ABSTRACT
T He Many Pathways To the study of biography, for both author and reader, converge into two main avenues: the historical and the psychological. Naturally, the historical is often deeply pervaded with psychological insight, and the psychological, as in analysis itself, reflects heavily on historical reconstruction. But in general the historical is regarded as objective, “factual,” an impartial record of events by an unbiased observer or investigator. The psychological, on the other hand, leans on the subjective response of the biographer, requiring extensive use of interpretation and a search for data quite different from those of conventional biography. The historian wants to know how the public man fit in with the broad movements of his (or her) time and people. But after the smoke of battle has cleared and the grand design has been (more or less) understood, we still long to know the inner man, the self that is not all that different from us, that offers an opening for human resonance and identification. W. H. Auden (1937, p. 33) sums it up in a few lines of a sonnet: A shilling life will give you all the facts: How Father beat him, how he ran away. What were the struggles of his youth, what acts made him the greatest figure of his day. Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night, though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea: Some of the last researchers even write love made him weep his pints like you and me.
