What Can We Learn From the Literary Lives Portrayed in 2025

For all that we have heard lately about the existential threat that AI poses to the creative industries, and the uncertain future of those who make their living by the pen, there can be no doubt that the troubles and triumphs of authors still sell.

Extensive biographies published in 2025 explored the formative years of writers and poets. A few of the most ambitious include Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited memoir Book of Lives, Willard M. Oliver’s Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author, Leo Damrosch’s Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler.

While disparate in chronological range, all these literary lives illuminate a vital contemporary issue: the shared interests of authors and their need for mutual support in a world not overly concerned with their welfare. In Atwood’s memoir and the three biographies, we find accounts of writers and poets helping one another in the seemingly impossible task of harpooning the white whale of success.

Oliver, a criminologist and professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, serves up an example of a struggling writer finding inspiration in the life and work of a more established colleague. Texas author Robert E. Howard found sustenance in letters he received from fellow Weird Tales contributor H.P. Lovecraft. Howard was the pulp author who came up with Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and other fixtures of the sword-and-sorcery genre, in which brawny heroes take on wizards, shapeshifters, monsters, brigands, and other vividly rendered villains. But trying to make your way in Cross Plains, Texas, in the 1920s and 1930s as a pulp fiction writer — especially one living with your parents well into adulthood — was not a traditional formula for success.

Oliver captures the plight well, in chapters with titles like “Struggling Author, 1923–1924” and “The Anguished Poet, 1927.” One thing that relieved Howard’s anguish — though it did not pull him out of the spiral that culminated in death by suicide on June 11, 1936, at age 30 — was his correspondence with Lovecraft. Like Howard, Lovecraft grappled with personal and professional frustrations and his vast international influence was mostly posthumous. But Lovecraft, who died aged 46, less than a year after Howard, was an inspiration to his younger correspondents in the weird, fantasy, and horror fields. In the pages of Oliver’s book, we learn just how deeply Lovecraft inspired Howard, who sent letters to Weird Tales praising Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” as a “masterpiece” and claiming that Lovecraft had “the gift of making the unreal seem very real and terrible, without lessening the sensation of horror attendant thereto.”

Lovecraft and Howard initially corresponded over an arcane point that Howard had raised about Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,” namely whether a character in a given time and place in Celtic Britain would have spoken Gaelic or Cymric. They went on to exchange conflicting views of over whether a man’s intellectual or physical characteristics mattered more, with the sickly Lovecraft arguing for the former and Howard — a target of bullying at school who turned to bodybuilding in response — for the latter. Though they often disagreed, the two weird authors admired each other’s work and the correspondence broadened Howard’s perspective, helping him grasp and articulate what he hoped to get out of writing. In a resonant passage of a letter that Oliver quotes, Howard explains that he views writing as a means to freedom. It helped him escape from the meaningless roles he filled in the past, working in an iron foundry and behind a soda fountain, he tells Lovecraft, adding: “I have worked as much as eighteen hours a day at my typewriter, but it was work of my own choosing, and I could quit any time I wanted to without getting fired from the job.”

Similarly, Margaret Atwood’s account of her early life — literary aspirations, personal struggles, and disappointments — also emphasizes what she shared with and took from fellow creatives, including some who, during their acquaintance, lacked even Lovecraft’s minor literary recognition. After sharing the ups and downs of her early days in Toronto, northern Quebec, Ottawa, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Atwood provides detailed accounts of her travels abroad in the early and mid-1960s, dwelling on time spent in New York and London, where she met many writers and poets.

On one visit to New York, Atwood met up with the poet Daryl Hine, to whom a landlady had once introduced her long before her trip. She describes Hine as a prodigy who put out his first book of poems, The Carnal and the Crane, at just 21. Hine had also gone through a couple of harrowing manic-depressive episodes, during one of which he stripped naked in a parking lot to talk to God. By the time Atwood met him, he was on lithium which helped keep him calm but also, in Atwood’s telling, took away the will to do much of anything. “We both found it soothing to talk about poetry, and I was able to tell him how much I liked his work,” Atwood writes. She adds, “Say that kind of thing when you can: the chance may vanish.”

Where others might have dismissed Hine as a flake, Atwood saw promise in his work, and later events fully vindicated her view. Hine, she relates, went on to become editor of Poetry magazine and to win a MacArthur Fellowship. The lessons about not giving up were clearly not lost on Atwood, whose concern for marginalized figures comes up again in the memoir, notably during her account of a visit to Prague long before the Iron Curtain fell. She recalls a young man who turned up on street corners on Franz Kafka’s birthday to read passages from Kafka’s work. For all the seditious nature of Kafka’s fiction and its explicit critique of repressive systems, the regime viewed the young man as something of a curiosity, on the grounds that he was probably mentally ill, Atwood recalls.

Damrosch, a Harvard professor whose works include studies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jonathan Swift, now chooses a curious complement to those 18th century essayists with an account of the 19th century novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as books of poetry and travel writing. This ambitious new biography dwells on Stevenson’s struggles with ill health and his seeking refuge and rest in locales as diverse as Monterey, California, Saranac Lake, New York, the Côte d’Azur, Samoa, and Tahiti.

Like Howard and Lovecraft, Stevenson toiled in a newspaper industry where even the most diligent and devoted authors were unlikely to find anything close to financial stability. Combine the subject’s money woes with a chronic lung condition that Damrosch says may or may not have been tuberculosis, and his story becomes one of struggle and upheaval, in which corresponding with fellow authors provided one of the few solaces. Henry James admired Stevenson’s work, and the latter fully reciprocated. The two sent each other samples of their published writing, and, in Damrosch’s telling, James was particularly grateful for the glimpses, in Stevenson’s writing, of settings so foreign to the sedate and courtly precincts that filled his own novels. Damrosch quotes a letter from James to Stevenson, expressing thanks for “the beautiful strange things you sent me which make forever in my sky-parlour a sort of dim rumble as of the Pacific surf. My heart beats over them — my imagination throbs — my eyes fill.”

Stylistically, the two writers were polar opposites, Damrosch observes. Yet he leaves no doubt about the effects on the sickly Stevenson of receiving such encouragement from a figure so esteemed in the world of letters as Henry James.

Kernan, the editor of James Schuyler’s diaries, has given us a life of the mid-century poet and member of the New York School, providing further confirmation of the strength and resolve that creatives can take from one another. Schuyler’s friendships with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, which began in 1952 and lasted for many years, were critical to his sense of himself and his role. Kernan quotes Schuyler on this point: “Both John and Frank were very encouraging and made me feel that I wasn’t just a poet who was being tested but that I was a poet. That was perhaps one of the most, if not the most important moment of my life; to be accepted by people of whose work I was absolutely certain.”

This knowledge helped sustain Schuyler during later years that Kernan describes in a chapter entitled “The Dark Apartment: 1974–1979,” where we hear about Schuyler moving into a lonely rented space at 250 East 35th Street and feeling overcome with disbelief and trepidation at turning fifty. “This Dark Apartment,” Kernan notes, is also the title of a poem in which Schuyler describes his reactions on entering the space one day in 1974 and finding his lover Bob Jordan in bed with another man. To make matters worse, that unexpected guest was a drug addict who, according to Kernan, used a key that Jordan had given him to come back and rob the apartment. Far from apologizing, Jordan cut off all contact with Schuyler, refusing to return calls. It was the epitome of shabbiness: he dumped a sensitive poet who had been kind to him. At the end of the poem, Schuyler recalls living in a different apartment on East 49th Street with O’Hara and Ashbery, who, even though they were not his lovers, treated him markedly better.

This is not to say that poets, or anyone else, should need or depend on other people’s positive opinions of their work. If Hine, discussed above, had done so in his early manic-depressive phases, he might never had found the resolve to forge ahead and accomplish feats as an editor and poet. Yet it was clearly important for Schuyler, as for others discussed here, to know that they were not howling into a void and that the rejection slips that came back from newspapers or magazines were based on subjective criteria others did not share.