Mrs. Gaskell’s _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, after many vicissitudes, has taken a place among the great biographies. Soon after its publication about seventy years ago, it was alleged by many to be unsound, untruthful, unjust, but time has shown it to be a remarkably accurate picture of a humourless genius who was sensitive, shy and temperamental, and whose statements were sometimes founded in fancy rather than in fact. Biography-writing has been influenced, as novel-writing has been, by the researches and discoveries of modern psychology, particularly by the teachings of Freud, and to a lesser extent of the behaviourists. The most prominent representative of this “new” kind of biography is Gamaliel Bradford. He is not, however, a Freudian, but a sane, temperate, laboriously trained writer who has a profound regard for facts, great industry in unearthing them, and much skill in serving them daintily and appetisingly, seasoned with fancy, to the reading public. Mr. Harvey O’Higgins has swallowed the doctrines of the Viennese mystic, bait, line and sinker, and in _The American Mind in Action_ he has attempted to show how well he has digested and assimilated them. A journalist by training, he has mastered the Freudian jargon, and he writes it with the same ease that James Joyce writes of the subconscious distillation and conscious crystallisation of Mr. and Mrs. Bloom. He is the Técla of biographers, but he offers his goods to the trade as genuine. They do not deceive experts. He is attempting to do for biographies what Dr. George M. Gould did a few years ago in his biographical clinics. Only he substituted the Œdipus-complex for Eye Strain. Œdipus Redivivus will have a longer day in court than Eye Strain had and more spectators, and there is a salaciousness about the testimony elicited that the elicitors and the audience like, but the verdict in both cases will be similar. A form of biography that is apparently finding great favour is represented by such books as _The Divine Lady_, _Ariel_, _The Portrait of Zélide_, _The Nightingale_, _Glorious Apollo_. It is an elaboration of the variety popularised by Mr. Gamaliel Bradford which he calls psychographs. These are psychographs and somagraphs flavoured with time-denatured scandal. They are easy reading, mildly instructive, and moderately diverting. They are a good substitute for fiction and a fairly acceptable one for history, and they are infinitely to be preferred to biographic fiction such as _He Was a Man_, the life of Jack London, by Rose Wilder Lane.