A Sum of Parts

The Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle once declared, “No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, believed that biography — having one’s peccadilloes and failings encased in amber —“lends to death a new terror.” More recently, the American novelist Thomas McGuane suggested that any future chronicler of his life ignore him altogether and concentrate on his dogs.

But for readers, it’s not hard to understand the continued appeal of the genre, which offers an insider’s view of the lives — private as much as public — of great men and women. (The latter were excluded by Carlyle, though a tradition of female biography is, of course, many centuries old.)

A human life is as natural an organizing principle for putting major events into context as any, and it has the advantage of pretty firm boundaries, unlike “the Middle Ages” or “the long eighteenth century.” Several years ago, I encountered...