On the Subject of Whether An Author's Personal Life Should be a Factor When Critiquing a Book ~

"Even if there are no themes in the work that resonate with the life, great writers are not machines that produce, out of nothingness, a series of words that happen to be more perfect than other people's words; they are flawed mortals, often imprudent and uncivil, who are so large (that's what greatness is: size) that every part of them deserves to be understood."

Anne Radiman disagrees that when critiquing a book, to "slide into biographical details [is] to admit a lack of critical perception."

She suggests that "if you know that Melville was a terrible husband, you may be able to make more sense of the sealed-off, sea-bound world of Moby-Dick, where everybody was male, even the whale."

~ Anne Radiman, At Large and At Small, Confessions of a Literary Hedonist, Penguin Books, 2007