"There is no doubt that the artist can only win recognition before posterity in the first and the last place through his works, but it is equally doubtless that if literary history thinks in a truly historical kind of way, the life of a writer must also be seen as one of his works: the writer is not only the paper printed full of text, he is also the symbolic flower and fruit of history, his body, his illnesses, his human struggles are works no less than his poems or his plays."
