A Restricted View of the Author

In light of our discussion in class today, I wanted to point out an observation I have made about how we as readers and thinkers view an author's piece of work once we have received information on his or her background. A few weeks ago, after reading the poem "We Wear the Mask", our class discussion turned toward how our reading of the poem was affected by the knowledge that the author was an African American slave. Many of us, including myself, said that these facts altered the way we read the poem. Where before it has seemed the author was speaking of the hardships of humanity, now it seemed he was speaking more specifically to black slaves when he wrote the poem. It was not until one students pointed out that just because the African American slave was just that does not mean he was writing specifically for one group of people that I realized how often we take information and apply it to the author as being absolute truth and base the author's writing on his background. This same exact thing happened today in class when we were discussing the author of the Cherokee novel who was really a racist and white supremacist. After discussion of how much this knowledge undermined this author's work in his Cherokee novel, a student pointed out that just because he was known for being a racist does not mean he was one at the time of writing the novel. Do we see a pattern forming? All of us, at one time or another, have learned a bit of information about an author and have undoubtedly applied that information to the work of literature being studied without thinking about the fact that maybe the information can only be applied to one part or area of the author's life. This means, then, that there a strong amount of validity in theorists like Eliot's argument that the author should play no role in analyzing a work of literature because it seems that we are all so quick to take the information and apply it where it may not be applicable at all.