moving under skies

When I picked this up I was really hoping for a meditation on how we attach ourselves to authors and construct wholly idealized and unreal idols of them for our own personal use--a sort of philosophy on the curious relationship between writer and reader, and all of the fictionalizing that goes on between the words on the page and their recipient. I am fascinated by how I often fall in love with entirely fictional constructs of real people based on what I've read of them and I want to explore that experience. Hawes does a tiny bit of that, but on the whole this is just a conventional biography. Thus my discontents with this one are entirely my fault--a case of mistaken identity. As biographies go, I'd much rather have read one on pretty much any contemporary of Camus, but given my low interest level once I realized my mistake this wasn't bad. Certainly it is informative and well-written enough, and I can now speak with considerable knowledge about a thinker whom I previously knew little. So that's good, but I'm still searching for that other book...