SOURCE: Mallon, Thomas. “Life Stories.” New Criterion 12, no. 10 (June 1994): 80-4.

In the following review, Mallon praises Hamilton's Keepers of the Flame, asserting that it addresses basic and enduring issues about literary biography.

This highly sensible and entertaining study of literary biography [Keepers of the Flame] seems to have surprised its own author. Ian Hamilton's prescription for approaching writers' lives slowly and respectfully “may sound fishy,” he admits, “coming as it does from the biographer of Robert Lowell (d. 1977) and the near, would-be or failed biographer of J. D. Salinger (1919-), but there it is. We live and learn.” Indeed, those who remember the Lowell book as a repetitive, over-documented re-creation of nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown, and who followed Hamilton's later battle over the Salinger letters, will be pleased to see how lean and writer-friendly Keepers of the Flame has turned out. Its “dozen or so case-histories” concentrate...