Author Research

A wide range of resources is available for finding biographical information about an author, depending on how much information and what sort of information you want to find. First, there are relatively brief biographies, which will give you a quick overview of an author’s life, such as those found in reference collections like the Dictionary of Literary Biography, or in short books, such as the Penguin Lives series. Often these are useful for orienting yourself to the author’s life and work and for leads to other sources. Second, there are biographies, often written by friends or family members of the author, which, although they may not be considered scholarly by today’s standards, often provide invaluable, personal perspectives on the author. In this category we might also include authors’ autobiographies. Finally, there are full-fledged critical biographies of an author, thoroughly researched and documented and usually integrating brief studies of an author’s works with a very detailed account of the author’s life (Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf or Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce).
It is important to know, once you locate a biography of an author, just what sort of biography it is so that you can use it intelligently and appropriately.

Many authors are almost as well known for the letters they wrote to their contemporaries as they are for their literary works. We look to an author’s letters often because they may shed light on what was transpiring in the author’s life while he or she was creating a particular literary work. Sometimes we find that authors wrote in great detail about novels they were busy writing, as, for example, in the letters of Gustave Flaubert to his mistress, Louise Colet, during the period Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary. Some writers, such as Franz Kafka or Virginia Woolf, also regularly wrote in journals or diaries; these, too, can be a source of insights into the author’s literary preoccupations as well as his or her personal life. When you are seriously studying an author, it’s always worthwhile to check whether correspondence or journals by that author exist and have been published.
In addition, there are also some authors who kept notebooks related to the novels, plays or poems they were creating. These notebooks can contain anything from brief notes or outlines to full drafts of passages that later appeared in the author’s work. An intriguing example of this would be Dostoevsky’s notebooks for novels like Crime and Punishment or The Possessed, or Dickens’ sketchy but revealing plans for his novels (which show, incidentally, that he planned them more than some people think he did).

One thing students of a particular author’s works often want to know is how the writer’s works were received by the public and by critics when they were first published and how they have been regarded since that time. It’s interesting to note, for example, that what many regard as an American classic, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, received some mixed and unenthusiastic reviews when it first appeared. On the other hand, the public couldn’t wait for the latest installment of a Dickens novel like The Old Curiosity Shop to appear. (Dickens’ novels were usually published in serial form.) Reference works such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography or Nineteenth- or Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism will often provide an overview of a work’s publication history and reception. Other studies, such as those in the Critical Heritage series, will give a longer, more detailed account of how the regard for an author and the author’s works changed over the decades or centuries. Finally, book reviews in newspapers, magazines and journals offer invaluable perspectives not only on reception but on the cultural milieu in which a work first appeared.

There are many perspectives from which an author’s works may be read, analyzed and evaluated. Our library offers ways into a range of these perspectives, including many individual volumes devoted solely to criticism of an author’s works or even of an individual work. It is crucial to know a volume of literary criticism when you see one; that is, to be able to tell that a certain book you have in hand is a book reflecting on and responding to an author’s work rather than, say, a biography of an author or an edition of an author’s work. The Twayne series of volume devoted to individual authors, for example, is mostly literary criticism, though each volume also contains biographical information on the author. To complicate things a bit further, there are also editions of author’s works that combine, say, a reliable text of a novel with literary criticism of the novel: the most well-known series of this type is the Norton Critical Editions. Finally, there are anthologies of important critical essays about an author, such as the Twentieth-Century Views series or the Chelsea House publications supervised by Harold Bloom.
If you’re looking for the most up-to-date criticism of an author’s work, though, you will not be as likely to find it in books as you will in scholarly journals. Our library’s databases are essential tools for leading you to such sources, and, for students of literature, an indispensable database for finding past and current articles about an author’s work is the MLA International Bibliography, which tries to list all the articles, dissertations and books published about hundreds of authors each year.