The New Biographers

“The old style of Canadian biography was written mainly by academic historians and characterized by a slavish devotion to the facts, and nothing but the facts, about the subject at hand.” Boring. But a new generation of biographers has taken more of the novelist approach to their work. “Virginia Woolf said every biography should be written twice – once as fiction and once as fact. Fact is accessible but interpretation is not, and fact won’t tell you much about character and thought.”