Abstract

Somewhere between hagiography and debunking lies truth. Or so we may think: the biographer’s sources are almost always tipped one way or the other, and it is his or her job to establish, or divine, the way of authentic fact and, if facts fall short, then of sturdy sober hypothesis. In general the debunker has more fun, especially when the weight of tradition favors the ennobling, if not the beatification, of its subject.