ABSTRACT
In March 2002 two massive biographies of Primo Levi appeared in Britain, to much critical acclaim and attention: Carole Angier's The Double Bond, Primo Levi, A Biography, and Ian Thomson's Primo Levi. Ian Thomson's biography declares itself from the outset as committed to a model of enquiry and writing based on research and sober sequence. A final element of structure to note, an exception which proves the rule, is the framing of the biography by chapters on Levi's suicide. Biography has tended to be subsumed within a larger field of so-called 'Life-Writing', containing all the myriad ways and forms in which the experience of an individual life is recorded. Beyond institutional obstacles, however, there have also been 'internal' forces pushing biography away from the chiselled certainties of conventional 'lives'. The battle of the Levi biographies represents a fascinating case study of the state of biography in the English-speaking world.
