Volume 38, Number 16 · October 10, 1991
Darwinian Psychobiography
By Frank J. Sulloway
Charles Darwin: A New Life
by John Bowlby
Norton, 511 pp., $24.95
Although not generally known for his contributions to biography, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was a biographer of considerable talents. He is also unusual as a biographer in having chronicled four generations in his own family history. Readers have delighted for more than a century in his Audiobiography (1887), with its charming modesty about his monumental achievements. Darwin's Autobiography also contains a reverential discussion of his father's life and thought, and, as such, is almost a dual biography. What is less well known about Darwin is that he also wrote a biography of his grandfather (1879), the poet, evolutionary theorist, and physician Erasmus Darwin. Darwin's fourth contribution to biography was a sketch of the early development of his first child, William, which he published in 1877 in the new British journal Mind.
Review, 4821 words
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