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Presents the author's views about writer Edmund Wilson. Details of the books written by Wilson; Literary skills of the writer; Critical appraisal of the writer's books; Political ideology of Wilson towards Marxism; Information on the meetings of Wilson with communist leaders; Account of the private life of the writer; Details of his political career.

Looks at the art of biography writing in the United States. Definitions given by several writers about biography; Assessment of problems faced by biographers; Analysis of the life of writer Ernest Hemingway; Biographers of David Thoreau's acceptance of his view of himself and his mission at the Walden Pond; Providing a glimpse of the myths within and behind the individual; Author's advice to a writer who plan to write the life of Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe.

The article focuses on style of literary biography. The author suggests that biography--and literary biography in particular--has been too much concerned with recitals of fact--the massed chronicle, the overwhelming card index--and not sufficiently concerned with the quality of the lived life. By the quality of the lived life I mean the awarenesses, the intensities, the moments of feeling and depths of experience that constitute the fundamental part of living, that part which people glimpse not so much in a writer's letters, but which is buried in the texture of his work, those inner dreams he has translated with verbal beauty into art--that art which has made him important enough to become the subject of a biography.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. "What's Fit to Print," which examined press reports on the Cuban missile crisis; Criticism of Professor Howard Mumford Jones' theory of biographical narrative; "Hide and Seek," which explored Russian opposition to nuclear arms inspection.

The article discusses the book "The Letters of W. B. Yeats," edited by Allan Wade. The letters tells much also of Yeats' lonely pilgrimage in search of love: this was the education of the heart, the discipline of the poetic sensibility. The letters to his ladylove Maude Gonne have perished but people long ago knew from his poems of the fierce touch of flame she gave to his prime and how it seared him into new heights of expression.

Focuses on notes dictated by author Henry James in his deathbed in 1915. Description of the final dictation; Events during his stroke; Details on the notes.

The article presents information on the book "With Love From Gracie: Sinclair Lewis 1912-25," by Grace Hegger Lewis. The author states that the title of Lewis' memoir of author Sinclair Lewis suggests a much more sentimental and trivial-book than she has written. In it she sets down her recollections of her decade of marriage to the author of "Main Street" and "Babbitt." The book tells the story of the early years of this awkward young man who was wedded, it would seem, much more to his typewriter than to his wife. The story is, inevitably, told from the single point of view, but the first Lewis recounts it with considerable forthrightness and a kind of stubborn honesty so that the portrait and the self-revelation are singularly complete.

This article focuses on the book "The Raven and the Whale," by Perry Miller. Miller's landscape, for all the detail of its foreground, is large: it is the province and the metropolis, New England versus New York, or by extension, the New World versus the Old. The first impression given by this book is that its canvas is too crowded; too many people occupy the scene. "The Raven and the Whale," is filled with animated sketches of the literary busy-bodies of a century ago. There is a distinct design in Professor Miller's composition and a wilful recreation of the brouhaha which surrounded authors Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville during the 1840 decade.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to Robert Sherrod's review of the book 'Drawing the Line: The Korean War, 1950-1953,' by Richard Whelan in the May 6, 1990 issue of 'The New York Times Book Review.'