Over the last decade, I have occasionally embraced a genre of writing I term “biocriticism,” a critical examination of a figure’s career and cultural impact through the prism of biographical details and life episodes. With biocriticism I hope to open an intellectual window onto the cultural and intellectual landscape that shapes a figure’s life, using biography as a means to social and cultural criticism. I have used a biocritical approach to probe the lives and times of black icons like black nationalist revolutionary Malcolm X, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and hip-hop immortal Tupac Shakur. The virtue of biocriticism is a wide-ranging exploration of the forces and figures that define a particular movement or era through the lens of a single figure, combining the best of biography, cultural analysis, historical examination, and social criticism. I am presently at work on a biocritical analysis of Marvin Gaye, the legendary artist whose work altered the American musical and cultural landscape.