When I was a graduate student, I longed for the completion of the magisterial Irvin Ehrenpreis biography of Swift, the first two volumes of which had appeared in 1962 and 1967. As I began and continued my life in the academy, there was still no third volume, a lack that seemed to grow larger with each passing year. Then, volume three, covering Swift's years as Dean of St. Patrick's, was published in 1983. It was not up to the standard of the first two volumes. Still, the sheer labor and length of Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age gave the complete biography authority, and it took some time for its faults to come to light, most notably its overreliance on Freudian paradigms to explain a man and writer who was, as Deane Swift called him in a description that Leo Damrosch quotes, “exceedingly strange, various, and perplexed” (2). Since 1983, other biographers have come forward with shorter treatments of Swift's life, but not until now have we had a work ambitious enough to rival Ehrenpreis's. Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World does not merely take its place alongside Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age. In its evenhanded consideration of evidence about Swift's life that Ehrenpreis ignored, it surpasses the earlier work.

Damrosch begins, as he must, by situating his work in relation to earlier lives of Swift. He deftly enumerates the limitations of Ehrenpreis that have become more apparent with the passage of time: in addition to the procrustean bed of Freud, there are assertions without evidence and the omission of evidence. In short, Ehrenpreis was convinced that his interpretation of Swift was accurate and chose not to pursue anything in the record that might challenge it. In 1985, David Nokes published a “critical biography” whose portrait of Swift is highly negative. Damrosch notes that it is also “heavily dependent” on Ehrenpreis (and, he might have added, on an earlier, generally ignored writer, Evelyn Hardy). What Damrosch promises in his biography is to explore the mysteries of Swift's life as fully as possible, assessing the old evidence with an open mind and employing new evidence from the past thirty years of research. This is worth doing, Damrosch rightly maintains, because Swift “still matters . . . he was a great writer and a great man” (7).

Damrosch has taken pains to make his book readable to nonspecialists while retaining the interest of those already familiar with Swift's life and world. Ninety-four illustrations punctuate the text, linked to relevant passages rather than bunched together in special sections. He also gives pronunciations in parentheses of names that look as if they were pronounced otherwise: for example, “Bullenbrook” for Bolingbroke and “Vannummery” for Vanhomrigh. There are other useful explanations. Damrosch makes the quantity of Swift's wine purchase of six hogsheads every year more understandable with the information that a hogshead is sixty-three gallons. Such an amount suggests that Swift was either more generous to his friends or more of a serious drinker than we may have imagined.

The text is enlivened by piquant details that other biographers might well regard as too trivial to mention, such as Swift's having spent money to see dwarfs. This does tell us something about Swift, as does his “Bedlam tourism.” As a biographer, Damrosch must write about many aspects of Swift's life that are well known, but he typically tries to add something that we did not know: for example, that Daniel Boone read Gulliver's Travels aloud to companions around his wilderness campfire and that one of these companions named a creek in Kentucky after a city of Brobdingnag. This brings to vivid life the idea of a “world classic.”

About Swift's health, a significant area since he suffered from a number of ailments, Damrosch notes that one recommendation was to wear a quilted cap stuffed with cloves, mace, and nutmegs. The effect is tragicomic, a reminder of how bizarre, as well as ineffectual, most such prescriptions were in Swift's time. This treatment, in addition to being useless, must have been quite uncomfortable, but it's likely that Swift subjected himself to many painful protocols in his desperation: Ménière's syndrome, which gave him severe giddiness throughout his life, remained untreatable until late in the twentieth century. About Swift's final state, Damrosch has an opportunity to correct Ehrenpreis, who wished to spare the aging Swift from any imputation of mental failure and who, in any case, could not have anticipated the knowledge of Alzheimer's that is now available. Swift may have had other afflictions as well—both Ehrenpreis and Damrosch believe that towards the end he had a stroke—but primarily, Swift presented as a classic case of Alzheimer's.

Given that no compelling new facts about Swift's life have come to light, Damrosch does what a biographer today must do to justify his work: he provides a full explanation of the various cruxes of Swift's life that have remained mysterious since the eighteenth century. In one instance, at least, the possibility that Sir William Temple was Stella's father, Damrosch makes a persuasive case, an elegant solution to many otherwise inexplicable aspects of Stella's life and her relationship with Swift.

But most of the biographical puzzles remain intractable, including the one we would most like to know more about. “The relationship between Swift and Stella ends as it began, in impenetrable privacy,” Damrosch writes (407). There are few firm conclusions, but thanks to his open-minded presentation of the evidence, we understand why.