On the Nature of Biography

Biographers, and I am one, are snoops….

In public I use the term “literary detectives” because it sounds more respectable. But we are the equivalent of gossips peering over the backyard fence with binoculars and taking notes. We do it because we are curious about people’s lives; and for the intellectual and personal satisfaction; and in the hope that we will make a contribution to history or literature.

What’s so interesting about other people’s lives?

I remember delivering a forty-minute talk about the life of the notoriously secluded Harper Lee, author of one of the most popular novels in American literature, To Kill a Mockingbird. Afterward, an audience member came up and said, “How would you like a biography written about you?” Nevertheless, he had come to hear me despite the cold and the rain and stayed until the end.

What that indicates to me is that how other people live, how they’ve coped with the vicissitudes of life is a compelling.

Charles J. Shields, Associate Director

Why? Because biographies can be comforting to readers. They provide an antidote to loneliness, and an opportunity to learn from the events, reversals, and triumphs experienced by our fellow human beings. As Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century author and dictionary-maker said, “Biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life.”

But do we intrude on our people’s privacy by researching and writing biography?

Absolutely. If we could get biographers— ancient, modern, and contemporary— to sit around a table, I feel reasonably sure that we could agree that the essence of our profession is this: we breech the walls of our subject’s privacy and try to make sense of what we find there.

If this sounds like Scrooge’s charwoman pulling down his bed curtains, “rings and all, with him lying there,” I suppose the analogy is apt. But again, as Johnson told his own biographer, James Boswell, fidelity to the facts about people is a duty, because “if nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything.”

In other words, it’s good to know that other people— the good, the great, and even the wicked— struggled as we do. We learn from their courage, their heartbreaks, and their mistakes, too.

But who’s worth writing about? Who’s worth spending perhaps years researching?

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Well, gone are the days (perhaps thankfully) when another book about Lincoln would be a welcome addition to the 16,000 already written. Nigel Hamilton, president of Biographers International Organization (BIO) and author of American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush explains.

“It is now no longer enough for a biographer to do what the reader can do himself or herself by looking up information on the Internet. This in turn means an author cannot hope to sell a book merely on his or her access to libraries and archives, as in the old days. The biographer now must offer a thesis/view/perspective substantially different from, and better than Wikipedia, etc.” In other words, the heat is on to be creative, original.

Ironically, not even this may be enough for the trade publishers.

Biographer Jonathan Eig says the economics of publishing today call for the bobble-head test. “On the shelf next to my desk I’ve got bobble-head figurines for each of my subjects: Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, and Al Capone. The bobble-head test is a good one, although not a perfect one. A person must be pretty well known to merit a bobble-head. Does that mean I should exclude subjects who are not bobble-worthy? I’m not sure. I do feel pressure to chose subjects that have a chance of racking up strong sales.”

Here’s what I do when I’m considering a subject for a biography: half of my mind is creative, and the other half is financial. The creative side asks, “Is this life so interesting that you could stick with it for years, even when the going gets boring or rough?” Then the financial side asks, “And when the book is finally finished, will it be such an interesting subject that someone will go into a bookstore and pay $30 for a copy?”

If the answer to both questions is an unequivocal “Yes!” then I trust my instincts and get going.

Fortunately, biographers today have new powers now to render more vivid, detailed, and original portraits of their subjects. We are the first generation of biographers to benefit from research that is Internet-enhanced. We can fly with Google Earth over roads our subjects traveled, and word-search for their names appearing in digitalized newspapers.

On the other hand, boiling down whole libraries into websites creates an uncanny feeling of never really reaching the end of it all. As the Red Queen said in Through the Looking Glass, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

My friend Brian Jay Jones, currently working on a biography of Jim Henson, worries that “I’ve missed something important just because I didn’t know how to search for it— I either didn’t type it into the search engine right or I forgot the quotes around it or whatever, which left something laying in plain sight somewhere that I will now never have.”

Nevertheless, now more than ever, “The game’s afoot!” as Sherlock Holmes likes to say. It’s an adventure, this effort to understand the nature of life through the lives of others!

And as long as people continue to be fascinating by one another, the readership for biographies seems to have no limit.

Charles J. Shields is the associate director of the Chappell Great Lives Lecture Series at the University of Mary Washington, and most recently the author of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life (Holt, 2011). This piece originally appeared in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.