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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES: Dilip Kumar Roy
There are also six other categories of this form
Informative biography is the most objective type of this form. The biographer in such a type of work avoids all forms of interpretation. He simply selects and seeks to unfold a life by presenting in chronological order the available documents pertaining to the subject. In the 19th century David Masson's the Life of Milton:Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical and Literary History of his Time and John G. Nicolay and John Hay's Abraham Lincoln, A History and Edward Nehls' D. H. Lawrence:A Composite Biography (1957-59) are some of the examples of this type.
Critical Biography, unlike the first. offers a genuine presentation of a life. In such a carefully researched biography, sources are scrupulously set forth in notes and appendices. Accuracy and documentation are most important here. The purpose of this type is to facilitate biographical approach to literature. It is designed specially for the purpose of helping students of literature than to entertain an average reader. Outstanding biographies of this category are Richard Ellmann's James Joyce (1959), Ernest Jones' The Life and Works of Sigmand Freud and Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens.
The third and the central category of biography is Standard Biography. It is a balanced work between the objective and the subjective approaches. It represents the mainstream of the practice of biography as an art. From the antiquity to the present day, this kind of biographical literature has had as its objective, what Sir Edmund Gosse called, "the faithful protrait of a soul in its adventures through life." Grorge Cavendish's 16th-century life of Cardinal Wolsey, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson and Lebn Edel's Henry James are a few remarkable examples of this kind,
In Interpretative Biography the biographer moulds his sources into a vivid narrative along with authentic scenes. He generally does not invent materials, but he freely manipulates or interprets them according to the promptings of insight, derived from arduous research to unfold his subject's life vividly. But the material is often exploited with such a freedom that the biography turns into fiction. Frank Harris's Oscar Wilde (1916) and Hesketh Pearson's Tom Paine, Friend of Mankind (1937) exhibit this type of biographical freedom. So does Sartre's St. Genet
The works of the fifth Category. Fictionalized Biography, belong to biographical literature only by courtesy. In it. materials are freely invented. scenes and conversations are imagined freely. The biographers of this type have created a hybrid form designed to mate the appeal of the novel with a vague claim to authenticity. Irving Stone's Lust for Life (on Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (on Michelangelo) and other works belong to this form.
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