Should biographers be on first-name terms with their subjects?

Robert Crawford’s use of ‘Tom’ in his new biography of TS Eliot has raised eyebrows – but he is not the first author to get so familiar. Here are 10 distinguished precedents

Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot has raised reviewers’ eyebrows by calling TS Eliot “Tom” throughout, a policy Crawford defends as reflecting a desire to portray a human being, rather than relate “the history of a monument”, and to see through the adult poet’s stiff public persona to the boy from St Louis ever present behind it.

Many object to this increasing tendency towards chumminess in literary biographies, and employing first names is a long way from becoming the orthodoxy (recent lives of the US giants Bellow, Cheever, Miller, Roth, Updike and Tennessee Williams all use their surnames, for example). But those in the given name camp can point to some distinguished precedents ...

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