Melville and Faulkner Biographies Explore Two Mysterious Writers

David Kirby. David Kiris a professor of English at Florida State University and the of a forthcoming book on Melville., The Christian Science Monitor

ONE of the paradoxes of biography is that the better-known someone becomes, the harder he or she is to know. The problem is compounded when the figure under scrutiny lived in the last century, a time when records were scarcer, photographs cruder, and descriptions couched in an English now foreign to our ears.

Even family members may be left in the dark. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Melville's granddaughter, wrote that "the core of the man remains incommunicable: suggestion of his quality is all that is possible." It takes time as well as tireless archive-delving to make figures as mysterious as Herman Melville and William Faulkner come fully alive, as they do in these two …

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Publication information: Article title: Melville and Faulkner Biographies Explore Two Mysterious Writers. Contributors: David Kirby. David Kiris a professor of English at Florida State University and the of a forthcoming book on Melville. - Author. Newspaper title: The Christian Science Monitor. Publication date: November 1, 1993. Page number: 13. © 2009 The Christian Science Publishing Society. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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