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This collection of reviews, selected from Rollyson's New York Sunlight column, is as much about the relationship of biography as it is approximately the American lives. Certain concerns resonate throughout the publication:

• The American Left's inability to reckon with Communist subversion, McCarthyism, and Stalinism
• The problematic mother nature of approved biography
• The history of American biography, definitive biographies, and literary biography
• The variations between autobiography and biography
• The need for interviews in biographies of modern-day figures
• The variations between history and biography, and comparative biographies
• The virtues of short biographies and of biographies for children
• The trend of biographers to fictionalize and of novelists to biographize
• Psychology and biography
• Rollyson's own experience as a biographer
• The way biographers treat one another's work

Too many biographers, he believes, evince no involvement in the biographical custom. Worried only with ownership of their themes, their proprietorial attitude deforms not only their biographies but also the genre itself. If a biography is reviewed badly (acquiring hardly greater than a summation of the subject's life with a perfunctory nod to the biographer), it is because the biographical custom has been disregarded or reduced. This book, in other words, has been created on the behalf of biography, a genre that still awaits a complete vindication.