographies by Ellmann, Painter, and Edel, that continue the tradition
begun by Johnson and Boswell and show the influence of Strachey's
innovative work, confirm that biography is still a flourishing art form.
By firing the facts of an author's life with their own imagination,
illuminating the relationship between daily existence and imaginative
life, these life-writers follow the same process as fiction writers and
create their own significant works of art.
