Biography, to begin with a very simple definition, is the record of a life. It is thus a branch of history, a small segment of a bigger pattern, just as the story of the development of a town, a state, or a nation may be thought of as an element in a larger whole. The word" biography" has often been used loosely. Marquis James has called his history of a great in-surance company The Biography of a Business. George Gamow has written a Biography of the Earth from the time it" was born from the Sun, its mother, as the result of a brief but violent encounter with a passing star" to its" violent thermal death in the far-distant future." Others have written" biographies" of buildings, books, even of ideas. But such works are biographies only by analogy, and perhaps the simplest accurate definition of biography should read:" the story of a human life." Since all biographies must say something of the times in which their subjects lived, the form is tied even more closely to history. There have been great variations in the amount of this" background material" in biography. At one extreme, for instance, are the" psychographs" of Gamaliel Bradford, in which the protagonists float like disembodied spirits in a vacuum. At the other pole is such a massive, multi-volumed" life and times" as Douglas Southall Freeman's George Wash-ington. In any life the author must of sheer necessity provide a certain amount of" background" if his hero is to be made intelligible to the reader. But how important and how con-