American Literary Biography

Biographies of American literary figures did not come into currency until the country began to explore the persons and conditions that made that emerging literature possible. Walt Whitman and Mark Twain appointed authorized biographers, Horace Traubel and Alfred Bigelow Paine, who began publishing multivolume works in 1892 and 1912, respectively. A depraved Edgar Allan Poe became the focus of the moralistic and deceitful Rufus Griswold in 1850, and Walt Whitman became lionized as the “good gray poet” in a pamphlet in 1866 and in Richard Maurice Bucke’s 1883 biography, as American authors deemed worthy of the attention already bestowed on public figures. Henry James’s biography of Hawthorne, published in 1879, is no more than a sketch, and it seems he could not even conceive of, say, a psychological biography along the lines of his own novels. American literary biography began to attract a mass audience in the 1920s, partly because of the rediscovery of Herman Melville, who became a major figure in biographies by Raymond Weaver, published in 1921, and by Lewis Mumford in 1929, both of whom sought to understand the troubled life and career of the author of a great American novel, Moby-Dick, who had lapsed into obscurity. Their books inspired a fascination with the possibilities of literary biography, spurred on by the wit and daring of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), which brought to the genre a vivid style absent in the stolid biographies of Victorian worthies and sentimental, genteel depictions of American writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by his brother Samuel Longfellow in 1881. That an American author could be the object of a narrative as engrossing as a novel attracted readers to biographies like that of Thomas Beer of Stephen Crane in 1923, although the biographer invented parts of his story and did not observe the standards of accuracy demanded much later, as in Arthur Hobson Quinn’s scrupulous Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941). The term “critical biography” became synonymous with the idea of biography as an accurate study based upon primary sources and verifiable testimony. However, American literary biography remained a modest enterprise with the notable exceptions of Newton Arvin’s Herman Melville, which won the National Book Award in 1950, or in a few more daring psychological narratives, such as John Berryman’s Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography (1950). The relative brevity of these books—compared to huge tomes produced on other public figures—reflected the tendency to focus on the writer’s work, not his life. Not until the late 1950s, with the five-volume biography of Henry James by Leon Edel were American biographers encouraged to explore the lives as well as the works of writers in meticulous detail. Edel achieved public and academic acclaim—still a rarity for biographers in higher education. No book is yet available devoted entirely to the history or the methodology of American literary biography.