Fred Kaplan: The Task of the Biographer

"That's what biographers do. They record the arc of a life. But they try to give it form and shape, the way we all as individuals try to give form and shape to our lives."

Fred Kaplan has written biographies of Charles Dickens, Henry James, Abraham Lincoln, Gore Vidal, and Mark Twain. Here, in poetic terms, he outlines the role of the biographer, and how the time spent constructing the story of another in turn comes to be a part of your own.…more