The biographer and perspective

John Worthen

pp. 191-203

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

There is nothing like a biographer for enjoying the destruction of orthodoxy. Scratch a biographer and you find an iconoclast. "People have always worshipped this icon. How absurd!" says the biographer. "The real truth, of course, is that it never was an icon: it was a hollow sepulchre." And so we biographers present the world with a new, radical icon.