Throughout his distinguished literary career, Humphrey Carpenter has produced work in a wide variety of genres-literary criticism, children's literature, magazine and newspaper journalism, and, primarily, literary biography. He has thus far, however, never attempted a novel. Nevertheless, in a 1983 interview for the Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, Carpenter declared that he "would love to be a novelist," continuing, "I think the novel, when it comes off-and sometimes even when it doesn't quite come off-is such a wonderfully satisfying thing. There's nothing else quite like it." And what distinguishes the work of Carpenter from that of other literary biographers is a prominent use of techniques that are generally associated with fiction and that might be shunned by the "pure" biographer. Through careful attention to details of setting; through the portrayal of authors as literary characters whose own stories (as well as those of their fictional creations) are worth recounting...