Biography, like fiction, is a shaping art. Even the most plodding and pedestrian chronological account of a life bears the mark of a biographer’s hand: the sense of evidence culled, compiled, enhanced, managed, meant to establish or emphasize a point, in a way that unedited life seldom affords. It is more likely in the correspondence, published and unpublished, that one finds the runaway untidiness of the subject’s everyday life: the stray episodes that do not fit a pattern, the chance relationships that, as often as not, lead nowhere in particular—or, with interesting possibilities, everywhere. In the letters (and in the journals and diaries) one gets the helter-skelter of life as it is lived.

To be sure, volumes of published correspondence are also shaped by literary or legal or commercial considerations. The market value of the letter-writer in question, the danger that some unnoticed bit of gossip may prove libelous, the high publication costs of a project more than likely to run to several volumes—all this may influence an editor and publisher. Lyall H. Powers’s authoritative edition of the correspondence of Henry James and Edith Wharton—that distinctive pair of American sensibilities—has, aside from the usual editorial circumstances, a complicating disadvantage: the loss of almost all of Wharton’s letters to James. Powers includes all the known letters (167 items) from James to Wharton during the fifteen-year span of their friendship, but only thirteen letters and postcards from Wharton. Several of these were co-signed by Wharton’s sometime companion Walter Berry, an