Biographical Reading Research Articles

The Doxies of Daughterhood: Plath, Cixous, and the Father

A s early as 1982 (English translation, 1984) Josette Feral called for comparative investigation of writers such as Sylvia Plath and He1kne Cixous, but until very recently, neither writer has been consistently and seriously considered as a literary figure (in the United States at any rate). Plath criticism, as Jacqueline Rose has exhaustively demonstrated, is so heavily invested in bitterly opposed biographical readings that the complexities of language, sexuality, history, and fantasy in Plath's texts have too often been ignored.' Cixous, on the other hand, has received attention primarily as a French and theorist-even as a literary critic-rather than as a novelist and dramatist. Moreover, detailed analysis of her feminist theory has often been lacking in debates over her reputed essentialism. This situation too has begun to

The Dilemma of Judicial Biography Or Who Cares Who Is the Great Appellate Judge? Gerald Gunther on Learned Hand

I have been reading biographies for the past six months on 19th century and early 20th century figures.' Although I've snarled at their weaknesses, I have also marveled at the deft handling of a complex narrative and smiled at the telling detail. And faced with some variety of structure and emphases, I have pondered the purpose of the judicial biography. How we do judicial biography has been addressed more often than why we do it. In 1948, during a symposium on The Writing of Judicial Biography, a roundtable of discussants tried to lay out some standards as to how judicial biography should be done (these articles still make profitable reading). Charles Fairman argued that the judge should be set against the background of legal history. He warned against treating opinions as literature or philosophy, feeling that such approaches underestimated the importance of the records, the briefs, the reports of the inferior courts. Although his emphasis was clearly on the internal workings of the legal system, Fairman urged investigation into the social conflicts which gave rise to the dispute

The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat, 1601-1665 (review)

REVIEWS 371 Especially fascinating is this book's analysis of atypical photographs of famous women—a risque Eleanor Roosevelt, a familial Gertrude Stein dandling her nephew on her knee, a flight-suited Anne Morrow Lindbergh as copilot for her husband. Wagner-Martin shows how these photographs revise the usual restrictive images of these women, stock images that reinforce the cliches and preconceptions that hobble biographers as they approach a subject. One of the objectives in studying women of the past—and present—is to discover inspiring precursors. Yet a new biographical pitfall has supplanted the hagiographie maternal and wifely platitudes of the past, the temptation to see all women's lives as feminist narratives, to find in every female biography a paradigm of feminist achievement. As feminist biographers, critics, and historians, we naturally want to locate a perfect map, a feminist profile of personal discovery and affirmation wherever we can find it, but we must also avoid taking Procrustean steps to deliver this model, rather than face the unwelcome news that not every famous woman has the feminist commitments we might wish to discover. Indeed, the stories of women who turned coat, who opposed feminist initiatives, who neglected other women, who want to remain the only woman in the boardroom , have lessons to teach us as well, albeit harsh ones. Reading biography is one way of reminding us of the long road to reform. Annette Wheeler Cafarelli Columbia University MICHAEL SEAN MAHONEY, The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermât, 16011665 . 2d edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. xx + 432 pp. |18.95 paperback . A complete biography of Fermât would include details of his personal and professional life, along with his mathematical career. This book focuses on the latter aspect, yet so much is included of his background and administrative career that one must regard this work as definitive. Mahoney is Professor of History at Princeton. The first edition (1973) represented five years of work at the beginning of his career. This edition incorporates corrections, results from more modern literature, and his own research in later years. A modern academic, reading Mahoney's biography of Fermât, would be struck by the thin network of numerical practitioners in the seventeenth century, and the lack of publication outlets. Indeed, our modern apparatus of scholarly communication had not yet been invented, or was in its raw infancy. This sets in perspective the intriguing task faced by Mahoney: how to show the brilliance of Fermat's thinking, the rather quick pace of dissemination of Fermat's results in the face of his reluctance to publish, and the necessity of inventing equations that would make Greek and Arab discoveries and conjectures usable by his correspondents. Fermât is best known by today's layman for his "Last Theorem," written in the margin of a book, saying that he did not have enough room to show a truly marvelous demonstration that what any schoolboy knows as the Pythagorean theorem on right triangles, x2 + y2 = z2, had no solution except when the exponent was 2. Apart from that statement, Fermât created modern number theory (it was 372 biography Vol. 18, No. 4 ignored for many decades), was one of the inventors of analytic geometry, and unknowingly laid early foundations for differential and integral calculus. But Mahoney quite clearly states: "Fermât sought neither curves nor functions; he sought areas, and he found them. . . . He did not invent the calculus." Along with Pascal, he created certain theoretical guidelines for probability theory—and all this while being a shy and reclusive bureaucrat in Toulouse. Born at the beginning of the century, Fermât enjoyed the advantage of wealth. He attended the university at Toulouse, graduated in law, and purchased the offices of conseiller and commissaire with the help of his wife's dowry. He was then able to add de to his name as a member of the noblesse de robe. One of his rare noted professional deeds was to help "organize the customary laws of his birthplace , Beaumont." Mahoney first sketches the diversity of numerical efforts in the seventeenth century, in six categories: the classical geometers, to whom the young Fermât was sympathetic; the cossist...

Grace Paley's Life Stories: A Literary Biography.

Is Faith Darwin Asbury really Grace Paley? Or is it coincidental that the personal history, politics, and relationships of the fictional Asbury seem to mirror those of the well-known author? And do other characters in Paley's stories represent individuals she has known, in scenes and entire episodes she has experienced? A writer who translates her life into art not only saves her own life, according to Paley, but offers others the revelation of its meaning. That idea is at the core of Judith Arcana's biographical reading of this strongly autobiographical writer. Grace Paley's Life Stories interweaves details about Paley with critical discussions of her works, examining her as a woman, mother, activist, and Jew. Arcana visited and interviewed Paley at her homes in Vermont and New York over a period of several years. She also interviewed Paley's family, friends, and colleagues. Such extensive research is unmatched in Paley scholarship; Arcana's focus on the political crucible of Paley's consciousness is rare in contemporary literary criticism.

Of Archivists and Other Termites

Archivists have long sought greater public awareness and understanding of archives, believing that this would lead to increased support. Generally, though, demonstrations of archival competence have not yielded adequate resources. In our focus on scholarly users and executive resource allocators we have ignored natural allies whose urge to remember is expressed through historic preservation, antique collecting, genealogy, and reading history and biography. Borrowing perspectives from biology and philosophy can help us in our quest and give us another sense of the meaning and value in our work. We must broaden our perspective to see our work as serving a universal human need to connect among people and across time through acts of memory.

Stalky and the Language of Education

When he wrote Stalky cjf Co. (1899),1 Rudyard Kipling had become a master stylist. The book retains its appeal nearly a century later but no longer as a manual for training administrators of the British Empire, which is how many early critics interpreted it. Rather, it can be read as a celebration of language, boys' language—how they sift and assimilate both their cultural heritage and their immediate experiences through it, and how this prepares them to confront the challenges of adulthood. The book is about education, and a reader's experience with its language constitutes the very process of education as Kipling envisions it. Stalky A–1 Co. tells the story of three English schoolboys in about 1880. The school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! was a corporation established in 1874 by military officers who could not afford distinguished schools but who wanted their sons well enough educated to pass entrance exams into military academies. Operated the cheap (Smith 8), the school occupied a row of connected buildings facing the Atlantic in North Devon. Kipling immortalized those twelve bleak houses by the shore where the boys endured plenty of raw weather and never much food (Something 46). Because the three boys (Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle) and all other characters are modeled on real people, the book is often treated solely as a roman A clef. Indeed, the three (L. C. Dunsterville, G. C. Beresford, and Kipling himself) later wrote autobiographical accounts augmenting or revising their fictional selves. But exclusively biographical readings seem inadequate. Kipling's imagination ran with a free rein once he escaped the bonds of journalism during his seven years' hard in India (Something 56). Moreover, he developed a poetic process of composition that emphasized the sound and rhythm of language. This polyglossic (and polysonic) style coupled with his high-speed imagination radically transformed events and people, blurring fact and fantasy. The distance between fictive language and reality became Shakespearean, which explains why a

The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (review)

REVIEWS 337 mediated by ethnographers, the personal narrative of the founder of the "Egyptian Feminist Union" (155), and African-American and French-Canadian autobiographies . Part three, "Double Messages: Maternal Legacies/Mythographies," includes essays on Margaret Oliphant, Audre Lorde, Nathalie Sarraute and Christa Wolf as well as a discussion of two Francophone writers. "De-Limiting Genre: Other Autobiographical Acts," the final section, expands the realm of autobiography with discussions of poetry and autobiography, eighteenth-century German epistolary tradition, the invented autobiographical form of a "Jewish woman in occupied France" (14), and women's self-representation in film. These essays, then, range from discussions of a female self and its many autobiographical representations, inventions, and challenges , to reconsiderations of the boundaries of autobiography as a genre. Life/Lines is an apt metaphor for this important book. Collectively the authors toss sturdy ropes into the sometimes "troubled waters" of feminist autobiography theory; they offer "essential routes of communication"; and they suggest the intricacy and inscrutability of women's life-lines—both lived and imagined. Its innovative theoretical discussions, its inclusivity, and its intelligence make this anthology a key resource for scholars of women's studies, feminist theory, and autobiography studies. Hertha D. Wong California State University, Chico Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. 203 pp. $27.50. In a spirit of neologism quite congenial with Michael J. Shapiro's TL· Politics of Representation : Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis, one might call Shapiro's chapter on "Reading Biography" an epistemographic essay. That is, Shapiro's project is to analyze the relation between writing and knowing, with the goal of understanding both activities as forms of inventing, extending, buttressing, or displacing political power. In his introductory essay on "The Problem of Ideology," Shapiro places ideology "within the metaphorical terrain of reading and writing. . . . Ideological production [can then] be characterized as a kind of writing and ideological thinking as a kind of reading, an enforced dyslexia wherein the reader is disenabled by being encouraged to adopt a politically insensitive view of the surrounding social formation and the objects, relationships, and events it contains" (6). Ideological dyslexia does not have to do with distorting the facts; on the contrary, one of the primary targets of Shapiro's criticism is the empiricist assumption that the "facts" are themselves prior to, rather than constructed during, the process of writing. Shapiro's emphasis throughout the book is on how practices of writing reflect and reproduce ways of apprehending or knowing reality which are in complicity with political forms of managing and controlling society. Shapiro wants to understand how various texts "contain meaning, how certain representational practices do their work, a work that can be arranged along a continuum of political challenge versus pious inscription of some aspect of entrenched power and authority" (67). One of the first things that will strike many readers as odd in Shapiro's chapter on biography is his wide-ranging and eclectic choice of texts for analysis, which sets autobiographies , novels, sociological studies, and sports telecasting alongside a few biogra- 338 biography Vol. 12, No. 4 phies. The effect of this eclecticism is to direct attention to the "biographical codes" operating in all of these texts to construct closely interdependent senses of selfhood and social obligation. Shapiro elicits these themes from a series of pairs of texts which offer contrasting examples of the assumptions which govern narrative and interpretive choices. For instance, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and Herman Melville's Israel Potter, with its sharply satiric portrait of Franklin, illustrate the basic polarity between pious and critical writing. Shapiro juxtaposes TL· Education of Henry Adams and JeanJacques Rousseau's Confessions in order to analyze the effects of the grammatical status afforded to the authorial voice. More complex issues, including what makes a given subject 's life worth understanding, emerge from the comparison of Jean-Paul Sartre's life of Flaubert and Michel Foucault's publication of and commentary upon the autobiographies of Herculine Barbin and Pierre Riviere. Shapiro's central preoccupation is always with the imposition of meaning upon individuals' lives, as in Benjamin Franklin's...

Eugene O’Neill’s Joseph: A Touch of the Dreamer

Since the publication in 1963 of John Henry Raleigh's Eugene O'Neill and the Escape from the Château ďlf,l the influence of James O'Neill's long-running stage romance Monte Cristo has become a given in any biographical reading of his son's works. But a play in which James acted after his final tour as Edmund Dantes in 1912, Joseph and His Brethren, may offer some further insight into the figure who appears in many of Eugene's plays the young man with a touch of the poet, the dreamer set apart from his fellows. Like the story of Edmund Dantes, the account of Joseph in the final chapters of Genesis develops themes closely parallel to those in O'Neill's plays: e.g., Joseph's sharply delimited role as a son and a brother; his sense of personal destiny; the descent into a pit, brought on by brothers' jealousy and ill-will; his disastrous dealings with women; his eventual re-emergence in power; and perhaps most crucially, his healing final gesture of forgiveness and family reconciliation. These themes in the Joseph story may even be said to define an essential aspect of O'Neill's writings. In the Genesis story (chapters 37-50) Joseph is the firstborn of Jacob's favored wife Rachel but younger than the sons of his father's other wife Leah. Joseph's brothers turn against him after he reveals a dream that seems to prophesy his eventual ascendancy in the family. The fine coat of many colors that Jacob gives him finally drives the brothers to violence. They cast Joseph into a pit, then sell him to itinerant slave traders who carry him to Egypt. There he soon becomes chief steward in Potiphar's house until his chaste rejection of Potiphar's wife provokes her to accuse him of trying to seduce her.

Leon Edel and Literary Art (review)

Reviewed by: Leon Edel and Literary Art William H. Epstein Lyall H. Powers , ed. Leon Edel and Literary Art. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988. 192 pp. $39.95. This festschrift celebrating Leon Edel's eightieth birthday is even more of a mixed bag than such productions usually are. Besides poems by William S. Merwin, Marjorie Sinclair, and Diane Wakoski, an excerpt from a novel by Michael Ondaatje, an essay with eight drawings by Lamb House's present occupant Sir Brian Cook Batsford, two one-paragraph "Letters to Leon" by Merwin and Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, two cartoons by M. G. Lord, a biographical introduction and tribute by Lyall Powers, two informal essays on writing biography and reading James by Joseph Blotner and Cynthia Ozick, and ten more or less scholarly articles on Edelian biography, biography as a genre, various fictions by James, and some social, literary, and historical contexts that James and a few of his contemporaries (Hopkins, Wharton, Woolf, Dreiser) deployed in their work, the volume also features an interview with James Baldwin, who reveals how another voluntary exile living among Europeans but writing about Americans "became, in a sense, [End Page 646] my master." "It was something about point of view, something about discipline," Baldwin muses on the example of Henry James. "And something about the silence in which I myself was living." Three of these contributions have appeared elsewhere, two are revisions and one a translation of previously published work. Of the scholarly essays, Robert Bernard Martin's meticulous exploration of possible sources for Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland" in contemporary newspaper accounts of a shipwreck and Hopkins' experiences at a Jesuit novitiate offers the closest parallel (and, in a sense, the most sincere tribute) to the persuasive power and critical elegance of Edel's psychobiographical methodology. Adeline Tintner's claim that there is "A Source for James' The Ambassadors in Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533)" is a characteristic example of this prolific critic's thorough command of James's work and life, but I found her reading of the novel somewhat mechanical. One can make more or less the same assessment of S. P. Rosenbaum's analysis of Virginia Woolf s use of her early diaries, Sergio Perosa's thematic study of "The Aspern Papers," and Powers' exploration of James's notion of "the missed experience": solid, careful, sensible, and knowledgeable, but practicing biographical criticism in a less sophisticated manner than this collection's dedicatee. Such epigonal slippage is also evident in the essays dealing with writing and reading biography. Blotner provides a few conflicted observations on his research technique and proclaims his ignorance of biographical theory. Dennis Petrie and Daniel Mark Fogel celebrate Edelian biography but never escape a rather old-fashioned stylistic approach: that is, Edel is a great biographer because he writes well, manipulating his material and his prose as if he were a novelist. This is to mystify rather than to clarify the issue. Novel-writing has a constantly changing history; it is not a stable cultural practice; life-writing's relationship with it is also constantly shifting. Indeed, why privilege the novelistic? Couldn't the early English novel (or the modern American novel) just as easily and inadequately be described as biographical because it stresses the verisimilitude of individual experience? It is (among other things) the ongoing relationships between the novelistic and the biographical (in all their various, unstable modes) that need to be recognized and articulated here, although not in the timid, oblique manner of Abraham Edel, who tries to use philosophical discourse to place "Biography Among the Disciplines." "In some respects [he concludes] it would be worth exploring the notion of the biographer . . . as not merely the writer of lives but as the theorist of lives. . . . Perhaps too, then, there is a dimension of making lives in the task of writing lives." Beginning rather than ending with this crucial premise is the way to make a significant contribution to the poetics of biography in the late twentieth century. One might have conjectured that the legacy of Leon Edel would have included such a stipulation, but, judging from this and other testaments to his example and influence, one...

Victorian Biography: A Collection of Essays from the Period (review)

366 biography Vol. 10, No. 4 the self-denigrating and wry caution psychoanalysts, and one might add now psychohistorians , give themselves: "Do not generalize from one case," they will say, "generalize from two." Steven Weiland University of Minnesota NOTES 1. Richard Ellmann, "Freud and Literary Autobiography." The American Scholar 54 (1985), 465-79. Peter Loewenberg's "Psychohistory: An Overview of the Field" includes extensive citations for the debate between historians and psychoanalysts (Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach [New York: Knopf, 1984]). In a recent essay, political scientist Michael Shapiro asks this question in the context of a discussion of psychobiography: "Why, one might ask, are some lives described and others not, and why are the descriptions cast in psychological versus political or other modes of writing? What do the representational or discursive practises of various historical periods tell us about what is regarded as important, authoritative and legitimate?" ("Reading Biography ," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16 [1986], 331-65.) 2. A. L. Louch, Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 223-4. 3. Thomas Kohut, "Psychohistory as History," American Historical Review 91 (1986), 336-54. Ira Bruce Nadel, ed., Victorian Biography: A Collection of Essays from the Period. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986. Unpaged. $40.00. The Victorian muse was elegant, erudite and, above all, literate. These complete essays by some of the great names in nineteenth and early twentieth-century criticism and biography are gracious, leisurely and highly intelligent. This gathering of primary material on biography from 1832 to 1911 introduces us to many of the issues seen by the Victorians as central to the genre. Without exception, these writers see the biographer's task as the depiction of a single individual's life: the essence of character, in Leslie Stephen's phrase. It should be portrayed openly and honestly, they argue, yet with sympathy. And in an age when biographies often ran to more than one volume, Sidney Lee (Leslie Stephen's assistant and then successor at the DNB) sees "discriminating brevity" as essential to proper method. In this, Lee typifies the move during the nineteenth century towards briefer biographies, more critical and selective. Most of the critics, from Thomas Carlyle (1832, 1838) to Edmund Gosse (1901), agree on the importance of letters. Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and founding editor of the DNB, considers that "while letters become less important as records of events, they preserve their full significance as revelations of character; and that is what the biographer chiefly requires." Edmund Purcell quotes with approval Cardinal Newman's judgment (itself contained in a letter) that "the true life of a man is in his letters" and that "contemporary letters are facts." Charles Whibley, more prudent, adds a cautionary note. In "The Limits of Biography" (1897), he finds the authority of letters to be suspect; removed from their original context, they too easily become "the easiest instrument of falsehood and distortion." REVIEWS 367 As the editor notes in a brief but solid introduction, Stephen was instrumental in shaping the course of nineteenth-century biography and its transition to the twentieth. His 1893 essay "Biography" defends the place of biographical dictionaries despite their limitations of space. A skillful writer can make facts imply far more than they state: "To write a life is to collect the particular heap of rubbish in which his material is contained, to sift the relevant from the superincumbent mass, and then try to smelt it and cast it into its natural mold. . . . The most interesting problem—that of the development of the human character—is generally the most inscrutable." Many of the writers urge candour rather than the suppression of damaging or sensitive information. However all are very aware of the position of trust and responsibility held by the biographer. Publisher George Bentley and novelists Margaret Oliphant and Mrs. Humphrey Ward discuss the issue. In "Sincerity in Biography" (1881), Bentley urges that Carlyle's gold "must need have some alloy," some qualifying colour to tone down an idolatrous portrait. Wilfrid Ward outlines the difference between balanced portraiture and the exaggeration of caricature. Flaws should be included, but proportion is all. Mrs. Oliphant ("The Ethics...

The Death of Empedocles

Empedocles' jump into Etna has fascinated both scholars and poets from ancient until modern times. ** Diogenes Laertius gave two versions of the jump; Matthew Arnold made it the subject of his long dramatic poem, Empedocles on Etna. The more one probes into the story, the more fascinating it is, as it becomes ever more clear that Empedocles was doomed to die in this particular manner. Not that he actually jumped into the volcano; rather, the manner of his death was determined by his biographers, by historians and compilers and, finally, by Empedocles himself. Empedocles' own works provided the ultimate source for those who wrote about him, and the way in which his philosophy was transformed into biography reveals more about ancient biographers, such as Diogenes Laertius, than it does about Empedocles. There was a tendency in the ancient world to approach any given text as biographical.1 Homer's life was pieced together from the Iliad and Odyssey; Aeschylus was presumed to have fought at Salamis because he describes that battle. Nearly all the biographical data that have come down to us from the ancient critics and historians about the lives of the poets were taken from their own poetry. The same case can be made for the lives of the philosophers. The legend of Empedocles neatly demonstrates this ancient tendency towards a biographical reading. A large enough body of Empedocles' own work is still extant, so that many of the legends and events about his life can be traced back to their original source. Since Empedocles was such a popular figure for the bi-

An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (review)

272 biography Vol. 4, No. 3 works, purports to be pure biography, Dowling's approach may prove disturbing to some. Throughout the study, the author seems aware of possible objections against his reading biography as a self-contained literary world, "making no reference to any 'real' Boswell, [or] any 'real' Johnson" (p. 90). The Life of Johnson, he asserts, is a big book. It can be read in as many ways as there are methods to approach it. Thus, his own "argument about the role of the hero in Boswell" should "be judged in its own terms, and these are just the terms in which an interpretation of King Lear or Bleak House would be judged sound or unsound " (pp. 187-88). To support this approach, Dowling appeals to Aristotle's "universality of literary meaning," the idea that poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history (p. 188). It should be, noted, however, that poetry will be more universal than history precisely because the poet is not, like the historian—or the modern biographer , I might add—constrained by the facts. In evoking the bios form, Dowling may perhaps have buttressed his argument by drawing on another classical tradition that sees the biographer as moralist first, historian second and holds that the biographer-as-moralist may take liberties with the facts to get at the meaning behind them. This tradition, however, would not help with Boswell, who frequently commends the accuracy of his own scientific method. As the Life of Johnson attests, the modern biographer can certainly employ literary patterns to shape a life history. But there is a point at which the biographer (unlike the poet) must stop, or his work ceases to be biography and becomes something else. Engaging as it is at times, Dowling's attempt to read biography as fiction tends to blur the important distinctions between the two, distinctions that make biography the unique genre it is. We would not ask "Pray tell me, Sir, where in Westminster Abbey do we find Lear?" We would ask this about Johnson. And in even the most "literary" of approaches to the Life, the "real" Samuel Johnson—as elusive a figure as he is—must be taken into account. Christopher Fox Wilkes College Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 266 pp. $16.50. Voltairine de Cleyre was one of that rare breed, an indigenous American anarchist. Though much loved by her comrades, she was little known outside that small circle of friends; her advocacy of and work reviews 273 for the principles of anarchy generated no mass following among her contemporaries of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Not surprisingly , her work has been largely ignored by historians. Paul Avrich's biography of Cleyre is therefore the first scholarly attempt to understand this woman's fascinating life. Avrich seeks not only to illuminate the "rich drama" of her career, but hopes to indicate how she helped influence the character of the American anarchist movement. He recognizes that Cleyre was only a "distinguished minor member" ofthat select club of radicals, yet suggests that an examination of her life can make the movement itself more comprehensible. Alas, Avrich is not altogether successful in these endeavors. Born in Michigan in 1866, Voltairine de Cleyre lived but forty-five years. Despite the brevity of her life, she spanned the Golden Age of American anarchy, as her friendship and association with Emma Goldman , Alexander Berkman, Benjamin Tucker, Dyer Lum and others attests . She shared with these men and women many of the intellectual dilemmas and emotional experiences that shaped the anarchist perspective . Like many of her colleagues, Cleyre slowly moved towards a form of ecumenical anarchism ("anarchy without adjectives"), one devoid of rigid economic and political dogma. Her vacillation on the issue of the use of violence to overthrow a repressive state was characteristic of the movement generally; only near the end of her life was she inclined to accept the need for force. Another aspect of Cleyre's career involves the role of women in American culture. She and others objected not simply to America's political framework but...

The matchmaker who fell for Brazil

Ian Gilbert, chairman of the British Match Corporation, is fond of good wine, golfing and reading biographies. But his overriding love is Brazil—a country he has courted regularly since the age of 27.

Whitman's Awakening to Death: Toward a Biographical Reading of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

Whitman's Awakening to Death: Toward a Biographical Reading of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

Achievement of Basic Aims through Reading Biography

Achievement of Basic Aims through Reading Biography