Not spectacular. Want a fascinating read on Alexander? Read Jacobs' 1979 thesis on the author. Simply thrilling! ( )

Great minds think alike. So, it seems, to mediocre minds. At least, they all have the same idea at the same time.

Lloyd Alexander's works have not received the critical attention of, say, J. R. R. Tolkien's, but his award-winning Chronicles of Prydain have remained in print for fifty years, and you'll still see him mentioned in occasional works of scholarship in journals such as Mythlore. But the Really Big Year of Alexander scholarship seems to have been 1991, when Jill P. May published Lloyd Alexander in the Twayne's United States Authors series and Jacobs and Tunnell published Lloyd Alexander, the first in Greenwood Press's Bio-Biblography series.

I truly have no idea why 1991 was so full of Alexandrine writings, but the two books are very different. May engages in a lot of literary criticism, to the detriment of biography, but her book is a unified whole. Jacobs and Tunnell have a different method: A 36 page (counting footnotes) biography, then an much longer annotated bibliography broken into sections: first Alexander's own works (classified into adult books; books for younger readers; translations by Alexander from French; Alexander's own works published in other countries, usually but not always in translation; and sundry other works), then works about Alexander by other authors (biographical material, scholarly works, book reviews, etc.). This is useful (I would never have guessed that Prydain would be translated into thirteen foreign languages but not Welsh!) but of course now dated, and the number of typos seems a little bit on the high side -- not extremely bad, but enough to make me worry a little. Plus the classification system would work better if there were page headings to make it clearer what section you're examining. And, of course, it's not something you're going to read for fun!

The biography is more interesting but slightly disquieting. There are ninety footnotes (i.e. not quite three per page). Of those ninety, 78 are taken directly from Alexander himself (mostly in interviews or letters; a few from items Alexander sent to magazines). Three are from his wife. Six are letters either to or from his primary editor. That leaves just three -- a primary school record, a contract, and one which is just information about one of the books Alexander reworked in his writings! No conversations with friends. No conversation with his agent. No consultation of his college or military records or his co-workers during his brief periods of having real work. It's not really a biography; it's an organized set of reminiscences.

Does it matter? I'm not sure. If someone were to write a real biography of Alexander, all that conversational material would surely help. And it does give a feeling for Alexander's personality and his quirks. But I can't think it's a complete picture. (This apart from the fact that he lived for another sixteen years after the book was written.) Let's just say that, if this were a Wikipedia article, it would be full of "Citation needed" and "Additional information required" sorts of flags. ( )