The books of Walter Jackson Bate have won the most impressive collection of awards ever garnered by an English professor in the United States. Bate has made major contributions to the fields of literary biography, eighteenth-century English literature, and history of criticism. Countering the rejection of literary biography by the New Criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, he restored the genre to the bold, synthesizing vein that begins with Samuel Johnson's The Lives of the Poets (1779-1781). Bate's lives of John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Johnson overcome the divisions of twentieth-century criticism into categories such as biography, psychology, stylistics, intellectual and cultural history, and critical reception. They balance attention between the inner drama of the life and the literary works, which, he said, are the main reasons we study writers' lives in the first place. Bate's clairvoyant empathy enables him to penetrate the darker sides of mind...