Accounts, multiple and definitive

In a books newsletter from The Washington Post, news of scholars pleading that Philip Roth’s papers not be destroyed as Roth wished:

In a statement released this week by the Philip Roth Society, dozens of professors begged the executors to ignore Roth’s wishes. “Arrangements limiting access to one biographer run counter to conventions of academic inquiry,” they wrote. “Scholarship can only be advanced when qualified researchers engage freely with essential sources. . . . A writer of Mr. Roth’s stature deserves multiple accounts of his life in keeping with the nuance and complexity of his art.”

And the next item, a link to a book review: “The Double Life of Bob Dylan is the definitive account of a shape-shifting genius’s early years.”