Character Study | Los Angeles Review of BooksCharacter Study<br>The burgeoning field of fiction character biographies.<br>By Scott W. SternJuly 29, 2026<br>Fiction
Biography & Autobiography
Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?<br>LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!
Donate
EARLY IN 2023, the theater historian Charles O’Malley and I circulated a nonfiction book proposal to publishers. Our book, we wrote, was “unusual”: “It is, for lack of a better word, a biography—but not the biography of a person. It is, instead, the biography of a character.”
Our subject was Margaret of Anjou, a character who appears in four of William Shakespeare’s earliest plays: the three parts of Henry VI, as well as Richard III. Though Shakespeare based her on a real historical figure, that medieval queen was not the focus of our proposed book; instead, we wanted to track the character from the playhouses of Elizabethan England up through centuries of performance and criticism to the present day. “Though there are many, many books about Shakespeare and his works on the market,” we claimed, “there are none like this one.”
A book proposal is, fundamentally, a marketing document, meant to thrill prospective editors with all of a book’s most singular and sellable qualities. But we were sincere in our assertion of uniqueness. At the time, we were aware of just one other published biographical account of a literary character—The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner, which had come out just days earlier. (I have since tracked a number of precursors, as outlined below.)
Yet, in the three years since we wrote those words, there has been something of a boom in this “unusual” subgenre. I’ve counted seven since the start of 2023, meaning one character biography—previously a nearly unheard-of form—every six months. Following Turner’s study of the Wife of Bath, similar books have hit shelves covering the lives and afterlives of Juliet (from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), Bigger Thomas (from Richard Wright’s Native Son), Jim (from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn), Haman (from the biblical book of Esther), Hannibal Lecter (from a series of Thomas Harris novels and films, most famously The Silence of the Lambs), and finally Margaret of Anjou (our own contribution to the burgeoning genre). Still others are forthcoming—the scholar James Shapiro is apparently at work on a biography of Shakespeare’s Othello.
It became something of a game to me tracking these biographies. Remarkably, they seemed to be multiplying just as I was making my own contribution to a literature now numerous enough to fill a small shelf. (A slightly larger shelf could be filled by a related but distinct subgenre, which I’ve written about elsewhere: books on the real-life inspirations behind famous literary characters. In recent years, authors have claimed to uncover the true stories behind, for instance, Atticus Finch, Dracula, Lolita, Uncle Tom, and Wonder Woman.) Most of the character biographies were written by academics, and most were put out by academic presses, but all appeared geared toward a broader readership, a public optimistically imagined to wonder after the lives of literary characters off and beyond the page.
As Charlie and I tracked Margaret over the centuries, I found myself asking why there was so much interest in the “lives” of figures who are, like her, fictional. Why now? And how can these books be properly styled as biographies when their subjects were never alive in the first place?
In 1967, the author died. Or so argued literary critic Roland Barthes in his influential essay “The Death of the Author.” According to Barthes, the meaning of a literary work did not depend on the intent of its author and could not be gleaned by reference to the author’s life or times; instead, readers gave meaning to a text by interpreting (and reinterpreting) it. It was a profoundly democratic idea, in keeping with the revolutionary age in which it emerged (an interpretation Barthes himself would have hated).
In the years that followed, others took up the reader’s mantle. In the 1990s, cultural theorists killed off the authors of film and television too; in the 2000s, the proliferation of fan fiction, social media, and meme culture stomped on their graves, further reducing the importance and influence of authorial intent.
Liberated from the need to focus on factors like Van Gogh’s “madness” or Tchaikovsky’s “vice” (to invoke Barthes’s derisive examples), some scholars began considering literary characters more or less independently of their creators. In 1992, the critic John Gross published a study of the figure of Shylock, tracing the character’s “legacy” from 1600 up to the present. Gross opened his erudite volume on a defensive...