Cook’s forthcoming biography of the literary critic Kazin offers an example. He quotes Kazin musing, just before his 49th birthday, “So much of my moral energy has gone into an awareness of the mother ...

Trade book editors tell my agent that “literary biography is dead.” It isn’t, but evidently it does not sell enough to make a profit. The big five — Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, ...

Who reads literary biographies these days? The question is pertinent because the audience and the advances for literary biography have been shrinking since the 1980s. Of course certain subjects, like ...

What strange beasts literary biographies are, how mixed their reasons for existing. The desire to read one must come from admiration for the writer’s work, but a literary biographer’s central concern ...