Francis M. Nevins

"First You Dream, Then You Die" defeated my attempts to read it as a straight biography, because I simply couldn't slog through detailed plot summaries of 24 novels and about 230 short stories - the verbiage expended on those far outweighs the pure biographical matter. Of course a literary biography will discuss the highlights of an author's publishing career, and examine thematic strands of the work. But Mr. Nevins is much less a literary critic than a simple paraphraser, and his judgments seem arbitrary - as an Amazon commenter put it, he damns Woolrich for certain writing tendencies on one page, then, confusingly, praises him for exactly the same tendencies on another. So: a fail as a biography, a fail as criticism - in this format.

However, the information contained in the massive 613-page volume, including its long Checklist combining bibliography, filmography, and other information, is essential for any serious Woolrich reader (although it could probably stand a little updating now). The plot summaries certainly have their value when you want to know what a given story is about. I just wish the entire book had been arranged quite differently, as a sort of Woolrich handbook containing a tight 150-page biography, the Checklist as it stands, an alphabetically arranged section of the summaries, and maybe a separate critical essay (or several of those by diverse hands).… (more)