Drawing upon the theoretical writings of Tzvetan Todorov and Georg Lukács on the subject of the novel, this essay argues for more widespread recognition of the biography as a literary genre. It frames the genre of biography as a genre of radical incompleteness, discussing the search for verisimilitude and the tendency toward fragmentation in the biographer’s pursuit — a quality that describes not only the biographer’s sources, but also the contingent, broken nature of the intellectual and emotional space that both the biographical subject and the biographer herself inhabit.