Is literary biography so widely read for popular, 'prurient' reasons, or for reputable intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so scanty? These are among the questions addressed by the seventeen leading biographers and literary critics who have contributed essays to John Batchelor's The Art of Literary Biography.

Always a popular genre, biography has become one of the most immediate and accessible modes of writing about literature and literary figures. In this book, individuals such as Conrad, Huxley, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Lord Rochester are examined.

Also addressed are the nature and form of literary biography, including the relationships between biography and autobiography, the challenges the genre poses for the reader, and the problems confronted by the literary biographer at work.