| Reviews |
| - 'She writes a fluent, good-humoured, often humorous prose, she wears her extraordinary erudition as lightly as a scarf, and her aims are disarmingly pragmatic: to offer a practical guide ... based on her personal experience ... and a remarkable range of intelligent reading (the bibliography is a treasure-trove) ... Her book will be blessed by generations of biographers and historians to come,
not only because Backscheider makes the rough places plainer, but because she celebrates the biographer's art as at once compelling, horribly difficult and significant.' - Inga Clendinnen, London Review of Books
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| Description | | - A fascinating examination, by a leading biographer and critic, of the biographer's art: its choices and challenges, and the effects of these on what the reader actually learns about the subject
- Written with warmth and conviction, and intimately informed by the writer's own experience as a biographer
- This is a book to illuminate and deepen the whole experience of biography, for all readers of the genre
| | Reflections on Biography
, written by the author of an award-winning life of Daniel Defoe, is an invitation to turn 'biography' over in the mind as we turn an artefact in our hands. Intended for all readers of biographynulllifelong or occasional, critical or casualnullit examines the subject from many angles, and gives a tour of the decisions biographers make and the implications of those
choices. Its aim is to increase the pleasure of reading biographies, to add new, enjoyable dimensions even as it increases readers' insights into the art of writing them. Among the biographies given special attention are prize-winning lives of writers, mathematical geniuses, intellectual women, the Roosevelts, and unusual marriage partners. The book is full of lively comparisons, for instance, of
Keats by Walter Jackson Bate, Andrew Motion, and others, and of a century of biographies of Edith Wharton.
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Paula R. Backscheider, Pepperell-Philpott Eminent Scholar, Auburn University
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limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations,
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possible at the time the catalogue was compiled.
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