You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Biography is the most popular nonfiction genre of modern literature. Millions of people spend long hours reading lives written by an increasing number of biographers and autobiographers, whose motivation in authoring these books varies from the highly scholarly to the strictly commercial.
For many years, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with several scholarly biographers, in an effort to explore how biographies come into being and, when possible, to facilitate the completion of the biographers' work. I have engaged my collaborators in a series of interviews and have had the opportunity to examine the product of their work long before it was ready for publication. This process mobilizes powerful affects, the presence of which indicates the strength of the psychological forces operating behind the ideas exchanged.
By and large, biographers are aware of the forceful influence of their subjectivity. The study of subjectivity, however, presents enormous complexities; it gives rise to the concern that, by addressing the elusive and boundless world of subjective perceptions, the biographers' enterprise comes to resemble more closely the work of the artist than that of a carefully documented scholarly inquiry.
Paula Backscheider (1999), in her thoughtful review of the biographical process, takes a strong position that biography is primarily a literary art, and biographers should not become “slaves to documentary fact” (p. 234). I agree with Leon Edel (1959), who provides a more balanced view of the work of the biographer in his statement, “A writer of lives is allowed the imagination of form, not of fact” (p. 13).
Most biographers probably agree with Edel's pronouncement but find it difficult to define what constitutes a “fact.” In order to objectify their observations and conclusions and avoid idiosyncratic interpretations of facts, biographers employ conceptual models from psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences in describing and interpreting their subjectsrs