Recognized as a biographer as well as a literary critic, Mark Schorer was above all an artist: his biographies are portraits, not documentary photographs. His Fiction and nonfiction are founded on the carefully thought-out aesthetic principles set forth in his essays "Technique as Discovery" and "The Analogical Matrix," collected in The World We Imagine (1968).

Marcus Robert Schorer was born on 17 May 1908 in Sauk City, Wisconsin, to William Carl Schorer, the manager of a canning plant, and Anna Walser Schorer. He shared his midwestern background with Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis, other young writers who attempted to synthesize this background with life in the East. Schorer tended to evaluate his compatriots by their success in achieving this synthesis.

In 1925 he entered the University of Wisconsin, where he received an A.B. in 1929. In 1930 he received his M.A. from Harvard; he then returned to...