‘A Mass of Anecdote and Incident Based Upon the Flimsiest Evidence’: On Franklyn Bliss Snyder, The First American Biographer of Robert Burns

Franklyn Bliss Snyder (1884–1958) was an American academic working at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois from 1909–1949. His biographical criticism on Robert Burns's life and works offered a corrective approach to various shibboleths in the poet's reception history. Of particular interest to Snyder was the accretion of errors in biographies of the poet from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which relied on anecdote and rumor rather than fact. Snyder's The Life of Robert Burns (1932) served as a tonic to this tradition, employing different standards and strategies than had been practiced in previous biographical efforts.