"A good biographical subject is difficult to find," wrote Jeffrey Meyers shortly after publishing his 1978 book on Katherine Mansfield, his first major biography. Despite his remark, he has since found more "good subjects"--Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad--and with their biographies and his essays on the craft of life writing, Meyers has emerged as a leading biographer.

Meyers was born on 1 April 1939 in New York City to Rubin (a clothing-industry worker) and Judith Meyers and grew up in Forest Hills, New York. He attended the University of Michigan, where he completed a B.A. in English in 1959, and then, after a year at Harvard Law School, he did graduate work in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his M.A. in 1961 and his Ph.D. in 1967. From 1963 to 1965 Meyers was an assistant professor of English at the...