The Impossible Craft
Literary Biography
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
In The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage others to destroy correspondence, write their own autobiographies, and appoint family or friends to protect their reputations as official biographers. Thomas Hardy went so far as to compose his own life story to be published after his death, while falsely assigning authorship to his widow. After a brief background sketch of the history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson recounts his experiences in writing biographies of a broad range of twentieth-century American writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Winfield Townley Scott, and Charlie Fenton.
Donaldson provides readers with a highly readable insiders’ introduction to literary biography. He suggests how to conduct interviews, and what not to do during the process. He offers sound advice about how closely biographers should identify with their subjects. He examines the ethical obligations of the biographer, who must aim for the truth without unduly or unnecessarily causing discomfort or worse to survivors. He shows us why and how misinformation comes into existence and tends to persist over time. He describes “the mythical ideal biographer,” an imaginary creature of universal intelligence and myriad talents beyond the reach of any single human being. And he suggests how its very impossibility makes the goal of writing a biography that captures the personality of an author a challenge well worth pursuing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
No stranger to the pitfalls of literary biography, Donaldson (Archibald MacLeish) provides a captivating and intimate glimpse of the challenges and rewards of writing lives of novelists and poets. The book, part memoir and part literary criticism, lays bare Donaldson's own process, with his thoughts on topics like incorporating sources, fidelity to the record versus artistic recreations, and ethical considerations. The ideal biographer, as described here, combines an investigative reporter's persistence, a novelist's narrative craft, and a historian's ability to recreate a time and place. In rich case histories of the writers Donaldson has depicted, he isolates some of the challenges he's faced, such as Hemingway's attempts to ensure any biographies of himself conformed with his own self-image, and the elusive reason for Zelda Fitzgeralds's affairs while her husband was writing The Great Gatsby. Donaldson also turns the spotlight on himself and admits mistakes he's made, such as not listening closely enough to John Cheever's widow while writing his biography of the novelist. Sometimes prone to repetition, Donaldson nevertheless offers a fascinating glimpse of what it's like to work at the biographer's craft.
