The Two Mrs. Veblens, Among Others.

Few thinkers are remembered so little for what they wrote and so much for dubious legends circulated about them as economist Thorstein Veblen. The primary fables whisper of predatory womanizing and perverse misanthropy. five years after its subject's death. Joseph Dorfrnan's "Thorstein Veblen and His America," a biography on Veblen focusing more on intellectual context than on psychological portraiture, has long occupied the revered position as the central work on Veblen. Setting out to correct the lies and misplaced myths that have hidden the essential Veblen, Elizabeth Watkins Jorgensen and Henry Irvin Jorgensen have brought together an immense amount of primary materials unknown to or unused by their predecessor. In the final chapter of their book the Jorgensens give the readers their conclusion that Veblen was obviously drawn to women who were brilliant, beautiful, needing rescuing, and were not of the usual complacent or obsequious model for Victorian women. The Jorgensens, focusing understandably on how the women shed light on Veblen, not on the women's lives in their own right, do not explore this tension, and thus at times their portraits tend to become one dimensional.