William H. Pritchard once said, "I don't think of myself as a bona fide biographer in either the old-fashioned or recent American sense--I'm not a sleuth or a painstaking researcher nor somebody with a theory about what made Frost or Jarrell go right or wrong"; he believes his books "fall between criticism and biography." His "literary lives" of Robert Frost (1984), Randall Jarrell (1990), and other twentieth-century writers eschew much of what characterizes recent biography. Drawing mainly from published sources, his books do not bulge with archival research. Historical and sociological background is minimal. Freudian speculation is shunned, as are assertions about what an individual "must have thought" in given situations. Feet of clay are not hidden, but Pritchard does not set up standards of behavior or political correctness against which his subject is condescendingly measured. The writer's persona is accepted as an essential element of his literary life.

The...