Herbert Sherman Gorman was an American novelist, biographer, poet, and literary critic, born in 1893 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and he died in 1954. He built his early career in journalism, working as a work reviewer and literary critic for New York newspapers, including a stint with the New York World and contributions to the New York Times Book Review, which sharpened both his critical eye and his prose style. Gorman is best remembered today for his biographical work, particularly his pioneering studies of James Joyce. He wrote the first full biography of Joyce, James Joyce: His First Forty Years, published in 1924 while Joyce was still very much alive and controversial, and he later expanded this into the more comprehensive James Joyce in 1939, a work produced with Joyce's own cooperation and oversight, which gives it unusual authority despite the tensions that arose between biographer and subject over how much personal material to include. Beyond Joyce, Gorman wrote biographies of other major literary and historical figures, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Hawthorne: A Study in Solitude, Herman Melville, and Alexandre Dumas, in The Incredible Marquis: Alexandre Dumas, a study that reflected his broader interest in Romantic and nineteenth-century literary figures. In addition to his biographical writing, Gorman was a productive novelist and poet. His novels, including works such as The Wine of San Lorenzo and Suzy, tended toward historical and richly atmospheric settings, and he also published volumes of poetry earlier in his career. Across his output, Gorman displayed a versatile literary sensibility, moving comfortably between fiction, verse, criticism, and biography, and his work as a biographer in particular helped shape early twentieth-century critical understanding of modernist writers even as it remained rooted in a more traditional, narrative-driven biographical style rather than the psychologically probing approach that later biographers would adopt.
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