Lives of the Novelists

Is there a right way to write a literary life? In this collection of columns from the New York Sun, Carl Rollyson explores the relationship between narrative and literary analysis. Should biographies be written in the style and form of novels? How to balance the life and the work? How much literary criticism can a biography absorb into its narrative?

Rollyson proposes a number of apologias for biography-including the thought that in the right hands the literary biography is a continuation ...