Writing Biographies of an Artist: The Work and the Life

I have been thinking about literary biographies in the last few days. That is to say, biographies about a writer (or other artist). I think I started thinking about this issue when listening to the most recent NYTimes Book podcast. In this episode, Dwight Garner gave his opinion of Timothy Brenan's biography of Edward Said. Garner's conclusion was that the book failed because it emphasized technical issues of the writing, such as how much was Said influenced by Derrida and Lacan, and did not emphasize enough the fantastically interesting, in Garner's opinion, personal life and personality of Said. One of the other Times writers, Parul Sehgal, said that the real challenge with a literary biography is balancing the personal details with an understanding of the writing. She gave the example of Moser's recent biography of Susan Sontag which she thought overemphasized Sontag's sex life and did not spend enough time on the ideas Sontag explored in her writing. (I read all 800 plus pages of the book and I disagree with Sehgal on this point).

I have been thinking about this idea of balance in a literary biography for a couple of reasons. The first reason I am interested in this topic is because I am looking forward to reading Blake Bailey's just published biography of Philip Roth in the not too distant future. I read Bailey's book on John Cheever and was very impressed. (My thoughts can be found here.) I have, in the last twenty years, read quite a few of Roth's novels and, since he wrote more than thirty, feel that I have much more that I could read. In fact, I just put in a request for his Zuckerman Bound series at my local public library. It will probably take a couple weeks for the interlibrary loan request to go through, but that book is something I look forward to reading in the near future.

The second reason I am interested in the topic of balance in a literary biography is that I was quite impressed by the recent PBS biography of Ernest Hemingway. (Some thoughts here). I thought that Ken Burns and Lynn Novick did a remarkable job researching and presenting the very complicated life of Hemingway. The film includes interviews with several Hemingway scholars and biographers. In addition, Burns and Novick spend quite a bit of time quoting from and giving detailed information about how Hemingway wrote many of his books and stories.

But I think the highest praise I can offer of the Hemingway documentary is that it inspired me to pick up several of the author's books and read them. I recently read his complete short stories and his novel The Sun Also Rises.

At least in my opinion, one needs to read both the biography and the work to understand the writer.

There are a few more questions that were raised in my mind when I read Mark Oppenheimer's story of Bailey's biography of Roth:

• Is Roth really the last of the celebrity writers? There was a time in the 1960s and 70s when people were very interested in both the life and the writing of intellectual writings of people like Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag.
• I am glad to see a big biography of Roth published, but what about other recent big name American writers such as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo? 
• It took a long time after her death to see a major documentary on the life and work of Flannery O'Connor, must we wait fully fifty years or more for other writers to get an in-depth biography of documentary?