Five Literary Biographies

by Alexandra Popoff
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5 books
Can a biographer accurately capture the life and character of a literary legend? According to James Atlas, a famous biographer and literary celebrity in his own right, this is unlikely. People are complex and elusive, and artists doubly so. We can never succeed in knowing them entirely –– no matter how hard we try. Yet, biographers keep trying. They invest years researching a life, hoping to unravel a mystery of human nature and creativity and to produce comprehensive portrayals. In biographer Michael Shelden’s words, a writer’s life matters “because his work matters.” The lives of Somerset Maugham, George Orwell, and Leo Tolstoy have been told many times, and each time from a different angle. Biographers mine archives for new material, conduct interviews, and read letters and diaries to pin down facts; then they tell a story to bring it alive. Below are five literary biographies that have both informed and entertained me.
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The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

Selina Hastings, 2010
An award-winning writer and literary journalist, Selina Hastings produced the lives of Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, and Rosamond Lehmann, among others. I highly recommend her biography of Somerset Maugham. Like Waugh, Maugham had been the subject of many portrayals, but Hastings’ account strikes me as the best –– it’s engaging, witty, and persuasive. Among the most famous and wealthiest writers of his day, Maugham lived to 91 to witness 98 films made from his works. He had met Henry James, Winston Churchill, and D.H. Lawrence, but despite prominence, was manipulated, controlled, and betrayed by his caddish secretary-friends, who were also his lovers. Hastings uncovered new material about Maugham’s private life and shaped it into an absorbing story.

Orwell

The Authorized Biography
Michael Shelden, 1992
Shelden’s biography of Orwell opens with paradoxical sentences that will draw you into the book: “George Orwell did not expect to be successful. In fact, he spent much of his life anticipating failure.” Orwell thrived on paradox, his biographer tells us. Even after the success of Animal Farm he declared that his next book, the future 1984, “was bound to be a failure…” Yet, Orwell worked relentlessly to succeed; his self-deprecating remarks inspired him to maintain his drive, and curb his pride and ambition. The writer’s elusive character is the main theme in the book. Shelden convincingly portrays Orwell’s life as an imperial police officer in Burma, a volunteer for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and, finally, the writer of some of the world’s most influential and lasting works. A sense of wonder created in the opening keeps the reader interested and involved.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made

Anne C. Heller, 2009
While researching Rand’s life for my own book, I read Heller’s biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. It remains the only full-length biography of the divisive American writer who had inspired critics’ polarizing views; with that, I found Heller’s account remarkably level-headed. (Jennifer Burns’ excellent biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, is a special study of Rand’s political philosophy.) Heller was not allowed to work in the Ayn Rand Archives––a huge deprivation to a biographer; however, she collected valuable information from numerous interviews and from her research at the Library of Congress among other places. Heller’s dependency on Barbara Branden, Rand’s first biographer, compromises the first chapters of the book. Rand’s early years in Russia are given chiefly from her often apocryphal stories to Barbara Branden. (The Russian letters that were unavailable to Heller tell the actual story of Rand’s relationship with her birth family.) In addition, the Ayn Rand Institute that issues permission to quote Rand’s works had apparently denied it to Heller: in her retelling of novelistic plots, she loses the author’s voice. The strongest part of the book is, again, the material collected from the interviews with people who had known Rand; the story of her movement and of Rand’s unfathomable contradictions. Despite some flaws, this is a well-written book that especially succeeds in portraying Rand’s later years.

Life of Tolstoy

Aylmer Maude, 2008
When researching Leo Tolstoy’s life I read every biography produced in the English-speaking world as well as in Russia. The biography I recommend, by Aylmer Maude, came out in the first quarter of the twentieth century (its second volume in 1930). It still remains unsurpassed. Maude was Tolstoy’s contemporary translator who held many conversations with the writer and deeply valued his art and philosophy. After Tolstoy’s death, he worked to chronicle his life, creating an intimate portrayal of one of the most complex and contradictory men of the epoch. Although a Tolstoy follower who shared some of his views, Maude was not overshadowed by the literary giant: writing as an insider, he discusses Tolstoy’s philosophy and movement objectively and critically. I also thoroughly enjoyed his account because Maude is a great stylist (befitting Tolstoy’s biographer); he tells lively stories from Tolstoy’s life and relates incidents he personally witnessed. Maude’s profound grasp of Tolstoy’s art and ideas, and his accurate portrayals of his family and milieus make this biography a rich and reliable source.

The Shadow in the Garden

A Biographer's Tale
James Atlas, 2018
This is a fascinating book about the art of writing biography. It’s also a memoir, a story of how James Atlas worked to chronicle eminent lives, creating portraits of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, and what he learned about challenges and rewards of the genre. Richard Holmes believed that a biographer will never “quite catch” his subject’s character. He told Atlas, “But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.” In Holmes’ words, “the capacity to be empathetic” is essential to a biographer. A biographer “extending ‘a handshake’ towards his subject” was an image that had influenced Atlas in his writing career. Atlas worked on Bellow’s biography for about 12 years. He still hesitated whether he got his subject right and shared his doubts with Saul’s son, Adam: “‘I never felt like I knew him,’ I said to Adam. ‘I never felt that I got him.’ ‘You got him,’ Adam said firmly.” In Atlas’ view, producing a good biography requires years of solitary research; “a curiosity about human nature, a need to find out why people are the way they are.”