Time Magazine both named the book as "one of the great American biographies".

Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century.

We have, he argues, no American "biographies on the human scale of English biography."

He would eventually publish his American Biographies in two volumes in 1794 and 1798.

But how many American biographies - or at least literary biographies - deserve the classification great?

In the late 1980s he wrote a short history of American biographies of Jesus Christ.

His plan was to do a shelf of 20th-century American biographies, but he was still drawn to Goldwyn.

Harlem Renaissance lives from the African American national biography.

The author Louis Auchincloss said yesterday that it was "the great American literary biography."

While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in the early American biography, the American writers carved out their own distinct approach.