No longer merely a stepchild of literary studies, history, psychology, or some other category, biography in recent years has emerged as its own discipline. Much of biography traditionally involves digging deeply into archival or source materials. But biography has also begun to assimilate to itself some of the critical procedures we see more generally in literary and historical studies. While the volumes of Biography and Source Studies are functionally independent of the Biography Seminar (begun at New York University by Professor Aileen Ward), they draw upon its considerable human resources for articles. - Publisher.