Field, Andrew, 1938-

Andrew Field was born in Orange, New Jersey, on March 28, 1938. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1960 and an M.A. from the same institution in 1961. He was a Harvard University exchange scholar at Moscow State University in 1963. He later was a lecturer at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, from 1967 to 1970, and a senior lecturer in Russian literature from 1971 to 1974; he earned his Ph.D. at this last institution in 1973. His doctoral work produced the first full bibliography of Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov: a Bibliography, which was published by McGraw Hill in 1974. That same year, Field became a professor of comparative literature at Griffith University, also in Brisbane, and was Director of the Institute for Modern Biography there from 1977 to 1979. He also served as a member of the advisory board of the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University from 1977 to 1979. In 1984, he was the Davis Visiting Professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He married Margaret (Meg) Shegog in 1977.

Professor Field's first publication was his translation of the second novel of the Russian symbolist Fyodor Sologub, entitled The Petty Demon (1907), published by Random House in 1962. In 1964, Little, Brown published an anthology of new Russian literature called Pages from Tarusa, edited by Field. His first biographical work was Nabokov: His Life in ArtA Critical Narrative, published by Little, Brown in 1967. In this work, he considers Vladimir Nabokov's writings in Russian and his reception by Russian, European, American, and émigré critics and suggests a fuller appreciation of the writer and his complete, bilingual oeuvre. Field's critical work on Nabokov produced two additional critical biographies: Nabokov: His Life in Part (1977) and VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (1986). Field also published a novel, Fractions, in 1969.

As a scholar, translator, and creative writer, Field considers biography a distinct literary genre. In the anthology Reading Life Histories, published by the Institute for Modern Biography at Griffith University in 1981, he asserted that biography should move "from history to artistic form with no sacrifice in standards of accuracy" (James Walter, ed., p. 21). Field's own biographical works are distinguished by stylistic and formal innovation, a practice that has been met with both praise and criticism.

Field began exploring the life and work of Djuna Barnes in the mid-1970s, and his research for Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes (alternately entitled Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes in Putnam's first American edition) began in earnest in 1977. The book was published in 1983, shortly after Barnes's death in 1982; was translated into French, Italian, and Spanish; and was republished in paperback edition by the University of Texas Press in 1985.

Another of Field's book-length publications, The Lost Chronicle of Edward de Vere: Lord Great Chamberlain Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Poet and Playwright William Shakespeare, is a biographical novel published by Viking in England in 1990. Field has published many articles about Nabokov, Barnes, and biographical narrative in journals including Quadrant, Meanjin, TriQuarterly, New Leader, and Partisan Review . He was a prolific newspaper essayist for the Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia) from 1992 until 1999 and continues to write regular travel articles for the same paper. Field and his wife reside in Paddington, Queensland, Australia.

From the guide to the Andrew Field papers, 1916-1989, majority 1976-1982, (University of Maryland Libraries)