Publishers will often use a writer's background to promote a book.
A writer's background is just one of many influences fuelling their imaginations.
The Society's president, Theodore G. Rochow gave the writer some background in the history of the microscope.
In the absence of a conversational partner who shares the writer's background and who can furrow her brows or break in and ask for clarification when he stops making sense, good writing depends an ability to imagine a generic reader and empathise about what she already knows and how she interprets the flow of words in real time.
You could make an argument for it — maybe you'd like to find a writer whose background mirrors your own, and, after all, there are whole academic disciplines dedicated to studies of race, gender, etc. — but I'm hesitant to champion the idea.
The significance of a writer's background, his context, is that of a point of departure: art is an escape, a flight of speech to the printed page, where the reader's imagination is free to encounter the writer's; biography moves in the opposite direction, dissolving text back into conversation, returning the writer to his "household", reincarnating his family, bringing him back to earth.
While Settle's work was published generally without his annotations and notes, the writer's background here is unique and Settle does have an excellent bibliography.
The category properly springs out of direct experience of proletarian life and is not available to writers whose background is bourgeois or aristocratic.
"Italy was the Gothic writers' favorite background," wrote Massimiliano Demata, a professor at the University of Bari, who has made a study of the form.
During the last few years, for example, by far the most impressive music book has been Rip It Up and Start Again, by Reynolds, one of the few music writers whose background in the Barthes/Baudrillard school has reaped enviable rewards.
