ABSTRACT
For much of the twentieth century, historians in the western world were in full flight from biography as a tool of historical analysis. Students were rarely permitted to write doctoral theses which could be classified as biographical; progressive scholarly journals refused to accept papers based on the life stories of individuals and were reluctant to review biographies; academics who wrote biographies could not count them as research that could help them advance within the university system; and academic historians who made use of this form were eager to distance themselves from the biographical tradition. If tempted – as happened not infrequently – into writing biographical material, they would not admit that they knew anything of the tradition, nor that they belonged to it in any direct way.1
