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Dickinson: Biography
- Ackmann, Martha. "The matrilineage of Emily Dickinson." DAI 49A, 2921 (1988). [U of Massachusetts; Jane F. Crosthwaite] Biographical study of the Norcrosses, the poet's mother's family.
- ---. "I'm Glad I Finally Surfaced: A Norcross Descendent Remembers Emily Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 120-126. Sylvia Swett Viano (d. 1995), daughter of ED's first cousin Anna Norcross Swett, provides some family oral history of the poet.
- ---. "Biographical Studies of Dickinson." In Grabher, et. al, eds., Handbook, 11-23. Brief survey of biographical scholarship followed by a presentation of recent work on the Norcross family.
- Bawer, Bruce. "The Audacity of Emily Dickinson." The New Criterion 5.5 (January 1987): 7-16. Lengthy negative critique of Wolff's biography.
- Benfey, Christopher. Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet. New York: George Braziller, 1986. Handsome illustrated short biography.
- Bernhard, Mary Elizabeth Kromer. "Portrait of a Family: Emily Dickinson's Norcross Connection." The New England Quarterly 60 (1987): 363-381. Survey of Dickinson's maternal relatives.
- Bianchi, Martha Dickinson. The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Houghton, 1924. Only till Whicher's biography (1938) was this definitive; but as the only biography written by a close relative, it has remained a major source of fact and myth.
- Bingham, Millicent Todd. Emily Dickinson's Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family. New York: Harper, 1955. First publication of many Dickinson family letters; Bingham's commentary is made both more and less reliable in different ways by her unique connection to the Dickinsons.
- Buckingham, Willis J. "Emily Dickinson's Dictionary." Harvard Library Bulletin 25 (1977): 489-492. The 1844 Webster's unabridged edition was the one probably used by the poet.
- Capps, Jack L. Emily Dickinson's Reading: 1836-1886. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Ground-breaking study of Dickinson's reading, covering the Bible, English and American literature, newspapers and periodicals.
- Cody, John. After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971. Controversial study that links ED's poetic achievement to mental illness. Broke ground in insisting that the poet's relationship to her mother was central to her life and work.
- Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1955. Treats Dickinson's life and the themes of nature, death, and immortality in her writing. Companion volume to Johnson's 1955 variorum edition of the poems.
- Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960. The life-records of the poet, in two volumes; an essential work for Dickinson scholars.
- Longsworth, Polly. Emily Dickinson: Her Letter to the World. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965. For general readers.
- ---. "'Was Mr. Dudley Dear?': Emily Dickinson and John Langdon Dudley." The Massachusetts Review 26. 2-3 (1985): 360-372. Yet another candidate for the role of Dickinson's love interest.
- Lowenberg, Carlton. Emily Dickinson's Textbooks. Lafayette, CA, 1986. Descriptive bibliography, annotated and illustrated, of textbooks and reference works available to ED.
- Morse, Jonathan. "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The Case of Emily Dickinson." The Georgia Review 35 (1981): 259-272. Theory of biography and its special application to ED.
- Patterson, Rebecca. The Riddle of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. An attempt to read ED's life through her supposed infatuation with the poet's friend Kate Scott. Ultimately pretty vague.
- Pollak, Vivian R., ed. A Poet's Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. The relationship between ED's parents, interesting not just for the connection to the poet but in its own right as 19th-century social history.
- Scharnhorst, Gary. "A Glimpse of Dickinson at Work." American Literature 57 (1985): 483-485. Quotes from a reminiscence by Louise Norcross, ED's cousin.
- Sewall, Richard B. The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1965. Joseph Lyman, who courted ED's sister Lavinia, is a source of first-hand knowledge about the poet and her family.
- ---. "In Search of Emily Dickinson." American Heritage, 1986. Repr. William Zinsser, ed., Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Comments on the process of writing a biography about a reticent subject from limited documentary resources.
- Taggard, Genevieve. The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson. New York: Knopf, 1930. An attempt to center Dickinson biography on the figure of a certain George Gould, identified by Taggard as the poet's fateful lover. No more successful than many other such attempts, but in its own time, a refreshingly sober piece of biographical sleuthing.
- Walsh, John Evangelist. The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971. Finds ED guilty of "plagiarism, but whsiper it soft." Most critics have not agreed.
- ---. This Brief Tragedy: Unraveling the Todd-Dickinson Affair. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. Tangling it back up, if you ask me.
- Whicher, George Frisbie. This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson. New York: Scribner's, 1938. The standard interpretive biography until Sewall (1974); still impressive considering the incomplete state of biographical documents in the 1930s.
- Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. New York: Knopf, 1986. Major biographical study, still the most up-to-date comprehensive biography. Does not superseded Sewall.
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