The Art of Literary Biography.

Edited by John Batchelor, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 289. $29.95.

John Batchelor's edited collection of essays on life writing, The Art of Literary Biography, gathers contributions from two conferences on literary biography held in England and Germany in 1993. Organizers of the British conference at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where most of these essays were first presented as papers, conceived their meeting as opportunity for both free-lance biographers and biographers associated with universities to share and explore their ideas about and practice of writing lives. The conference origins of Batchelor's collection are noteworthy for at least two reasons: They help account for the essays' interactive vigor; they also exemplify collectively the current sociology of energetic interest in the poetics, ethics, and practice of biography, …