Undaunted by its stature as the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for biography, Richard S. Kennedy said of David Herbert Donald's Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987): "What troubles me is his [Donald's] seeming reluctance to interpret Wolfe in order to provide understanding of his unusual personality and relate it to his literary achievement or his literary shortcomings. If one's subject is a writer, the countless details of his life are less important than a consideration of why he wrote the kind of books that he did and how they came to be." That principle lies at the core of Kennedy's approach to the lives of Thomas Wolfe and E. E. Cummings and can be traced to Kennedy's first efforts at literary biography as a Harvard graduate student, when he immersed himself in the newly acquired papers of Thomas Wolfe and examined Wolfe's life and writings. The...