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The Impossible Craft

Literary Biography
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Explores the challenges and rewards faced by literary biographers. Details the author's experiences writing the lives of writers including Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, and Archibald MacLeish.


Contents

Abbreviations

1 Beginnings

Biography: A Background Sketch

Becoming a Biographer

And Then I Wrote . . .

The Editor’s Hand: Hemingway

Fitzgerald and the Craft

The Amazing Archibald MacLeish

A Dual Biography of Fitz and Hem

Recovering Robinson

Other Chores, On to Fenton

2 Topics in Literary Biography

Fact and Fiction

Writers as Subjects

Ethical Issues

Sources: Letters

Sources: Interviews

3 The Impossible Craft

The Issue of Involvement

Trying to Capture Hemingway

The Mythical Ideal Biographer

What Biography Can’t Do

And Yet . . .

4 Case Studies

Telling Robinson’s Story: The Fight over a Poet’s Bones

Summer of ’24: Zelda’s Affair

Hemingway’s Battle with Biographers, 1949–1954

5 The Cheever Misadventure

Writing the Cheever

The Lawsuit

The Next Biography

Bibliography


“This well-written study belongs in the hands of every would-be or seasoned writer and every impassioned reader and teacher.”

—Dale Salwak, Biography

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