In his literary biographies Jay Martin is concerned with the often-confusing relationship between a writer's life and the alternatives to that life generated out of the writing process. Martin has chosen for his biographies subjects ranging from the unjustly ignored Conrad Aiken and Nathanael West, their art being thus rescued from public obscurity, to such well-known writers as Robert Lowell and Henry Miller, whose creative personalities Martin carefully distinguishes from the public's images of them. His biographies examine the dialectical opposition between the life of art and the art of life: the intricate ways in which the activity of writing can either develop or displace a given writer's life, and the no-less-intricate ways in which a writer's invention of an artistic personality can overshadow his artistic accomplishments. Martin's exploration of this dialectic eventually led him to a psychoanalytic understanding of the relationship between the biographical impulse and the...