The End of My American Literature Era

To research my New Yorker story piece, I had to read a lot of literary biographies.

Most of these biographies are weighty tomes like Blake Bailey’s Cheever or Matt Bruccoli’s John O’Hara biography or Carol Sklenicka’s Alice Adams bio. These books are published by major presses, but surely do not have that many readers. And yet the authors often put years of work into these books. Carol Sklenicka spent nine years writing her biography of Alice Adams—a writer who was completely unknown to 77 percent of the respondents surveyed for my literary reputation poll.