Evelyn Barish's The Double Life of Paul de Man is an amazing biography, an age-old story of hubris and the fall of one of the 20th century's most influential literary critics.
Along with Jacques Derrida, de Man created deconstruction, a very difficult and obscure theory of literary analysis. Barish observed de Man's classes in the 1960s; she couldn't understand what he was talking about, she admits, but "he had a magnetic pull." When he died in 1983, the New York Times ran his obituary on the front page. Five years later, it came out that the Belgian native had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and had written an anti-Semitic article. The revelations rocked the academic world; Newsweek even put the story on its cover.
Barish (Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy) was determined to find out who de Man really was. Her research in Belgium revealed that he was a bigamist who embezzled funds from his own postwar publishing company, yet he occasionally gave assistance to the Resistance even while he was working with the Nazis. The de Man she discovered was a "chameleon," easily changing colors when it suited his purpose, escaping time and again--eventually to the United States, where he kept his past a secret and rose to the highest levels of academia. As Barish writes, each new revelation in this mesmerizing exposé leads to "new and more tangled mysteries" about its subject's life. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher