Writing the Lives of Writers

Writing the Lives of Writers ponders the ventriloquized dialogue between biographers and their subjects, a dialogue all the stranger when the subject is a writer. It contains 22 essays by internationally distinguished scholars and biographers. The focus moves from the "birth of the author" to such problems as life-writing without letters' or the isolated nature of the writer's professional life, the difficulties of writing about writing itself, and the necessity of showing how life of the writer can be used to show "the imaginative dynamic" (in Helen Wendler's phrase) of a writer, by which the reader makes sense of the writer's oeuvre, as well as the varieties of the writer's life.