Samuel Johnson, Biographer by Robert Folkenflik (review)

Book Reviews the volume discusses the use of Puritan rhetoric by Revolutionary orators and pamphleteers. The second set of essays begins with Claudia Johnson's interpretation of Hawthorne s use of the pattern of Puritan conversion, especially as it relates to The Marble Faun. William Howarth analyzes Thoreau's use of Concord as a microcosm in the Journal to reveal his sense of sacred human unity, while Bernard Rosenthal's essay on Melville's Clarel illustrates Melville's use of biblical typology for his own ironic purposes. In the final essay in the collection, a study of Emily Dickinson's use of persona, Nina Baym shows how the belle of Amherst sometimes ironically twisted Puritan imagery in her discussion of man's place in a universe she saw as baffling. All nine essays are first-rate, and despite the diversity of their approaches, contribute much to our understanding of the influence of Puritan thought on American literature. It is through the efforts of young scholars like Emory Elliott that our generation is beginning to recognize the importance of looking to our past for a reassessment of our literary heritage. I recommend it most highly. JEFFREY B. WALKER, Oklahoma State University Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. 235 p. $12.50. To many who think of Samuel Johnson primarily as the subject of James Boswell's monumental biography, the fact that Johnson himself wrote over seventy biographical pieces during a period of over four decades may come as something of a surprise. From the writing of his life of Father Sarpi (1738) to his revision of his biographyof Edward Cave(1784), Johnson was frequently involved with both the practice and theory of biography. Robert Folkenflik's book is the first major study of Johnson as a biographer . Drawing upon a diverse range of materials from Johnson's work, the author demonstrates that Johnson's biographical achievement is marked by a "unity of form and purpose, the correspondence between his conception of man and the biographical style in which he conveys it." Before Johnson English biography was rather limited in its scope and method. Confined, with a few exceptions (notably Izaak Walton) to political and religious adulation, English biographers rarely sought to apply any critical, historical, or moral standards to the figures they wrote about. Johnson himself described the mass of this material as "a penury of English biography." Professor Folkenflik sets out to demonstrate how Johnson's biographies —whether in the shorter and more ephemeral pieces or the life of Richard Savage ("one of the masterpieces of English biography")—are deeply influenced by Christian and classical views of man, as well as by his skeptical mind and his belief that to "judge rightly of an author, we must transport ourselves to his time, and examine what were the wants of his contemporaries, and what were his means of supplying them." In his penultimate chapter Professor Folkenflik provides a thorough and conROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW277 Book Reviews vincing reading of the life of Savage to demonstrate Johnson's principles of biography. Samuel Johnson, Biographer is undeniable evidence that Boswell was nearly correct when he spoke of his friend as one "who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others." ROBERT C. STEENSMA, University of Utah John Hollowell, Fact & Fiction: the New Journalism and the NonFiction Novel. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 190 p. The current critical interest in the nonfiction novel is apparently solid: Hollowell's study appeared close on the heels of Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's The mythopoeic reality & the postwar American nonfiction novel (University of Illinois Press, 1976). In part this interest reflects the production patterns in the new novel: American writers like Capote, Mailer, Wolfe have found that the narrative patterns of "real" events are as mythopeic as those of fictional metaphors. The second reason for such an interest is not explicit in either Zavarzadeh or Hollowell, whose research is essentially descriptive, with little overt use for contemporary narrative theory. Nevertheless, the issue looms large for many scholars who will consult these books; the degree to which a category like the "non-fiction novel" calls into question both the...