| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Scott E. Casper. Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century American. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 439. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

Scott E. Casper has crafted a sophisticated, ambitious, and rewarding treatise on how Americans wrote, published, and read biographies from 1790 to the turn of the twentieth century. On one level, Casper convincingly argues for the absolute ubiquity of biographical writing in this century by excavating an incredible range of biographical writing and writing about biographies hitherto unexplored by historians and literary critics alike. On another level, he builds on the work of Jane Tompkins, Cathy Davidson, and Daniel A. Cohen, among others, to show how producers and readers of biography deeply believed in the genre's power to shape American lives and national character. His work owes much to both the scholarly traditions of New Historicism and history of the book studies. . . .

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