As a prolific editor, educator, translator, and biographer, Frank MacShane has dedicated his career to documenting the lives and accomplishments of those writers "with substantial followings and many enthusiastic champions," but who are not "automatically accepted into the highest literary rank" (as he says in "Writing Biographies," Columbia Library Columns, May 1981). Feeling that the lives of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner have already been well documented and reported, MacShane chooses as his subjects those authors "who need a little help on the side, the help that a biographer can give," in order to establish more firmly their place in the literary canon. His books include biographies of critically acclaimed writers, such as Ford Madox Ford and John O'Hara, and of more celebrated writers, such as Raymond Chandler and James Jones, whom he feels are somewhat overlooked by literary critics.

MacShane was born on 19 October 1927 in...