Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse: The Life And Death Of An American Writer

Rather than reading something that brings you down, or reading something that has no purpose, when you read something inspiring it makes people feel good or encourages them or even makes them smile. When a writer writes a biography about a persons life yes the he or she tries to portray the truth but he or she is also giving inspiration to the reader or even giving them a role model to follow. That is why it is more important that the biography is inspiring rather than being impartial. To get the reader inspired and to maybe make a change in the

A biography is defined as a written account of another person 's life. The key word in the definition being another person’s life. Biographies are full of great information that can often times make history fun and exciting. Historical phenomenon is often portrayed through biographies allowing us to see how society has developed over time and how the past and present may be similar. Although biographies are full of information often times it is impossible to prove them to be true because they aren’t written by the person themselves. Linda Colley’s The ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh is a great example of an exciting biography that allows us to learn about British Imperial Rule through someone else’s eyes.

Holden’s huge personality conduces a very mutually honest relationship between the reader and the protagonist. Holden becomes personal with the reader very quickly by his use of slang, honesty, and profanity, “The immediacy of rapport between the reader and Holden stems, in part, from the confessional nature of The Catcher in the Rye,” (Bloom, 46). Holden tells his truth and the reader honestly engages. Holden tells his story to a friend, the reader. The reader is a friend who doesn’t judge, but rather supports, agrees with, and sympathizes with Holden (Moore, 4).

Richard’s biography is considered the best biography available for Emily Dickinson. Moreover, he begins the biography by saying “Almost nothing to do with Emily Dickinson is simple and clear-cut…. It is the delicate business of the biographer to explore and assess the reasons why” (3). Sewall explains difficult subjects with ease, such as the difficulty of figuring out and explaining her life. While many authors would use their extensive vocabulary to impress the reader, which is often seen as pretentious, Richard does not. Likewise, the reason for something like a biography is to help the reader learn about the subject’s life, not learn something inconsequential. Sewall does this spectacularly, he explains questions he poses at the beginning of the

No success of mine---if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life,---what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,---may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" (Hawthorne 10)

life can be attributed to the fact that his era was not one of biography, casual

Near the end of the novel the narrator realises the limitations in the depiction of character and event:

Over the years I have interviewed a good number of people, but there has never been anyone quite like John McWhorter. Upon reading the article “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English” as published in the 2009 Fall edition of World Affairs, I found myself delighted by the mellow but powerful tone and the writer who could use it with such ease. Here was a man with brains, consideration, and humor. Lost in my reveries about what McWhorter would be like, I didn’t quite realize that I had somehow dialed his office number until a deep voice filtered through the receiver. “Yes? McWhorter speaking.”

The biographical approach is a popular approach for analyzing literature; however, Wolff claims that, especially with Dickinson, it is overused. Wolff claims that while one cannot begin with only a biographical approach to fully understand the complexity of Dickinson’s poetry, a critical reader is also missing something if he or she does not respond at all to the biographical element in Dickinson’s

He himself refers to childhood as the ‘first part of us to die’ and in this way the world of fantasy too dies. In our adult lives we tend not to create fantasy narratives through the objects we surround ourselves with, at least not in the same way. Objects take on a much more complex role of narrative and history the longer we possess them, and we call this object biography.

James A. Michener’s The Novel details the creation of the titular novel as it passes through the hands of four different characters in their respective chapters to reach completion. These four characters—the writer, Lukas Yoder; the editor, Yvonne Marmelle; the critic, Karl Streibert; and the reader, Jane Garland—each contribute to the story in some way and are each necessary to its creation and success in varying ways and in various magnitudes. However, the one who was the most integral to the creation of Lukas Yoder’s final work was Yvonne Marmelle, his long-time editor who never gave up on him. Michener’s story is done in a very unique way and provides much knowledge for the reader to gain in regards to literature as a whole.

J. D. Salinger became one of the most popular and known American authors in America today. Up to this day students from all over the country have read and purchased the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” which was a novel that was not so long ago controversial due to vulgar language, sexual references, and unacceptable behavior; parents were concerned that J. D. Salinger’s novel was going to influence their children. Salinger was one of many authors that stood out more from a group of authors that wrote simply about society. Salinger on the other hand criticised the society by using the word “phony” most of the time. The word phony meant fake, false, and fraudulent and by the 1950’s the word became used more and more frequently. Some of Salinger’s famous pieces of work like Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, The Catcher in the Rye , and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction presented themes such as love,war, death, and the reminiscing of something. The themes widely connected to J. D. Salinger by reason of his personal experiences and character traits . The success of J. D. Salinger was reached by personally experiencing the drafting to war and actively writing about his surroundings.

This literature bridging text and context, helped me understand that every author when he writes a story he puts in it details that relate to his life. Behind every story there is a life, the life of the author who wrote it.

biography of the artist” (Rosenberg, pg 590). By this he means when the artist takes the time to act and create a painting then that resulting painting has forever captured a moment specific to the artist’s life. Therefore the painting is a biography of that certain moment specific to the

The second issue discussed by the art historians is the sender of a work. In this section, Bal and Bryson define and differentiate the composition of the ‘’artist’’ of a work. First, there is the concept of the sender as an individual, or J. Bloggs, as they call him. J. Bloggs stands for the name of the individual, ‘’a designation, not a description;[…] it does not assign any particular characteristics to its bearer’’(p.181). The second aspect of the sender is the author, which is ‘’in the works, in a body of artifacts and in the complex operations performed on them’’(p.181). It is the notions of enframement that distinguishes J.Bloggs from the author, which is what Bal and Bryson identify as ‘’an elaborate work of framing, something we can elaborately produce rather than something we simply find’’ (p. 181).