There is only one kind of author: The one which no one knows

Sean Burke (The Death and Return of the Author) suggested that much of the confusion around the death(s) of the Author arises from the confusion of the death of the Author as a desired but optional methodological basis for literary criticism with the death of the Author as a transcendental event, an axiom of all discourse. Andrew Bennet's book (The Author) is abounding in terms distinguishing not between the types of the deaths of the Author, but between types of the Author itself: between the biographical and the hypothetical / artificial / constructed / implied Author.

But it must be realised that such dichotomies might be misleading; that the biographical (extratextual, existing, and mostly dead) Author (which was writing) is not in essence different from the implied (intratextual) Author (which is read out of / into the text). For both entities are constructs: the extratextual Author, or, which is the same thing, what we know about it, is constructed from pieces of information gathered from original documents, objects, letters, biographies, memoirs--to use Barthes' term, biographemes. The process during which it is constructed is not really different from how an author-figure is created around the implied addresser of a literary text. The two processes might also reinforce each other with data from a literary text contributing to our knowledge of the extratextual Author, and previous information about the extratextual writer modifying our understanding of the implied one. The only difference between an extratextual and an intratextual Author is that in the construction of the first, a large amount of extratextual data is used, whereas that of the latter is ideally confined to information from the literary text under scrutiny.

In other words, the two type of Authors do not form an irreconcilable opposition: they appear to be the extremes of a single linear continuum. In this sense, there are no distinct Authors of a text: there are, instead, different sets of Author-related information used by different readers or by the same reader at different times. It can be attempted to intentionally exclude all extratextual data, for example (as New Criticism advocated), but one thing is sure: everything can never be taken into account. No matter which Author we investigate: we will never know it as well as we'd like.