Keynes as Biographer and Obituarist

Abstract

In John Maynard Keynes’s Collected Writings there are forty-five biographical essays, sixteen of which are obituaries from the Economic Journal. The obituaries in the Economic Journal were very important to Keynes. The Collected Writings attempt ‘to publish a complete record of Keynes’s serious writing as an economist’ and in Essays in Biography ‘to include not only his major but also his minor writings both about economists and his friends in King’s’. In this paper, however, it is argued that not all of Keynes’s biographical writings are included in his Collected Writings. There may be over ten additional obituaries authored by Keynes that are not included in the Collected Writings version of Essays in Biography. Two of these are definitely attributable to Keynes, one of which is half of Ramsey’s obituary in The Times. During Keynes’s editorship of the Economic Journal there were fourteen anonymous obituaries in the Economic Journal. It is argued that almost all of these were authored by Keynes. In addition to the obituaries in the Economic Journal, there were announcements of death. It is argued that most, if not all, of the announcements of death in the Economic Journal during Keynes’s editorship were also written by him.