Seven years ago, Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson, a former editor of TIME Magazine, if he would write his biography. Isaacson, who has done books about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, thought the request presumptuous and premature, since Jobs was still a young man. What Isaacson didn’t know at the time, and only a few people did, was that Jobs was about to undergo surgery for pancreatic cancer and was feeling his mortality. It speaks to the secrecy with which Jobs conducted his life and his business, adding mystery to an already compelling figure.