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that “increasingly historians are turning to biography,” even though in the past they “haven’t considered it a kind of legitimate scholarship in some respects.”33 The new center supports biographers working in a wide range of modes, including film, television, and graphic novels, and the executive director, Nancy Milford, author of biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay, told a reporter that she “insisted that at least half the fellows come from outside the academy.”34 So on the one hand, biographers are seeking credibility and standing within the academy (as non-academicians call the world of universities and colleges). On the other hand, they stand proudly outside it. Where does the readership come from? According to the head of the Leon Levy Foundation, Levy’s widow Shelby White, her enthusiasm for the project came from “a love of biography and history and reading about other people’s lives. I guess I’m a snoop.”35

The gratification of snooping, or even of a more seemly curiosity, was not the stated goal for biographers from ancient times through the Victorian period. Once upon a time, biography was supposed to model character and the conduct of life. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans placed, side by side, biographies of famous men from these two periods. Plutarch announced in the opening sentences of his Life of Alexander that his objective was to depict the character of his subjects rather than every detail of their daily existence. “It must be borne in mind,” he wrote (in the celebrated translation by John Dryden), “that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges …” Plutarch compared his art to that of the portrait painter, who focuses attention on the lines and features of the face, rather than on other parts of the body, as the most indicative signs of character.36 This comparison between the biographer and the portrait painter or sculptor would become a favorite in later biographies, and calls attention, tacitly but importantly, to the degree of artifice involved in making something “true to life.”37

The historian Jill Lepore cites a story told by David Hume in his 1741 essay “Of the Study of History.” Having been asked by a “young beauty, for whom I had some passion,” to send her some novels and romances to read while she was in the country, Hume sent her, instead, Plutarch’s Lives, “assuring her, at the same time, that there was not a word of truth in them.” She read them with pleasure, apparently, until she came to the lives of Alexander and Caesar, “whose names she had heard of by accident,” then indignantly sent the book back to Hume “with many reproaches for deceiving her.”38

The story is amusing, but it is also condescending, the more so because the writer is conscious of its charm. Both the description of this female reader as a “young beauty” and the fact, so casually dropped, that she had heard of the two famous heroes of antiquity only “by accident” put her firmly in her place, which is quite a different place from that of Hume. The first sentence of the essay sets the tone: “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history, as an occupation, above all others, the best suited both to their sex and education, much more instructive than their ordinary books of amusement, and more entertaining than those serious compositions, which are usually to be found in their closets.” Hume playfully deplores the preference of “the fair sex” for fiction: “I am sorry,” he says, “to see them have such an aversion to matter of fact, and such an appetite for falsehood.” By contrast, “truth,” he insists, “is the basis of history.” Though he will later change his tone from “raillery” to something more serious (and at that point will introduce as his anticipated readers