ABSTRACT
Group biography characteristically focuses on the historical period, its details and atmosphere, in which the subjects lived. Henry James, in his two-volume life of William Wetmore Story, nineteenth-century sculptor and man of letters, proposes a valuable poetics of group biography to accommodate this particular subject. Collective biography narrates many lives and, while depicting them individually, proceeds by a set of organizational criteria with a cumulative purpose. Collective biography dates back to the literate origins of life writing and continues to flourish. National origin and occupation are the main organizational categories of modern collective biographies. Biographical dictionaries tend generally to differ from directories in conception and imagined use. Silver Burdett Press publishes Julian Messner’s series Classic American Writers with lives of Willa Cather, Herman Melville, and Edith Wharton, to date, along with biographical series devoted to African-Americans, Native Americans, American women, and other persons coming from diverse cultural backgrounds, aimed at an audience of young and middle-grade readers.
