David Ellis. Literary Lives: Biogra...

David Ellis. Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding. recently made known York: Routledge, 2000. 195 pp ISBN 0-415-92847-8 $3500

David Ellis notes at the beginning of Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding the "surprising absence of work forward the theory or manner of biography" (ix). Even biographers who write about the form, he says typically offer "behind-the-scene unrevealeds of the craft without attempting sustained analysis" of by what mode this genre ought to function and for what purpose (2). Ellis, himself a practicing biographer (author of convolution 3 ...