The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography

No stranger to the pitfalls of literary biography, Donaldson (Archibald MacLeish) provides a captivating and intimate glimpse of the challenges and rewards of writing lives of novelists and poets. The book, part memoir and part literary criticism, lays bare Donaldson's own process, with his thoughts on topics like incorporating sources, fidelity to the record versus artistic recreations, and ethical considerations. The ideal biographer, as described here, combines an investigative reporter's persistence, a novelist's narrative craft, and a historian's ability to recreate a time and place. In rich case histories of the writers Donaldson has depicted, he isolates some of the challenges he's faced, such as Hemingway's attempts to ensure any biographies of himself conformed with his own self-image, and the elusive reason for Zelda Fitzgeralds's affairs while her husband was writing The Great Gatsby. Donaldson also turns the spotlight on himself and admits mistakes he's made, such as not listening closely enough to John Cheever's widow while writing his biography of the novelist. Sometimes prone to repetition, Donaldson nevertheless offers a fascinating glimpse of what it's like to work at the biographer's craft. (Mar.)