The Nation, February 5th, 1990
Somebody in Books
"The writing of history," Goethe said, "is a way of getting rid of the past." Perhaps he was referring to biography, which seems to be a way of collecting the remains of a life and depositing them in a box of pages, a contribution to the boneyard called posterity.
My discomfort with final things arises from having read Bettina Drew's biography of Nelson Algren, whom I knew, admired and angered before he died and was booked. It is a good biography, full of facts and anecdotes, sympathetic, sometimes loving, as sweet as a socialist's smile, but it never overcomes the cool, ...
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