ABSTRACT
The reactions of the people suggest that we all have deep reservations about subjectivity. No matter how loudly we praise introspection and the cultivation of self-awareness, subjectivity remains a frightening thing. People who cultivate subjectivity are thought to be self-centered, reclusive, inactive, and unproductive. Scholarship and professional activities are public functions in which all the values opposed to subjectivity have traditionally been cultivated. The many associations attached to the opposition of objective and subjective constitute a cultural inhibition to recapturing subjectivity for theory and knowledge. If subjectivity is truly to be recaptured for public knowledge, it must be integrated into the more acceptable dimensions of the knowledge of lives. But biography is the perfect enterprise in which to transcend that ideal and show the value of assimilating subjectivity in a larger conception of knowledge. Biography has always been a locus of subjectivity, although this attitude has been assigned to the readers rather than the authors of biographies.
