"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

The Education of a Prince (Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff) / Alva Johnston (1932)

Johnston hit just the right note: arch ('In 1922, a Russian prince was somebody'), urban, and ultimately benign. It's all together possible that the writer harbored a soft spot for this remarkable impostor, seen from phrases like 'his freedom from small virtues' (thrift, prudence, thought of the future), 'a childlike faith in some of his (own) fictions'. Speaking on behalf of the Prince's undeceived admirers, he points out that 'there is a touch of real Americanism... here it is considered more creditable for a man to be a Romanoff by his own efforts than by accident of birth.'

The Prince was honest after his own fashion:
__ "I don't like because I desire to be a crook and a thief, but because I wish to associate with persons whose lives I believe to be adorned. .. If I told you the truth, I would feel like a bare wall."
__ "This obligation (would remain) a secret debt which I am glad to think I can never possibly repay."
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White Like Me (Anotole Broyard) / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1996)

Standing Oscar Wilde's quote on its head, (all criticism is a form of autobiography), this is biography as social/cultural criticism:

• a Faustian bargain or... a case of personality over-spilling, or rebelling against, the reign of category
  
• To pass is to sin against authenticity, and "authenticity" is among the founding lies of the modern age.
  

Some particularly well-chosen adjectives: plangent, mandarin, ticklish.

__ Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel. [Broyard]
__ Seduction is the most heartfelt literature of the self. [Broyard]
__ A lot of men steal from women. They steal bits of their souls, bits of their personalities, to construct an emotional life, which many men don't have. [Harold Brodkey according to his widow]
__ Whose family wasn't in someway unsuitable?
__ much more the better for being a little bad [Shakespeare]