They can be two hundred pages - or a thousand. Soul-searching synthesis or Encyclopedic list. Biographies encapsulate the lives of rogues and royals, writers and generals, painters and presidents ? the dead and the living. As a literary form, they?ve thrived since Plutarch ? in their modern more complete form since Johnson and Boswell more than two hundred years ago. This hour on the Connection ? three of the masters of modern biography: Michael Holroyd did Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw. Ashbel Green edited the life stories of Huey Long, Teddy Roosevelt and now Pitt the Younger. Jim Atlas took on the tale of Saul Bellow - and then founded the Penguin Lives Series of stylish short takes on the great and the near great. The story of biography.
