Balanced uneasily on the top of the bookshelves in my office are three over-stuffed banker’s boxes straining at the seams. Within, at least for now, are the seventy-five octavo volumes of the complete Works of the English Poets, with Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, edited by the famed Dr. Samuel Johnson, and printed and bound in 1790. It is a legitimate full set of legitimately antique books.
And I got them for free. When Lock Haven University, a small school in central Pennsylvania, was culling its library collection some years ago, they offered me the Johnson set. I mostly wanted them to use in the book-history classes that I teach, as they are excellent examples of late eighteenth-century printing and binding. Despite their age, they really aren’t worth much, as they aren’t particularly rare, and my copies are in rough shape. Still, they’re impressive looking.
This mega-anthology was the product of smart, if deceptive, marketing. In his last major project, undertaken from 1779–1781, Johnson wrote a series of biographical prefaces about major English poets, published initially in four volumes. Johnson’s prefaces proved so popular that in later editions his publisher appended generous selections of works from those featured poets, largely without the permission of the living ones (copyright wasn’t really a thing). Johnson didn’t make any of the poetry selections, and was incensed that the publisher slapped his name on what he saw as an inferior product (again, no copyright…), but he was dead by 1784, so who’s laughing now, Dr. Johnson?
The Lives of the Poets, as it’s most commonly known, was the first significant literary biography project in English. There had been biographical sketches (including memorable shade-throwing at Shakespeare such as Robert Greene calling him an “upstart Crow” and Ben Jonson sneering at the Bard’s “small Latin and lesse Greeke”), but no formal set of biographies of important poets yet existed that attempted to demonstrate how their lives influenced their works. And in its expanded iteration Johnson’s project, much like Vasari’s Lives of the Artists had done for Italian Renaissance painters two centuries before, established a canon of greats of the field and (implicitly) set the parameters of the field. Together, the biographies and prefaces argued that “English poetry” was a coherent body marked by evolution, evidencing threads of influence, and expressive of the character of the nation and its people. It was the Norton Anthology of its time.
Biography is essential in what counts as “literature” and how people are taught to read it. And like literature itself, literary biography has evolved. Johnson is, again, key here, also as subject: James Boswell’s 1791 Life of Johnson, reportorial and formless and gossipy, swerves dramatically from Johnson’s own model in the Prefaces. Major nineteenth-century literary biographies were often explicit efforts at exaltation and memorialization by authors’ friends. Elizabeth Gaskell, an important novelist in her own right, helped kindle the Brontë cult with her 1857 life of her friend Charlotte Brontë, and John Forster relied on his long acquaintance with Charles Dickens to write his 1872 life of the author.
In the twentieth century, serious literary biographies—those aiming at definitiveness and enduring importance—settled into a pattern, often sacrificing narrative energy for comprehensiveness and detail. I’ve read, among many others, Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce (1959), Joseph Blotner’s two-volume study of Faulkner (1974), Paul Mariani’s account of William Carlos Williams (1981), Peter Ackroyd’s book on T.S. Eliot (1984), Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf (1999), and David Moody’s three-volume life of Ezra Pound (2007); and I will say that they did their job, and did it well, but I will not be re-reading them. I have been saving Leon Edel’s five-volume life of Henry James for my next transatlantic cruise or interplanetary voyage.
A few years ago, my consumption of literary lives accelerated, as I had started writing a biography of a literary-adjacent figure (professor and Cold War spy Norman Holmes Pearson) and wanted to understand out how to do this strange thing. My potential book posed a couple of pretty high hurdles. First, it was about someone that few people had ever heard of, so I first had to explain why anyone would want to read his life story. Second, although what he accomplished was (I argue) both greatly significant and perfectly illustrative of a moment in our nation’s history, he was a literature professor, and pretty much lived the life of a literature professor, which a ripping yarn does not make. So, I had to figure out a way to tell this story that wasn’t strictly chronological—“and then this happened, and then this happened”—because for thirty years not much happened.
These, it seemed to me, were structural problems, and clever narrative engineering might be able to solve them. Fortunately, my side reading made clear to me that many recent biographers and life writers have been confronted by similar problems, or have been searching for new ways to talk about literary accomplishment and celebrity and meaning-making, and have come up with some notably original new models for this kind of book.
This is not, of course, to say that the old-fashioned doorstop literary biography is dead, or even dying. Nicholas Boggs’s 2025 life of James Baldwin, which I’ll discuss below, is very much in the tradition, even if not squarely in its center. Heather Clark’s 2020 Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath deserved all the acclaim it received, and Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (2025) is a huge achievement, even if it left me still wondering just why Matthiessen was so obsessed with Bigfoot (read the book).
One of the stars of the new biographical writing is Francesca Wade. Her first book, Square Haunting (2021), wasn’t a biography, but rather what Wade calls “an experiment in juxtaposing lives linked—ostensibly—by pure coincidence.” The five important early-twentieth-century women writers Square Haunting profiles were not a group in the traditional sense (many didn’t know each other) but Wade ropes them together through a cunning little device: they all lived, at an important point in their careers, in London’s Mecklenburgh Square. Wade turns what could have been a gimmick into a surprising insight about how this Georgian plaza epitomized the slowly increasing opportunities for independence for intellectual women in London at the time—a square of one’s own, one might say.
Wade followed this up in 2025 with Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which like its predecessor was widely reviewed (including in this publication) and earned distinctions: the Washington Post and NPR’s “Fresh Air” both named it to their Top 10 Books of the Year. The notoriously difficult but enduringly familiar Stein has been enjoying a bit of revival of academic interest in recent years in the academy as well as among queer readers and writers, and her last major biography appeared in 1975, so the ground was ready.
And Wade had unearthed a treasure: the notes of Leon Katz, who as a graduate student and Stein obsessive in the 1950s had interviewed Stein’s widowed life partner and estate executor Alice B. Toklas. Over the course of a decade, Stein had sold her papers to the Yale Libraries, helping to make that institution the center of modern literary study that it remains, but Toklas retained control over the publication of materials in the archive, including an early unpublished novel in which Stein fictionalized her first lesbian relationship with a woman named May Bookstaver. Toklas’s discovery of this manuscript ignited a crisis in their partnership, and even years after Stein’s death she felt hurt and betrayed by it.
While the first half of Wade’s book is a straight account of the events of Stein’s life, the second half focuses on Katz’s materials, in which Alice explains her unconventional relationship with “Baby” (her pet name for Stein). While the notes don’t give us any dramatic new understanding of this very famous and very public lesbian partnership, they do permit Wade to shift the focus to Stein’s “afterlife,” including the eventual 1950 publication of the Bookstaver manuscript by a small private press under the title Things As They Are. A writer lives on not just in her works but in her reputation, in the critical discourse surrounding her, in the digging that scholars do into her life and creative process, and most importantly in the role that she and her works play in readers’ lives. Toklas (who controlled publication of Stein’s works) and the Stein collection at Yale (from which a thousand dissertations and articles bloomed) are as much a part of the author’s ongoing “life” as are the events of her actual life. Literary immortality is always a group project, so who built the Stein we now know? This is the real topic of Wade’s book, and she does a remarkable job of getting this idea across to readers who may not have encountered it before. In this, she says, she was strongly influenced by biographer Janet Malcolm, especially by 1994’s The Silent Woman (documenting the “afterlife” of Sylvia Plath) as well as Two Lives (2007), Malcolm’s own version of the Stein and Toklas story, “which to some extent,” Wade told me, Afterlife is “writing against.”
Of all of the high-modernist all-star lineup, James Joyce is probably the most indebted to his own set of Alice B Toklases. Sylvia Beach, John Quinn, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Stuart Gilbert, and of course his wife Nora Barnacle (among many others) made it possible for Joyce to do his work, for readers to get access to his work, for critics and scholars to shape interpretation of the work and of Joyce’s life.
With the exception of the long-suffering Nora, Margaret Anderson might have sacrificed more than anyone in the service of the master. Born to a prosperous and conservative Indianapolis family, in 1914 Anderson founded a cutting-edge literary journal, The Little Review, whose slogan was “Making no compromise with the public taste.” She wasn’t kidding: in 1918, the magazine became the first publication to serialize pieces of Joyce’s then in-progress Ulysses, whose installments started out as baffling and, before long, became blue.
In this Comstock era, the U.S. Post Office seized and burned three issues of The Little Review, and in 1921 John Sumner of the deliciously named “New York Society for the Suppression of Vice” initiated a complaint against Anderson and her editorial and romantic partner, Jane Heap, for obscenity. Anderson and Heap were found guilty, forced to pay a fine, and enjoined from publishing any further excerpts from Joyce’s now-notorious novel.
The Little Review obscenity trial is at the core of A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature, but Adam Morgan’s breezy new contribution to the mountain of Joyce-related material is also a full biography of Anderson. In that, it joins Diane Souhami’s 2020 No Modernism Without Lesbians as a capacious and original portrait of the literary lesbian scene of the early twentieth century. Like Wade, Morgan demonstrates that a work’s path between creation and arriving on a reader’s lap or laptop always relies on the service of others, and how that work often becomes central to those others’ own identity and their own life stories.
Joyce is just off the center of another new and unconventional work of modernist biography, Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and its Maker. In Ellmann’s Joyce, Leader documents the life of the man who, more than anyone else, assembled the infrastructure for the academic Joyce industry. Particularly because his last work, Finnegans Wake, is so impenetrable and baffling, for the decade or two after Joyce’s death it was unclear whether his ultimate reputation would be as “the greatest modernist genius,” “the self-indulgent curiosity,” “the dirty-book writer,” or something else. As with Stein, libraries helped, making his manuscripts and correspondence available for scholars to start pulling apart. Probably more importantly, though, was something that could give order to Joyce’s artistic trajectory: a biography.
In 1959, eighteen years after Joyce’s death, the Northwestern University critic Richard Ellmann published James Joyce, a doorstop that did just that. Leader’s book, like Ellmann’s, is a bit workmanlike, but amusingly recounts the finagling involved in Ellmann’s efforts to wrest information and documents from Joyce’s friends, family, and hangers-on, many of whom were hoping to make themselves a little money from their Jim Joyce tidbits. And Ellmann, a Yale Ph.D., was an early beneficiary of his program’s turn to modern literature that Stein and Toklas had helped put in motion.
This, then, is the landscape that Wade and Leader and Morgan depict, just as much as the lives of Stein and Toklas and Ellmann and Anderson. The great monuments of modernism—both the works and the reputations of their authors—were the products of institutions like The Little Review and the Banyan Press and Northwestern University, and of the often semi-visible people whose decisions moved those institutions, always with their own motivations that didn’t necessarily mesh with that of the authors’. Toklas, Wade beautifully elaborates, saw her mission as protecting Baby’s legacy. But she was also in love with Stein, and the pain she still carried about Bookstaver shaped how readers accessed that legacy. Joyce wanted his Ulysses to be published, and he wanted to finally be able to make a living from his writing. The Little Review helped with that, until it didn’t, and in fact Anderson and Heap’s conviction put a stake in any hope Joyce had of obtaining an American publisher (that ended up taking until 1934, and required another court decision). But by the time Ellmann’s Joyce came around, the scandalous Ulysses was now one of the landmarks of modern literature.
While many of these books center on the modernist period, another innovative new literary biography is the first full life of a writer whose career mapped almost exactly onto the Cold War era, even if the Cold War was rarely his subject. Definitive biographies often look like definitive biographies, which is the case with Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story. The book is thick and substantial, with a striking three-quarter profile photograph of its subject, James Baldwin, on its stark cover, and an alluringly pebbled dust jacket (in the Macmillan U.S. edition, at least). This is a book you want to carry around, plop on coffeehouse tables, and maybe even caress for a good long while.
You’ll need to, because its 720 pages replace the brisk storytelling of the other biographies discussed here with detail and documentation instead (though it’s still a lot more dynamic than Ellmann’s Joyce, and perhaps Ellmann’s Joyce too). What puts it in this category is not necessarily its purely chronological structure but rather its founding principle: that we need to understand Baldwin’s life through his loves. The book’s sections, but also Boggs’s interpretation of Baldwin’s personal, aesthetic, and political evolution, correspond to the men he loved, and the relationships he cultivated with them, none of which look like marriage (of course) or even monogamy as it is commonly understood.
I don’t love the overused and overdetermined term “queered,” which academics use to mean “complicating the taken-for granted heteronormativity of everyday practices, spaces, and discourses.“ But it can’t be coincidental that so many of these books center on queer people (Ellmann is the exception here). It is the axis of Boggs’s life of Baldwin, of course, but each of them thematizes how queer people in the midcentury forged a diversity of models for romantic relationships, from Stein and Toklas’s mirror image of a hetero marriage to Anderson and Heap’s business and romantic partnership to Baldwin’s serial kinda-monogamy. If the conventional cradle-to-grave literary biography has a taken-for-granted heteronormative ur-structure (birth–education and formation–relationship and marriage–work–death), then these books “queer” that structure. And, as I learned in trying to figure out how to write about a very straight man who had many very visibly queer close friends, you don’t need a queer subject to make a queer book.
