February 4, 2000
Biography Can Escape the Tyranny of Facts
Biography, as a genre, has always had its detractors, but rarely has the noise level of dissent reached such a volume. It isn't all the fault of Edmund Morris, whose controversial biography of Ronald Reagan mixed fact and fiction in ways that drew feigned shrieks of outrage from reviewers last fall. Not long before that, John Updike, writing in The New York Review of Books, suggested that biographies of literary figures, in particular, were far too long, and
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