Author Description

Around 319 B.C. Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher who was Aristotle's pupil, compiled his "Characters": some thirty brief but graphic descriptions of recognizable human types (the coward, the boor, etc.). His work inspired a prolific literary genre; "character writing" flourished in England and in European countries in various guises for several centuries. This book, the first devoted to tracing the development and decline of character writing, provides a wide-ranging and illuminating survey of the style used by La Bruyère, Addison, and Steele, among others, a style whose origins and influence most readers may never have stopped to question.