A Higher Form of Cannibalism?: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography
by Carl Edmund Rollyson
Category: Biography & Autobiography

Writers as various as Rebecca West, Ted Hughes, and Joyce Carol Oates have deplored biographers' tendency to cut up lives and render the bloody data so as to make their subjects seem unhealthy, unwholesome, and unsound; Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars. Has biography in fact accelerated its decent into bad taste? Carl Rollyson's lively and anecdotal investigation of writing about the lives of others is skeptical that much has changed over the past few hundred years. His inquiry into the history of the art of biography, in which he examines his own practices as well as those of biographers from Samuel Johnson to Richard Ellmann, Jeffrey Meyers, and many others, casts considerable doubt on the indictments handed down by Oates, Malcolm, & Co. By its very nature, Mr. Rollyson argues, biography is a problematic and controversial genre - it invites the burglar, and justifiably so, especially in the case of literary heroes. That contemporary critics believe biography has gone astray only reveals their ignorance of history and their hostility to the biographical enterprise itself. A Higher Form of Cannibalism? explores the nexus between scholarship and biography, and demonstrates how the similarities of method between Leon Edel and Kitty Kelly outweigh the differences. The gap between the scholarly and the popular, the "authorized" and the "unauthorized," may not be as wide as most people suppose.