Volume 16, Number 11 · June 17, 1971
Champion of Bohemia
By Noel Annan
The Saddest Story
by Arthur Mizener
World, 616 pp., $12.50
The Alien Protagonist of Ford Madox Ford
by H. Robert Huntley
University of North Carolina, 208 pp., $7.50
Your Mirror to My Times: The Selected Autobiographies and Impressions of Ford Madox Ford
edited by Michael Killigrew
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 392 pp., $10.00
Biographers are usually fired with the ambition of discovering unpublished material, and American scholars have won a reputation in Britain for their indefatigability in tracking down papers in attics, lumber rooms, and libraries, and for their persuasiveness in inducing their owners to part with them. One of the reasons why they succeed is the scrupulous way they handle the material they are given. The British on occasions huff and puff at them for being ponderous, and it is true that some of the standard biographies of literary figures which have appeared in recent years scarcely sparkle. But it is this dogged attempt to discover the facts, and not to leap to premature judgments, that wins the confidence of the squirrels who hoard the papers.
Review, 2678 words
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