Another Brief and Daring Bio: Teasing, Tangled Melville Yarn
Herman Melville , by Elizabeth Hardwick. Lipper/Viking, 161 pages, $19.95.
The English excel at writing brief lives, a pocket-size genre long on style, short on facts. Invented by the second-century Roman historian Suetonius ( Lives of the Caesars ), aped by John Aubrey as an alternative to 17th-century dinner-party gossip, epitomized by Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Read More
