Love’s Labor Lost and Found: My Relationship with Psychobiography

My tale of a love for psychobiography, lost and regained, starts in my first semester at Amherst College in 1976 with a seminar entitled “Other People’s Youth.” We read biographies of prominent individuals focusing primarily on their formative early years. Most importantly, we started our course by reading Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958) and finished the semester with his Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969). In between, we pored over biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, among others.