The present book includes very little biographical information on Schumpeter. The primary exceptions are found in Chapters 2 and 10, where some information is given on the contexts in which he worked before and after World War I. The present appendix gives some pointers to the Schumpeter literature.

The literature on Schumpeter's life and work consists of specialised papers and monographic treatments. The contributions published before 1990 have been catalogued by Massimo Augello (1990), and Cunningham Wood (1991) and Horst Hanusch (1999) have collected large selections of the papers. The monographs are of two types. On the one hand, we have the personal biographies by Loring Allen (1991), Richard Swedberg (1991), Wolfgang Stolper (1994), Thomas McCraw (2007) as well as accounts that include much biographical material like the books by Erich Schneider (1975) and Eduard März (1991). On the other hand, the accounts for Schumpeter's works include books by Clemence and Doody (1950), Khan (1957), Perroux (1965), Oakley (1990), Bottomore (1992), Vecchi (1995), Shionoya (1997), Reisman (2004), and Heertje (2006). The extensive account for neo-Schumpeterian economics that is edited by Horst Hanusch and Andreas Pyka (2007) also includes much of interest for the interpretation of Schumpeter's work.

The first wave of biographical and interpretative work started immediately after Schumpeter's death in 1950. This was a period during which the main issue for ambitious economists was the development and application of the tools of equilibrium economics and the related econometrics.