invented self : an anti-biography, from documents of Thomas A. Edison

An attack on biography as a mode of historical writing might appear untimely, since for two decades works based on social scientific methodology have dominated historiography. Biography ostensibly has occupied a second place. The social historian still writes a biography, but its subject is a statistical abstraction, a social class, or an institution.
The present work is a theoretical enterprise, based on the work of structuralists and semioticians, and a research project dealing with archival materials.