George D. Painter (George Duncan Painter) Biography

British biographer, born in Birmingham, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1938 to 1974 he worked in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum, where he became an assistant keeper in charge of fifteenth-century material in 1954. Studies in Fifteenth Century-Printing (1984) collects his internationally respected writings as a bibliographer and incunabulist. André Gide (1951) was the first of his biographies; Gide's The Chelsea Way (1967), a parody of Proust, is among the numerous works he has translated. His reputation as one of the foremost biographers of the twentieth century was established with Marcel Proust (2 volumes, 1959, 1965); the product of eighteen years' writing and research, it combines scholarship of immense meticulousness with a lucidly developed narrative. Painter's other biographies include William Caxton (1976), which draws on his specialized knowledge of fifteenth-century printing, and Chateaubriand (1977), the first part of a projected three-volume study.