BIOGRAPHY PAST AND PRESENT: SELECTIONS AND CRITICAL ESSAYS.

Edited by William H. Davenport '29 andBen Siegel. New York: Charles Scribner'sSons, 1965. 472 pp. $3.95 (paper bound).

In the foreword the editors state that the book "is intended to be functional and is aimed primarily at teachers and students." Further they say that "an anthology of this kind is at best a guided tour to scattered points of interest in one literary area." In this enterprise the editors take a "broad view" and include much that a definition-monger would leave out. They have much in their minds to warrant their eclecticism, for the field of writings about individual characters is indeed broad. One pauses, however, when the expression "literary genre" is employed, for if caution is not used with it too much is implied to fall into any clear meaning for the word Biography.

However this may be, William Davenport and Ben Siegel offer in this collection a lively and deliberately scattered sampling of exhibits in and about biography which is calculated to stimulate teachers and students rather than to freeze definitions. They meet the public challenge of widespread popularity for biography with examples of the art from various times and climes among which are sprinkled essays in criticism which are lively. It is obviously no intention of the editors to be didactic, for the modern critics vary as much in their assumptions as in their pronouncements. W. S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Bernard DeVoto, Edward Hayes O'Neill, and Iris Origo in one panel would hardly leave Sam Johnson unruffled and there would not be "an end on't."

There is not likely soon to be an end to the appraisal of biography, which, as Harold Nicolson has reminded us, thrives on the breaking down of institutions. Its forms vary with the interests and the functions that it serves, to say nothing of the variety of persons depicted. One welcomes this different sort of anthology, different in that it does not pretend to offer what the editors declare to be "the best" examples; while at the same time one is at least stimulated into wondering why this choice among the Plutarchs or the Johnsons rather than that."

The editors state a fair case and they offer lively wares. They also strongly suggest, although they do not dogmatize. They suggest that biographical writings have earned a distinct place among the stimuli and responses of 20th Century culture. By designing the anthology for students and teachers they make it fairly obvious that they think that biography may be a discipline.

Professor of Biography