Biographer James Atlas writes in The New York Times about the differences between American and British literary cultures and the surprising ways in which those differences manifest in biographies. He writes, “Biography isn’t an outpost of literature in England, a supplement to the poem or novel, but a vital form in its own right.”

Classic American biographies are scarce in comparison; Atlas cites a number of reasons for this. With illustrious figures on both sides of the equation, old British biographies are as much about the biographer as about the subject. In contrast, American writing is subject to a division-of-labour mentality that discourages a single writer’s participation in multiple genres and thus creates a literary ghetto of unknown biographers. Atlas also points to American historical biographers’ tendency to include all possible details, even irrelevant or uninteresting ones, simply because they have been discovered.

Atlas contends that the chief advantage British biographies of historical figures have over their American counterparts — their intimate and dynamic character — is a matter of history and the fact that British biographers like Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf wrote within the lifetimes of their subjects and were often well acquainted, and sometimes even friends, with them. The intimacy of British biographies is compared to the exaltation of biographical subjects in the current American celebrity culture. Writes Atlas, “America is too amorphous, too diverse, too sprawling in its sheer immensity to produce biographies on the human scale of English biography. Hungering for greatness, we make our subjects larger than life.”

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