When I indulge in my secret hobby of reading writer biographies, I prefer the ones written before 1980. Ideally, long before 1980.
The older generation of biographers allowed the story to take them wherever it would. These days, the author comes up with a theory or an organizing principle of the subject’s life and then massages the story to fit the theory. This is especially bad in autobiographies where every event becomes “one more step on the way to my enormous success.” And that sucks because human lives don’t have an organizing principle. We can attach narratives to them a posteriori but that’s always fake.
Another problem with recent biographies is the blasted Internet. Research has become so darn easy that biographers can’t resist the temptation to list every casual acquaintance of the subject and every word that ever passed the subject’s lips. An example of this strategy is this biography of Maugham whose review got me persecuted for years by a bunch of the author’s faithful fans.
This is why I only buy my biographies in old and musty used book stores.
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