Writing Lives: Principia Biographica

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Henry James presents here a revision of his Literary Biography expanded with six further essays illuminating what he calls the New Biography--an approach that draws on the resources of psychoanalysis, the biographer's own subjectivity, and the skills of the novelist. Mr. Edel includes a history of the art of biography since Boswell, criticism of some of the best-known biographers, advice for the biographer on documentation and the use of psychological theory, and a discussion of what Edel calls the supreme problem in biography--transference, the life-writer's emotional involvement with his or her subject.