Unlike the clinician, who is let in on the patient's story as it gradually unfolds, refolds, and unfolds further in the transferential (and countertransferential) ambiance of the analytic situation, and under the patient's ongoing imperative of therapeutic need, the biographer requires an overall life perspective schema to help sort the (often posthumous) storehouses of data from the outset. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a biographer of repute (Hannah Arendt, Anna Freud) and in command of considerable knowledge of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalytic psychology, makes the case for character and her own