Without wading too deep into any technical lit-crit battles over the so-called death of the author, I think I can safely endorse the rule that, in general, one should not criticize a writer’s work by attacking his personal life. If an author happens to have been an adulterer, a miser, or a scoundrel as well as a literary genius, he should not thereafter have to have his genius hyphenated. John O’Hara was a genius, not a genius-slash-midget-punching-belligerent-drunk. (You can look that one up.) This holds true even when the author’s failings directly contradict his most notable literary accomplishments. Evelyn Waugh was never very good at practicing Christian forgiveness, but he still wrote about it wonderfully.
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