There has been a surprising, even paradoxical interest in literary biography since the publication of Roland Barthes's apparently premature announcement of "The Death of the Author" (in the 1968 essay of that name, collected in Image Music Text, 1977). Much biography has been written by academics who have confused the art of biography with the massive accumulation of information and who have often managed to exhaust their readers as well as their subjects with works that seem less literary than archival in nature. In this regard, the work of Scott Donaldson stands apart. His biographies of Winfield Townley Scott, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever are not only meticulously researched but forcefully narrated. Even as he provides a wealth of detail about each writer, Donaldson does more, offering knowledge of the man and insights into the relationships among that man, his work, and his world. Neither trifling nor...