But Carolyn K. Reidy, the president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in an interview yesterday that Mr. McGinniss had intentionally written a work of "interpretive biography."

In March, 2011 Foran's short interpretive biography Maurice Richard was published by Penguin, as part of their Extraordinary Canadians series.

Mr. Mailer has called his work "an interpretive biography," to distinguish it from a work of original scholarship.

A sophisticated "interpretive biography" less interested in Marshall the institution builder than in how the chief justice's constitutional thinking developed during three decades as leader of an increasingly divided body.

Mr. Birkin writes that he has tried to create "a documentary account," not an interpretive biography.

As the title suggests, this is an interpretive biography, filtering a life through late-20th-century feminism and gender studies, making no attempt to streamline its theoretical mechanics.

But judging this avowedly interpretive biography by its historical accuracy or the quality of its Koranic interpretation is to miss the more relevant question: What does the book reveal about Ramadan's political philosophy?

Mary Baker Eddy, an interpretive biography of the founder of Christian Science.

Maybe it's not entirely fair to read these letters in one hand, with an admittedly interpretive biography in the other.

The book met with some controversy at the time for mixing fact and fiction in a technique Fosburgh described as "interpretive biography".