A Biographer Can't Be Objective

It’s really an effort to see your subject from within. That is, we imagine the biographer as an objective figure, standing outside his subject and recording and investigating what can be learned and known, but what I discovered after a lifetime of this is that the biographer is utterly enmeshed in the subject and can’t separate himself out. So the only way you can really write biography – whether the biographer’s presence is explicitly in the text or not – is to be aware of this relationship. You can be “correct,” you can be “accurate,” but you cannot be “objective.”

JAMES ATLAS