Editor's Note

Editor's Note Although not approaching the telephone book dimensions of our last issue, a glance at the Table of Contents of Biography 21:1 will confirm that if nothing else, we are still providing a fairly broad forum for diverse opinions from a variety of fields. I suspect, for instance, that both Marvin Rintala and Patrick O'Brien would have some reservations about each other's essays, just as Greg Mahr's account of Fernando Pessoa, or Herman Rapaport's comments on the new personalism, occasioned by the publication of H. Aram Veeser's Confessions of the Critics, might raise some questions in the minds of a number of our reviewers. Our criteria for publication remain pretty much the same. First, the essays must make a contribution to their own fields. Second, the essays must add something to the unfolding theory of life writing: others working in different fields should be able, if only by analogy, to profit from the writer's efforts. And third, the essays must simply be interesting. Ideally, someone just glancing through Biography should be caught by an odd fact, an intriguing argument, a compelling voice—so caught, that only reading the article will lead to release. We're currently preparing for a subscription drive, and part of that process will be yet another appeal, through a variety of media, for article submissions. Though our acceptance rate is quite low, regardless of the decision, all essays receive readers' comments, and our average turnaround time is three months— two months for revised essays. Biography very seldom solicits contributions, so accepted essays are not squeezed out by commissions, and the lag between publication and acceptance is at present roughly a year. We are very interested in seeing your most interesting work: for more details on submission, see the inside back cover. One final note: many thanks to Michael Oishi, currently at the University of Washington, for his assistance during the preparation of this issue. ...