ABSTRACT
In English and American literature the greatest publishing successes of the first third of the twentieth century, apart from fiction, lay in biography and autobiography. Assuming that history and biography are to be used side by side rather than merged, it can still be contended that biography is indispensable to the historical student. Like history, biography has its overtones and undertones. The ideal in biography is the patient investigator who can write lives which combine scholarship, interpretive power, and literary charm; which are thorough, expert, and yet full of popular interest. Biography is useful, as a means of breaking down the complexity of wide movements and crowded periods into parts sufficiently simple to the readily grasped and long retained. Finally, one indispensable requirement of a good biography is that it carefully relate the man it treats to history—that it define his position and significance in the broad stream of events.
