On the first page of Sarah Ruden’s biography of Vergil, she states the problem that any biographer of the ancient poet and author of the Aeneid faces: We know almost nothing about him. “The man is ...

In his recent chronicle of Freud’s life Becoming Freud: the Making of a Psychoanalyst (2014), Adam Phillips expresses a skeptical view of biography, arguing it’s a perniciously misleading fiction (136 ...

There is a popular trend in modern biographical writing. Take a slice of a famous person’s life and treat it like a novel by supplying a dramatic arc and employing constructive imagination to fill in ...

Below left: Berg holds a photograph of Wilson used in his 1910 campaign for governor of New Jersey. Although he has been researching and thinking about Wilson for 35 years, he hasn't yet reached a ...

“The moon is a dead body, having nothing but reflected light: but it can blot out the sun,” writes Michael Holroyd, explaining why people often fear becoming the subject of biographies. “Whenever a ...

Shane Warne has lived his professional life in the public eye. Does this make it more difficult for a biographer to tell his story? AAP Image/Mal Fairclough Virginia Woolf – so Hermione Lee writes in ...

Each is animated by the author’s love—for their subject, for language, and for pushing the boundaries of what the genre can ...

Women’s history, written and performed by women, provides new and challenging perspectives on the past. So it is with three new biographies of women in colonial and contemporary America. In “The ...