3. I. Getting Started
1. 1. The Task of Biography
2. 2. What Is Your Agenda?
3. 3. Defining Your Audience
4. 4. Researching Your Subject
5. 5. The Shape of a Life
4. II. Composing a Life-Story
1. 6. The Starting Point
2. 7. Birthing Your Subject
3. 8. Childhood and Youth
4. 9. Love Stories
5. 10. Life’s Work
6. 11. The Twilight Years
7. 12. Ending Your Story
5. III. Variations on a Theme
1. 13. Autobiography and Memoirs
2. 14. Memoir
3. 15. Truth—and Its Consequences
4. 16. The Afterlife
7. Selected Bibliography
HOW TO DO BIOGRAPHY
HOW TO DO
Harvard University Press
LONDON, ENGLAND 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Nigel Hamilton All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hamilton, Nigel. How to do biography : a primer / Nigel Hamilton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-02796-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Biography as a literary form. 2. Biography—Research— Methodology.
3. Autobiography—Authorship. I. Title.
CT22.H36 2008 808′.06692—dc22 2007047583
For Oskari Gray Hamilton né June 9, 2007 and Joyce Seltzer
1. The Task of Biography 7
2. What Is Your Agenda? 22
3. Defining Your Audience 47
4. Researching Your Subject 63
5. The Shape of a Life 93
COMPOSING A LIFE-STORY
6. The Starting Point 119
7. Birthing Your Subject 138
8. Childhood and Youth 155
9. Love Stories 174
10. Life’s Work 194
11. The Twilight Years 217
12. Ending Your Story 238
VARIATIONS ON A T HEME
13. Autobiography and Memoirs 269
14. Memoir 294
15. Truth—and Its Consequences 317
16. The Afterlife 334
Notes 349 Selected Bibliography 362 Acknowledgments 368 Index 371
HOW TO DO BIOGRAPHY
e live—at least in the Western world—in a golden age for biography. The depiction
of real lives in every medium from print to film, from radio to television and the Internet,
is more popular than ever. More people are undertaking biographies (and
autobiographical works, such as blogs and memoirs) than ever before. Yet there is still, to
my knowledge, no book or primer to guide the would-be biographer in tackling the record
and interpretation of a human individual, past or present.
Given the contribution that biography makes to knowledge and understanding in the
modern democratic world, this is, to say the least, disappointing. A society in which no
biographies could be produced is almost unthinkable—yet we do not teach the study and
composition of biography, in all its aspects, in higher education. Its ethics, like the his tory
and theory behind it, thus go largely unaddressed,
while at a practical level there are still relatively few courses offered to those who wish to
write a biography, whether big or small. Would-be biographers are thus left largely to
their own devices, scrabbling for advice and examples in every direction.
Having spent a lifetime in the business of biography—as a writer, teacher, bookseller,
publisher, and filmmaker—I therefore wondered whether it would be useful to write a
short book of advice on how to do biography, a manual that would follow Biography: A
Brief History, my survey of biography’s long and storied past up to the present day.
The project proved more challenging than I anticipated. For instance, I had hoped,
initially, to cover the many different media in which life-depiction can be tackled in our
time. This was beyond me; the manuscript filled with subjunctives, subsidiary clauses,
subsidiary cases, multiple choices. It lacked clarity—which is essential in tackling a life. I
therefore began again, confining myself to print biography. Perhaps one day this can be
extended to the visual and aural media of film, radio, television, the fine arts, and the
Internet, where the biographical impetus is now such a burgeoning force. Meanwhile I
hope that How To Do Biography will provide a building block, and a start.
I have structured the book in sixteen chapters, to cover the main elements of the
biographical undertaking, from conception to composition and publishing—but although
they reflect the stages in which you accomplish the work, I must emphasize that the real
process of biography is like juggling: you must learn to manage several aspects
simultaneously. The business of research, for example, constantly affects your agenda,
your design, and your composition—as does a concern with your audience’s needs and
Because interest in memoir has been increasing exponentially of late, I have included
several chapters on autobiography as well. I hope they, too, will be useful.
In the course of this work, I’ve chosen a number of brief extracts from well-known
biographies: examples of good practice that illustrate the sheer range of approaches you
can adopt, from great beginnings to memorable death scenes.
My intention was to write a primer that would be readable, informative, instructive—
and, to a degree, entertaining. Biography has been my passion for more than forty years
—and I hope it will be yours, too, for it offers a raft of pleasures and fulfillments, if you
get it right—as well as interesting life-experience if you don’t!
No species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful,
none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of
The Rambler, 60 (October 13, 1750)
ou wish to write or produce a “life,” but wisely pause to think about the task. I
have no wish to hold you up; but no would-be biographer, in my view, should em bark on
the depiction of a real life without bothering to know something about how—and why—
previous biographers have addressed the lives of real individuals in the past—and with
what results. From canonizations, peerages, and professorships to trials, punishments,
and even beheadings, it is a fascinating story.
When did the biographical urge arise in humans? How was it first manifested? How did
the invention of writing— in cuneiform and, later, in ink on papyrus—affect the course of
life-depiction? Was the purpose to commemorate the dead—or to judge them? Was it
individuals’ achievements that were important to record, or their characters—and why?
Did readers want to learn of the dead—or from the dead? And where did art—the art of
storytelling and composition—come in?
These are important questions for us, because they’ve remained more or less constant
throughout Western history, and are still valid today. Dr. Johnson, who had under taken to
write the lives of the eminent English poets, put the matter very well. “Most accounts of
particular persons are barren and useless,” he commented—English biogra phies of his
time (circa 1750) having been “allotted to writers who seem little acquainted with the
nature of their task.”1
What the task of biography is, then, must be your first concern, if you wish to avoid Dr.
Johnson’s penitentiary! How did your predecessors see their task, how did they carry it
out—and with what results? Even though biogra
THE TASK OF BIOGRAPHY
phy is seldom, if ever, taught at the university level, it is a discipline, and awareness of
its history and rationale can only enrich your view of what you’re undertaking as a lifechronicler in today’s society. It may also help you avoid some of the pitfalls—or, if not
avoid them, may help you take consolation in the pitfalls already encountered by
biographers past. After all, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Suetonius, Tacitus,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Gnostic gospelers, Saint Augustine, Holinshed, Sir
Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Vasari, Bellini, Dr. John son, Boswell, Rousseau, Casanova,
de Quincy, Lockhart, Carlyle, Froude, Morley, Leslie Stephen, Gosse, Freud, Strachey,
Woolf, Nicolson, and others who brought biog raphy into the modern age, as well as
innovators like Flaherty, Gance, Riefenstahl, Welles, Brecht, Capote, Holroyd, Plath,
Hughes—their hard-won experience in depicting real lives has shaped our biographical
conventions, and we would be daft to ignore them as we start out.
Briefly put, Dr. Johnson is really the father of modern biography in the Western world—
most famous for the book that James Boswell wrote about him, The Life of Samuel
Johnson, LL.D. However, it was Johnson’s own essays on biography, in his twice-weekly
journal The Rambler, that truly redefined the aims and practice of written biography.
Regarding the quality of contemporary biographical works, in the mid 1700s, he was
caustic. Their authors “rarely afford any other account than might be collected from public
papers”—whereas it was vital, if a true and honest portrait was to be attempted, to look
behind the public mask of an individual: in other words, to explore the individual’s private
Dr. Johnson’s interest was not prurient. What he wanted to see, in biography, was the
recording and evaluating of people’s moral character, the way Plutarch and Suetonius had
practiced this art in classical times: how, in facing the vicissitudes of life, an individual did
or didn’t cope, was or was not tempted into sin, felt or did not feel remorse. Though
Johnson could see the value in historical accounts of the past, such as the rise and fall of
kings and emperors, he was more interested, within such chronicles, in those episodes
and stories that resonated with the reader, and whose lessons could be applied to his or
her own life—in other words, the practical usefulness of biography. “I es teem biography,”
Johnson told Boswell on their tour of the Hebrides, “as giving us what comes near to
ourselves, what we can put to use.” Like Plutarch, Johnson distrusted history—or the
history being written in his time; for although historians claimed to give the facts of
people’s actions, they did not give credible motives. “We cannot trust to the characters
we find in history,” he objected, memora bly.2 They were straw men, unreal: “whole ranks
of characters adorned with uniform panegyrick,” as he put it. 3 Stuffed with pointless,
commemorative information, most English biographies were, he claimed, fatuous.
Between “falsehood and useless truth there is little difference,” he remarked—adding: “As
gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which he cannot apply
will make no man wise.”4
Applicable knowledge, then, was Johnson’s goal for biography—and here he
distinguished himself from the “ancients,” as he referred to them. Biography was the
record of real lives; but if its great benefit to society was its ability to provide insights into
human nature that could be useful to the reader in his own life, then there was no
intrinsic reason biographers should chronicle only the lives of the famous. It was not
improper to “gain attention” by writing about celebrities, Johnson assured readers, but
the intrinsic aim of biography remained the same for all biographical subjects: to
penetrate to the moral core of a life, to interpret it—and thereby not only learn facts and
information, but acquire insight and lessons that could be serviceable in one’s own life,
either as warnings or inspiration. “I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life
of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful,” he wrote—and he did not
mean faithful in the fawning sense!5
The real “business of the biographer” was to “pass slightly over those performances and
incidents, which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestick privacies,
and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside” so
as to reveal the moral center of an individual’s life. 6 What Johnson called “the
mischievous consequences of vice and folly, of irregular desires and predominant
passions,”7 were most readily apparent in private life. This belief prompted him to one of
his most famous remarks—namely, that “more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real
character, by a short conver sation with one of his servants, than from a formal and
studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral.”8
This perception was crucial to the development of modern biography—at least in its
justification of the need for a biographer to enter the private life of his subject, and not
rest content with the public image. It is in his own home that a man, after all, “shrinks to
his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises, which he feels in
privacy to be useless incumbrances”; it is “at home that every man must be known by
those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and
embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted
honour, and fictitious benevo lence.” Nor was it so difficult for the resourceful biogra pher
to find out the true story of the man—or woman— behind the mask. There were “very
few faults to be committed in solitude,” he pointed out, “or without some agents,
partners, confederates, or witnesses”—evidence it was the business of the biographer to
collect, collate, and present in depicting the moral character of a real individual.9
I quote these comments of Johnson on biography at such length because they are often
forgotten, yet are timeless. Johnson’s younger companion, James Boswell—whose own
morals were deeply suspect—certainly took the Doctor’s prescription to heart: penning in
1791 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., one of the greatest biographies in the English
language. Since then, an army of practitioners and critics have discussed and debated the
objectives, merits, ethics, and failings of biography—and autobiography. Al though there
are no ultimate answers, you can take heart from the fact that many before you have
struggled with the issues, just as you will. Knowing, in advance, a little of the history of
biography in the Western world, and the nature of the debates it has engendered over
time, will not only help inure you to the poisoned arrows of detractors on the day your
work is published, but perhaps help you predict many of those attacks in advance, so that
you can structure and formulate your work to meet them. Forewarned is forearmed! Reallife depiction has always been controversial, in a manner that long predated Johnson’s
time—and this is something you need to understand. How could it be otherwise when the
biographer is not only tackling the record of a person’s life, but his or her reputation?
Think, if you question this, about the life of Jesus of Nazareth—and how, once the
Christian church decided to adopt the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as
the “official biography” or authorized version of his life, all alternative biographies—such
as the gospels of Thomas, Judas, and Mary Magdalene—were damned as heretical and
ordered to be destroyed. “Hagiography” was the name given to the biography of saints
during the Christian era—but the matrix of hagiography was the policing and censoring of
life stories viewed as subversive by the church.
Biography, then, has always negotiated the line between what is socially acceptable in
recounting real lives, and what is unacceptable. As the power of the church waned at the
end of the Middle Ages, this concern spilled over into secular biography—with similar
controversies (and censorship). Sir Walter Raleigh, thinking on the perils of biographical
candor—especially when it concerned reigning princes—warned potential practitioners not
to tackle lives too close in time to their own, since “whosoever in writing a modern
history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.” 10
Unhappily, in the case of Raleigh, it did: he was beheaded in 1618. How could the
outcome have been any different? Biography deals, after all, with reputations—and as
Shakespeare’s Othello puts it, “He that filches from me my good name, robs me of that
which not enriches him, but makes me poor indeed.” Small wonder that men and women
—as well as their families, friends, and loyal supporters—have always fought fiercely to
defend their good names, by invoking the laws of libel, challenging slanderers to a duel,
imposing censorship, vilifying their critics, or threatening other sorts of retaliation.
Knowing something of the biographical evolution that has taken place between Dr.
Johnson’s time and ours will help ground your approach and your work. Boswell’s
warts’n’all life of Johnson was rapturously received in 1791—but within a generation the
mood in Victorian Europe and America had changed, and, along with it, standards for
what was permissible in biography. As studiously as the best Victorian biographers
attempted to put the great Doctor’s precepts into practice in life-stories and
autobiography, they were defeated by the new social, politi cal, judicial, and sexual mores
of their time—shifting imperatives that affected women even more than men. In her
comic novel Orlando: A Biography (1928), Virginia Woolf lamented the fact that, after
Queen Victoria’s accession, “love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine
phrases,” while “the sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was
tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.” 11 The
patriarchal “spirit of the nineteenth century” was “antipathetic to” Orlando in the
extreme; “it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she
had never been before.” 12 Woolf had cause to know— her father was the founding editor
of the Dictionary of National Biography, in which only a handful of women were allowed
to be included in its twenty-eight volumes.
Even within the lives that could be written in Victorian times, censorship and evasion
held sway. Peering into a biographee’s private life—so crucial to Johnson’s vision of
biography—was nearly impossible in those days; the achievements, and the struggle to
achieve, were the only subjects a biographer was licensed to address. Johnson’s
“mischievous consequences of vice and folly” could be seen everywhere in Victorian
society—in homes for foundlings, in widescale prostitution, and in hospitals where syphilis
and gonorrhea abounded—but were unmentionable in Victorian biography, which Lytton
Strachey, in 1918, lik ened to the “cortège of the undertaker,” wearing “the same air of
slow, funereal barbarism.”
Victorian biography, then, exuded panegyric—spun out at vast length, devoted to public
lives, and restricted to males. As the Oxford English Dictionary defined the term in 1888,
“biography” was simply “the history of men’s lives,” and a sub-branch of English
All this changed, however, in the twentieth century. Not overnight, but year by year,
decade by decade, the century witnessed a veritable cultural revolution in life-writing and
real-life depiction, in media ranging from painted portraits to print and new technologies
such as film. Moreover, the very frontier between biography (nonfiction) and the novel
(fiction) became blurry—was attacked, crossed, moved, and then recrossed. Seeing
biographers so enchained by the rules of convention, social acceptability, and sheer
hypocrisy, the best Victorian writers had moved into the fictional arena of the novel and
short story—a domain where they couldn’t be sued for libel, or challenged to a duel for
defamation, or ostracized from polite society for daring to explore the private life of
famous individuals behind the ubiquitous virtuous masks. As a result, the Victorian novel
abounded in fictional biographies: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Eugénie Grandet, Jane
Eyre, Henry Esmond, Silas Marner, The Warden, Madame Bovary, The Idiot, Anna
Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thérèse Raquin, Nana, Lord Jim ...These are among
the pearls of modern literature, and maintain their timelessness in part because of their
quasi-biographical form—their authors having recognized the very opportunities and
challenges to which Johnson had alluded, but which had been legally and socially off
limits to real-life biographers.
The world of biography changed in the early decades of the twentieth century, as did,
eventually, the laws safe guarding people’s reputations and the social mores restricting
biographers’ access to private lives. There are two key texts that you might with profit
read as the biographical “shots heard ’round the world.” The first is Father and Son
(1907), Edmund Gosse’s childhood memoir which posthumously exposed his father, the
distinguished British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, as a religious (Plymouth Brethren)
tyrant. The second is Leonardo da Vinci (1910), Sigmund Freud’s outing of the great
Renaissance polymath as a homosexual. These two works marked the beginning of the
modern age in biography—the one daring to tell the sort of intimate, private-life truths
that would ultimately lead to the dizzying rise of memoir in the late twentieth-century,
the other opening the gates of biography to the kind of psychological and sociological
interpretation that characterizes almost all biography today.
It was, however, the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism in World War II,
followed by the Cold War, that really spurred biography as the study of the individ ual in
Western society—and fulfilled Johnson’s dictum re garding ordinary people’s lives, as well
as extraordinary ones. From GIs, generals, aircraft technicians, air raid wardens, to
secretaries, Rosie the Riveter, and housewives, mil lions of people participated in the war
for the individual’s rights against those of a tyrannical leader and state, validating and
ennobling the cause of human rights—which was then taken up domestically in the
postwar world, in movements to promote civil rights, gender rights, and sexual rights.
From Richard Wright’s Black Boy to the accounts of gulag prisoners in the Soviet Union,
the voices of the marginalized and oppressed were finally heard, alongside those of the
successful and self-satisfied.
Inexorably, the public altered its expectations of biogra phy, as biographers and memoir
writers broke down the barriers holding back innovation—in every medium, from
television to museums. The personal truly became the political, an adage epitomized
when the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 struck down the law of libel as biography’s biggest
barrier to the criticism and depiction of living public figures—enshrined in the lawsuit of a
bigoted Alabama police commissioner named L. B. Sullivan, who had sued the New York
Times for defamation in an editorial advertisement.
New York Times v. Sullivan changed the practice and possibilities of biography. Not only
did written and graphic life-depictions (which had begun in 15,000 B.C. as matchstick men
on cave walls) proliferate, but biography exploded in all the new technologies of the
twentieth century: in celluloid, on the airwaves, on TV, and ultimately on the Internet—
where blogging became the autobiographical rage.
Learning more about that evolution will not inhibit you in becoming a biographer.
Rather, a historical overview will deepen your understanding of biography’s rich and
conflicted past, its 250-year struggle to fulfill Dr. Johnson’s vision of its importance, and
will enable you to appreciate the legal, religious, social, and other barriers with which
biography has had to contend, from laws governing defamation, obscenity, copyright, and
plagiarism, to academic prejudice and the minefield of poststructuralism. The crosspollination between media, between genres, and between nonfiction and fiction has been
immense—generating intense debate over the ethics of biography and issues of
trivialization, intrusiveness, copyright, access rights, even nomenclature. Was Thomas
Keneally’s book Schindler’s List a novel (for which it was awarded the Whitbread Prize for
Fiction) or a biography? Should James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces have been published
as fiction instead of memoir—as Frey first intended? Is Steven Shainberg’s 2007 film Fur:
An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr., a
fictive drama seeking to exploit what Virginia Woolf called the “granite” of biography as
the narrative of a real person? Or is it simply a postmodern biopic for sophisticated
audiences who appreciate erotica?
Biography, today, remains, as it has always been, the record and interpretation of real
lives—the lives of others and of ourselves. But the way we record and interpret those
lives has varied enormously from age to age. Knowing more of biography’s past, you’ll be
wiser, more alert to what you can attempt without ruffling feathers, and more prepared
to be challenged by vested interests (a likely event, if we can judge from past
With the past in mind, then, let’s move on to the fu-ture—your future, as a biographer—
beginning with your agenda.
He that writes the life of another is either his friend or his
enemy, and wishes either to exalt his praise or aggravate
DR. JOHNSON, The Idler, 84 (November 24, 1759)
hat life do you wish to tell—and why?
When I first drafted this chapter I tried to boil down my advice to a sequence of bullet
points, a sort of questionnaire you might ponder and mentally fill out. It covered what I
saw as the primary factors that make for success or failure in tackling an individual’s lifestory: your aims, your motivation, your suitability, your stamina. On paper, though, the
questionnaire looked... phony. No biogra pher ticks off a list before starting, however
logical and helpful such a procedure might be. So I scrapped the bullet points; I’m not
going to ask you anything. What I will do, though, is run through the “bare necessities”
you should consider when deciding whether to tackle a life, and I’ll provide some
At some point—sooner rather than later—you will, if you are serious about writing a life,
have to produce what’s called the “proposal,” in order to get funding for what will take
several years of research and writing. In other words, you’ll need to convince someone
else that the biography is a good idea: that there’s an audience and thus a market for it,
and that you are the right person to undertake it. Clarifying, for others, your conception of
the biography you’d like to write is the first hurdle you’ll have to overcome. As we’ll see,
it’s not something you can do without some preliminary research, but recognizing that
this is Goal Number One is the initial step in “doing” a biography.
The proposal must set forth your agenda with clarity and purpose: whose life you wish
to record; why; and how.
Although the proposal will be a real document and, if accepted, the basis of an
agreement or contract between you and a publisher or funding body, it is of course a
figment of your imagination—not unlike Christopher Columbus’ assurance to Ferdinand
and Isabella in 1492, when he was seeking Spanish support and investment, that he
would find a western sea route to India. Its real value, however, is as a spur to selfdiscipline, and as a test of your persuasiveness. It’s a document which compels you to
think through, in advance, the aims and objectives of your undertaking, then sets them
out in such a way that the publisher or sponsoring institution has full confidence in you,
as biographer-to-be. In other words, it’s a rehearsal— not so much of the eventual or
eventuating book, but of your abilities at the outset, both in conceptualization and in
presentation. It must articulately convey, in writing, your sense of purpose and your
mastery of what will be of interest and importance to others.
A publisher, reading the proposal, will be calculating whether there is a market for such
a subject—and specifically for the sort of book you have in mind. The proposal must
therefore convey not only the importance of a fresh route to the Indies, but your
reliability: why and how you think you can successfully find and navigate the passage. It
must display complete confidence in your idea, your motivation, and the application of
that motivation— strong enough to withstand the inevitable storms!
Before attempting the proposal (which usually takes some research and many iterations
before you’re satisfied), it will be worth your time to think through your agenda: why you
really want to write this life, whether it is possible, and whether you are the right person
to do it.
Tackling the mystery of a life is no mean enterprise. It’ll involve research—often years of
it. It’ll require writing ability. It’ll also test your skills of human understanding, insight, and
appreciation—and then some—as you face the trials of true, rather than invented,
portraiture. Motivation is therefore a key requirement.
Why do you wish to write this particular life? What interests you about it? Are you
merely responding to a commission—that is, are you being paid to carry out someone
else’s idea—or are you responding to your own curiosity about the individual? Is there
some deeper reason than money or curiosity? What, really, is the impulse—your impulse
—in tackling the project?
These are not things you can necessarily know for certain, since they will be embedded
in your psyche as much as your intellect. Moreover they will not necessarily be mentioned
in your proposal—yet they will and must fuel that document, if it is to get you a sponsor. I
remember when I was first asked if I would be willing to tackle a biography of Field
Marshal Montgomery, after he died in 1976. I’d been very close to him in my youth, in
fact I had loved him like a second father, and he had—or claimed to have—regarded me
as a “second son.” “Of course, you’ll write about me when I’m gone,” he would say—and I
would protest that I had no interest in military matters, and no wish to write about
someone so vain. He would laugh, and we’d leave it there.
In my fondness for “Monty,” I did not like to think of him as dead—and when he finally
passed away, I was, in any case, already in mourning, as my wife had recently died.
Writing about his life, for publication, did not come into question in my mind. Others felt
differently, however, and in due course I was asked if I would write an autho rized
biography of Monty, based on his private papers.
Again, I demurred. I had loved him—therefore I would be too prejudiced from the start.
Moreover, I had by then moved abroad, to Finland, and had remarried, in an effort to
fashion a new life as a self-made exile. Taking the job would mean returning to England,
and would lead to upsetting memories. But when I was asked who I would therefore
recommend among historians or biographers of my generation (I was thirty-two), I was
troubled. I had spent my vacations with Monty; his home had been my second home.
We’d had many an argument and spat, but over the years I felt I’d gotten to understand
him—his eccentricities, strengths, and weaknesses. Suppose someone was appointed
who got him wrong? Most American historians did, and many British ones too. Wouldn’t I
feel that I had let him down?
And so I agreed to at least look through Monty’s unpublished papers and make a
determination, either for myself or with an eye toward recommending someone else.
Once I did that, of course, I was hooked—for there, in hundreds of letters to his mother,
his father, his siblings, and others, was the quasi-father I’d never known: in his childhood,
his early years, his first battles on the Western Front in World WarI...Moreover,ata
moment when Monty’s reputation had been savaged, thanks to his boastfulness and
exaggerations (asked who he thought were the three greatest commanders in English
history, he named himself and two others), I saw an opportunity to rehabili tate that
tainted public image. I therefore accepted the task and became his official biographer.
My point is that your motivation for tackling a life may be unclear, conflicted,
contradictory, naïve, even stupid, but motivation there must be: motivation strong
enough to start you off, even if at some point you abandon ship— or, conversely,
assemble a fleet. (My proposed single volume became two volumes and then three, plus
a BBC television documentary and subsidiary works relating to the field marshal. Sir
Martin Gilbert, undertaking Churchill’s biography on the death of Churchill’s son,
Randolph, had a similar experience.)
En bref, biographers need years to research, to write, and to publish a life. Unless you
are powerfully motivated, don’t even think of it.
Aims, Feasibility, Credentials
Assuming, then, that you are motivated at a deep enough level to undertake the years of
work necessary for a biography, you will have to convince others, in your proposal, that
such a book is worthwhile, doable, and of sufficient interest to generate an audience. For
this, you must set out your aims and objectives—which may, as I’ve shown, be distinct
from your motivation.
I’ve always been impressed by Robert Caro’s approach to the biography of President
Lyndon Johnson. Caro had spent seven years researching and writing The Power Broker,
a study of Robert Moses, the “master builder” and urban planner who helped to shape
New York City in the twentieth century. The Power Broker had enabled Caro to educate
himself, and eventually others, about the nature of nonelected power in running a great
city like New York. The insight he had gained led him to consider a new study. “I knew if I
ever somehow could, I’d like to do the same thing for national power as I had done in
The Power Broker with urban power,” he later explained. “And I knew I wanted to do it
with Lyndon Johnson, because I felt he understood national power better than any other
president in our time.”1
Caro’s aim, in other words, was not so much to reveal the character and persona of
Lyndon Johnson—which, as he acknowledged, had already been done by at least fifteen
others, including Doris Kearns Goodwin in her wonderful book Lyndon Johnson and the
American Dream. Rather, it was to explore, as he had done with Robert Moses, the trail
Johnson had followed—or had established—in achieving and wielding power in America.
The important thing is to be clear, and remain clear, about your avowed aims in
tackling a biography; for you will be challenged on these, not only in your proposal, but
all the way through the research, writing, publication, and reception of your book. For
example, each time you ask for an interview or for access to papers, you’ll be asked to
state your aim in writing such a biography. If it seems dis ingenuous to attempt this when
your internal agenda and motivation are so hard to know, get over it. In the real world,
other people need a simple, clear articulation of your intent. Give it to them. Think
Now, let’s assume you have clarified for a publisher your initial aims and objectives:
your search for a western passage to the Indies. No one, you argue, has tackled the
subject before, or in the way you propose. The publisher’s next question about the
project will be: Is it doable?
I remember vividly the most exciting proposal I ever saw. I was working for a publishing
house, where I’d gotten a job right after earning my university degree. The proposal
came inside a smart blue folder and was about seven pages long. It laid out a plan to
undertake the life-story of Sir Stewart Menzies, the legendary director of the British secret
service (MI6) during World War II, who had been the counterpart of Admiral Canaris, the
head of the equivalent German agency, the Abwehr. Marked “Strictly Confidential,” the
beguiling proposal opened with a haunting description of a visit by the would-be
biographer to Sir Stewart’s rural home in England’s Cotswold district, and a dinner at
which there was an unoccupied seat and table setting. When the author asked for whom
the place had been set, Menzies (“M” in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels) replied, with
an air of mystery: “It is in memory of my opposite number, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris”—
who was arrested by Hitler after the July Plot in 1944, and executed less than a month
before Hitler’s own suicide and the end of the war. For the first time ever, Sir Stewart
would, the proposal promised, cooperate with a biographer and reveal all.
The publisher, accordingly, gave the author an immedi ate cash advance. This proved a
blunder, as we soon found out! I mentioned the proposal in confidence to my father, a
newspaper editor who had made his reputation for buying serialization rights to
biographies and memoirs, many of them concerning World War II. He shook his head.
“There’s no way Menzies can cooperate!” he snorted— “He signed the Official Secrets Act
—he’d be arrested!” And went back to reading his paper.
Crestfallen, I told my boss, the publisher. It was true. In 1932 the famous British
novelist Compton Mackenzie had been fined £100, and all copies of his autobiography
Greek Memories had been withdrawn and pulped, merely because he mentioned (as a
former employee) the existence of MI6! Did the would-be biographer know this? Gingerly,
my boss began calling the directors of other houses—and found that the aspiring author
had already sold the proposal to a number of other gullible publishers!
Unless you’re a fraud, then, you must convince a publisher that your project can be
lawfully undertaken and that it’s feasible. Being the authorized biographer—that is,
authorized by those who hold copyright to the documents you will want to quote—is a
tremendous advantage. Even in this case, however, you’ll need to be careful. Do you
have signed consent that you may write the book and publish it without interference?
Have the individual, the family, the designated legal representatives signed off, in
advance, on your right to publish copyrighted documents?
Perhaps the best-known case, in this respect, is the biography of Eric Blair (alias George
Orwell) which Bernard Crick undertook, having first obtained written consent from
Orwell’s widow, Sonia. “She agreed to my firm condition that as well as complete access
to the papers, I should have an absolute and prior waiver of copyright so that I could
quote what I liked and write what I liked,” Crick later explained. “These were hard terms,
even if the only terms on which, I think, a scholar should and can take on contemporary
It was just as well. Once Sonia saw the typescript, she was appalled, and attempted to
annul the arrangement by taking Crick to court. She failed; her consent could not be
If you have not been specifically authorized to undertake a life by family members or
representatives who have copyright control of essential documents, you will need to show
the publisher how you propose to undertake the research; what sort of materials you
hope to assemble; how available they are; what interviews you propose to conduct; and
how likely you are to obtain access and copyright permissions.
This is by no means as straightforward as people generally imagine. Bernard Crick was
tough enough not to be halted or intimidated by Mrs. Blair, and he produced a very fine
biography of Orwell.3 But when Ian Hamilton (no relation to me), tackled the
unauthorized life of J. D. Salinger in the 1980s, he was not so lucky.
Hamilton had published a highly regarded and commercially successful life of Robert
Lowell, and so had been given a very generous advance by Random House in anticipation
of similar sales and reception for the Salinger biography. Yet not only did Salinger refuse
to cooperate or give copyright permission for his writings to be quoted; he made it legally
impossible for any of his relatives, friends, or colleagues to be interviewed—and then, in
1986, he sued to halt publication of Hamilton’s completed manuscript!
The moral, then, is simple. Your aims and objectives must not only be well stated in
your proposal, but must be achievable. And this leads to the question of whether you are
the right person to undertake the biography: in other words, to the question of your
Sadly, there is still, to the best of my knowledge, no uni versity that offers a degree in
biography or biographical studies. Your suitability for the task of writing a proposed
biography is therefore difficult for the publisher to assess, other than on past evidence.
Would-be authors often have wonderful notions for a biography, as well as excellentsounding specific credentials—such as access to crucial people or documents, and good
research skills. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into a credible proposal or
biography. A biographer has to be, or become, a good writer; and your proposal will be,
among other things, a test of your writing skill, as you rehearse, in advance and for an
advance, your aim, your approach, your prospects for success in obtaining the necessary
access and copyright permissions, and your own suitability for the project.
Robert Caro was given a paltry $2,500 advance royalty for his Moses book. When, after
five years’ work on a project which he had said would take only nine months, he dared to
ask for another advance, he got short shrift—perhaps understandably. The “uncut
manuscript of The Power Broker ran to 1.1 million words,” Nicholas Von Hoffman later
reported in Vanity Fair. “Flat broke and five years into the project, he submitted the first
400,000 or 500,000 words in hopes of getting a second $2,500 payment, due on
completion. His editor took him out to a cheap Chinese restaurant at the corner of 107th
and Broadway, and told him that while the people at the [ Newsday] office [where Caro
worked as a journalist] thought he was writing ‘one of the most important works of
nonfiction in the twentieth century’ they were ‘not prepared to go beyond the terms of
Caro’s publishers saw no prospect of commercial success—but the Pulitzer Prize
committee didn’t worry about that, and after The Power Broker won the Pulitzer it went
on to become a classic. It also provided Caro with a stepping stone to his great biography
of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
“Suitability” in biography, then, is an impossible quality to predict, even to define. What
is important, however, is that you should believe you are a suitable candidate. Only you
can know whether you have the sustained interest and the commitment to successfully
record the life of your chosen subject. And somehow you must be able to convey that
confidence through your proposal.
Quitting While You’re Ahead Conversely, it behooves you, if possible, to assess
your unsuitability—however tempting the project, however strong the pressure to tackle
it. A publisher, or the relative of a possible subject, may suggest a subject to you. Think
hard before you accept such a commission, however well credentialed the publisher may
think you. Reflect, for example, on Virginia Woolf ’s life of her close friend Roger Fry, the
early twentieth-century artist and art critic. Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen, had been
knighted for his biographical work, and Virginia had already written her best-selling spoof
biography, Orlando, as well as some of her generation’s finest essays on biography. Roger
Fry’s long-time lover, Helen Anrep, and Fry’s sister Margery both begged her to write Fry’s
life. Since the staff of the Hogarth Press—the publishing company Virginia had established
with her husband, Leonard—was keen to publish such a work, she accepted the
The result was Virginia Woolf ’s worst manuscript—one which even her loyal husband
thought a failure and which Woolf herself regretted, once she’d started it. Friendship had
impelled her to accede to Helen and Margery’s request. Once she realized she’d have to
leave out at least half of Fry’s private life (such as his affair with Virginia’s own sister, the
painter Vanessa Bell, and his many other adulterous relationships), Virginia became
increasingly frustrated. She was simply not equipped (or interested enough) to record
Fry’s development as a painter, nor was she free to depict his private life. The book was a
commercial and critical failure, and did not endure.5
Anne Stevenson’s biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, fared similarly. Dr. Stevenson,
an American poet living in England, had seemed the ideal person to tackle a life of Plath
—but the project proved a nightmare. Having been appointed the authorized biographer
by Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes, Stevenson found her path crossed at every turn by
Hughes’s sister Olwyn, who acted zealously to protect his reputation and estate. “Ms.
Hughes has contributed so liberally to the text that this is in effect a work of joint
authorship,” Stevenson finally wrote despairingly in her original acknowledgments. Ms.
Hughes made her remove even that comment.
As Janet Malcolm would write in her seminal account of the problem of writing Plath’s
biography (indeed, all biography), what emerged was “a piece of worthless native
propaganda” by Dr. Stevenson on Ted Hughes’s be half. Stevenson was, as Janet Malcolm
made clear, the last person able to stand up to Hughes’s sister, or even the mysterious
Hughes himself. “You never saw him alone?” Malcolm asked Dr. Stevenson. “I never saw
him at all,” Dr. Stevenson confessed—an astounding limitation on Plath’s official
David McCullough, a highly experienced writer and broadcaster, was more careful.
McCullough would undertake the life of President Harry Truman, and, like Caro, would win
the Pulitzer Prize—but, as he later confided, he had first intended to write a very different
“I’d started working [in 1982] on a book about Pablo Picasso,” McCullough later
revealed. “I quit that book. I stopped after a few months because I found I disliked him
so. He was, to me, a repellent human being, and he didn’t really have the story of the
kind that interested me. He was instantly successful. He never really went very far or had
any adventures, so to speak. He was an immensely important painter. He was the
Krakatoa of modern art. But I found he wasn’t somebody I wanted to spend five years
with as a roommate, so to speak.”7
Picasso’s posthumous loss was Truman’s gain—one that led, in the 1990s, not only to a
Pulitzer Prize for Mc-Cullough but to a widescale reconsideration of the thirty-third
president of the United States.
Poor Picasso (full name Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María
de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso) had meanwhile to
wait, like Whistler, for a biographer who could overcome personal distaste for his quirky
character. Eventually that person came forward: John Richardson.
Here is Richardson being interviewed on publication of the second of his projected four
volumes—the first having won Britain’s Whitbread Award for Biography in 1991:
Interviewer: The current myth of Picasso is very much along these lines—woman hater, bad guy, I mean,
John Richardson: That’s a lot of nonsense. Whatever you say about him—you say he’s a mean bastard—he
was also an angelic, compassionate, tender, sweet man. The reverse is always true. You say that he was
stingy. He was also incredibly generous. You say that he was very bohemian, but also he had a sort of up-tight,
bourgeois side. I mean, he was a mass of antitheses. And that is one of the sort of amazing things about him,
that he was able to contain these totally different qualities, defects, what have you.
Asked if he had ever challenged Picasso over his bad behavior, Richardson admitted he
hadn’t. “Nobody dared confront him. If you ever confronted Picasso over anything like
that, over any personal matters, if you were critical of him, you were out.” Asked if he
had any other such demanding friends, Richardson acknowledged he hadn’t, but
explained that he had put up with Picasso’s strange personality because “he’s a genius,
and you don’t want to offend him.”
I mean, I liked the man, and I wanted access to him. And I wasn’t going to, you know, say something dumbly
critical and have the door barred in my face in the future. I mean, I used to spend a lot of time with Picasso in
the 50’s and early 60’s, and he was a marvelous, funny, nice guy to be around. But you’d find by the end of the
day, even if you’d just had lunch with him and gone to the beach with him, had dinner with him, somehow by the
end of the day that you had—were totally nervously exhausted; that everybody around him had suffered from
nervous exhaustion; and he, at the age of eighty or eighty-five, would go off into his studio, strutting off into his
studio, and would work all night on your energy.
The point here is that Richardson knew his subject, indeed was a devoted friend to
Picasso, while remaining fully aware of the artist’s complex personality, both good and
bad. Such tolerance, moreover, was rewarded. After Picasso’s death, Richardson was not
only motivated but uniquely situated to explore Picasso’s life, head-on, as the story not
simply of a man but of modern art.
Richardson’s perseverance was admirable—but even that was not enough. He accepted
that Picasso’s character was deplored by many, and that he could overcome such reader
prejudice only by maintaining superlative standards of research and writing—as well as
by keeping his equanimity in the face of media hostility when his work was published.
You must accept the fact that your agenda will not necessarily be that of others.
For example, Robert Caro’s initial Johnson volume, subtitled The Path to Power, caused
a firestorm of controversy in 1982. Eight years later, Brian Lamb interviewed Caro on his
TV program Booknotes. He quoted a hostile newspaper cutting in which a former Johnson
aide, Jack Valenti, “accused Caro of being passionately bent on destroying the late
president’s reputation.” Not content with quoting one critic, Lamb quoted another: Bob
Hardesty, a Johnson speechwriter who’d helped Johnson write his memoirs. Hardesty
went further still, labeling Caro’s biography “dishonest.” “I don’t think it pretends to be
fair,” Lamb quoted Hardesty’s diatribe on the air. “I think it is the work of a man with a
burning unnatural hatred for his subject.” Somewhat in the manner of a public prosecutor,
Lamb then asked Caro how he wished to “answer those charges.” 8 Caro was not in the
least taken aback:
Well, I don’t think there’s any truth in them at all. I think I let the facts speak for themselves. I’m taking people
through Lyndon Johnson’s life as he lived it, chronologically. Nobody disputes that these are the things that he
did. Nobody has challenged really, anything that I know of....Asfor disliking him, that’s not really true. The
Johnson loyalists really dislike, as you can tell, even hate my books. That, however, does not mean that I
disliked Lyndon Johnson. I think that the story of his life, to me, is a very sad and poignant story; it’s not a
question of liking and disliking. I’m trying to understand and make people understand. 9
More than that, Caro added, he himself was “trying to learn how political power worked,
as he [Johnson] used it, and I’m trying to portray that. Now, that’s very unpleasant, in
some of this volume. It’s a very unpleasant story, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
That doesn’t mean that my portraying it means I dislike Lyndon Johnson.”10
Memorably put—and worth remembering not only when you consider undertaking a
biography, but when you are attacked for having done so.
We’ve noted how biography builds upon the investigation of an individual life to evoke
lasting insights. That potential to connect with the reader can be reassuring, as in
McCullough’s Truman, or disturbing, as in Caro’s Johnson. Sigmund Freud was fascinated
by this revelatory power— indeed, it was the primary reason for his Leonardo da Vinci
monograph, which was as much a squib aimed at cowardly conventional biographers as
an exploration of Leonardo’s sexuality. Biographers who indulged in mind less heroworship were doing life-writing a grave disservice, Freud maintained. Such biographers
were “fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen
their hero as the subject of their studies because— for reasons of their personal
emotional life—they have felt a special affection for him from the very first. They then
devote their energies to a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among
the class of their infantile models—at reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of his
father.” To gratify this wish, Freud claimed, biographers “smooth over the traces” of the
subject’s “real life struggles,” and “tolerate in him no vestige of human weak ness or
imperfection.” The result was “regrettable, for they therefore sacrifice truth to an illusion,
and for the sake of their infantile phantasies abandon the opportunity of penetrating the
most fascinating secrets of human nature.”11
A truthful life-study, Freud recognized, is a courageous undertaking. Indeed, it was one
that exceeded his own limited ambitions in the realm of biography, for he had, he
apologized, suffered from “insufficient material” to do more than posit a possible
psychosexual explanation of Leonardo’s scientific and artistic creativity—knowing how
offensive it would be to admirers of Leonardo’s genius.
Intellectually, financially, practically, and psychologically, then, the task of serious
biography is a challenge that you must carefully appraise before committing yourself. As
David McCullough realized when rejecting Pablo Picasso as a bedfellow, the task of
biography will involve a veritable cohabitation. And while cohabitation may be less
daunting than marriage, and permits you (in theory, at any rate!) to part company
without hard feelings (or legal punishment) if the relationship doesn’t work, it is a major
undertaking which you should not embark on lightly.
Cohabitation requires you to have some prior conviction as to why you think this is the
right person for you to spend years of your life with. You must also be confident that you
can measure up to your subject’s expectations. For some, mutual respect will be enough
for the partnership to prosper; but for most of us, genuine love and affection, on both
sides, are a prerequisite—and this is as true in biography (notwithstanding Freud’s
skepticism) as in real life.
Many relationship therapists request that, before couples arrive for counseling, the two
individuals set down on a piece of paper the positives and negatives that come to mind
when they think of their partner. This is a very good exercise to perform before
encountering relationship problems, not just after! Certainly it’s one you might well adopt
in deciding whether to tackle a specific biography you have in mind. You are proposing to
live with this person, after all—and to find out everything about him or her! (Leo Tolstoy
insisted on showing his fiancée, Sonya, his personal diary before they married—recording,
in particular, the sowing of his wild oats in shocking detail. Sonya al most called off the
proposed union, she was so disgusted. Although the revelations did not make for an easy
marriage, they did enable her to anticipate and accept the vivid portrait of Anna Karenina
when Tolstoy came to write his titanic novel of adultery.)
When you draw up the list of positives and negatives that come to mind in thinking of
your proposed partner, make sure you have the humility to put yourself in his or her
shoes! You must ask whether your subject has the requisite qualities and assets (a
wealth of life-events, documents, friends who can be interviewed) that promise to make
the cohabitation a success. But you must also ask: Have you the qualities and assets that
augur well for success?
Respect, love, affection, even hatred have to go pretty deep, in my experience, not
simply to engage the eventual reader, but to ensure that you and your subject both
survive the cohabitation.
The more, then, that you can review in advance your motivation—and your level of
motivation (your aims, the feasibility of the project, your suitability for the task)—in
selecting the subject of your biography, the more you’ll be able to tackle the subject
maturely when you settle down to work. And as any practicing biographer will tell you,
moving in with your partner is precisely when the challenge truly begins!
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. —OSCAR W ILDE, quoted in Hesketh Pearson,
The Life of Oscar Wilde
whom are you producing your biographical work?
Biography is not just a conversation with oneself and one’s subject—it’s a three-way
communication. At one level, yes, it’s a private dialogue between you, as portrait painter
in words, and your sitter (dead or alive) whose story you’re attempting to record,
illuminate, interpret. But—like Saint Augustine’s famous Confessions, which were
ostensibly written down as an extended, private conversation with God but which were
published to be read by others—it’s public. It will be your work, but produced for a third
party: the reader.
Both for your proposal and for your own good, ask yourself: “Who will be interested in
my subject?” Without an audience, your work has no use, save to you. So somehow you,
the prospective biographer, have to take the audience into account, not only in proposing
your work but in executing it. Like Vermeer’s famous canvas An Allegory of Painting, in
which an empty chair takes the visitor’s eye to an inner scene in the artist’s studio (where
the artist is painting a beautifully dressed model of Clio, the muse of history), you need to
ask yourself: “How can I fill that empty chair?” (Vermeer didn’t; the painting was never
sold in his lifetime, and he died penniless and despondent. The picture now hangs in
Vienna, not Holland.)
Who is your potential audience, and how can you make your biography sufficiently
compelling that it will attract one? What is it about the portrait that will prove of interest
to readers: that will inform, entertain, educate, and move them?
The significance of the audience is different for biographers than, say, for novelists.
Very few novelists can obtain an advance against royalties or an investment from a
publisher before their novel is completed, or at least partly written. With biographers, it’s
the other way around— few biographers can undertake the years of work required to
produce a worthwhile biography without a publisher’s monetary advance. As a would-be
biographer, then, you must craft a proposal that gives publishers a good idea of your
Doing some research on the potential audience for your biography may vastly repay the
time and expense it entails. To my surprise and delight, Harold Evans, director of Random
House, was willing to take on the first volume of my biography of John F. Kennedy when
my contracted publisher rejected my decision to make it a multivolume work. I found out
later that he’d asked his chief assistant to go to the New York Public Library and find out
what biographies were being borrowed most frequently. At the top of the list were lives
of JFK! Evans was leaving nothing to chance when he accepted JFK: Reckless Youth.
Go in search of facts, figures, and indications which will convince prospective publishers
that there is truly a market for the book you propose. (The publishers, too, will do their
own checking, believe me.) It may help to think of this as seeking a financial loan—which,
in effect, it is, as the publisher will be acting as your bank manager, advancing you
money against your eventual royalties. He will run your credit report—in other words,
determine what previous work you have done, and how it has been received and sold.
He’ll want to know what sort of work you’re intending to write, how you’re proposing to
do it, and above all whether there is an audience for it.
The proposal has an audience of one, yet the book must have an audience of thousands
to be commercially viable, let alone successful—and you have to show you’re comfortable
with that. “As far as I’m concerned, what makes this book a success,” David McCullough
said of his biography of Harry Truman, “is that it reaches readers.” McCullough had
reason to crow. “It’s already a best-seller. It became rapidly a best-seller within a matter
of weeks. For a 922-page serious biography to go right to the top of the best-seller list in
the summertime—I won’t say it’s unprecedented, but it’s certainly rare,” he said with
understandable pride.1 He gave various possible reasons, such as the appeal of a man of
principle as his subject, in the critical post–World War II years. But there was, too, the
fact that he’d written the huge book with an essential aim always in mind: to inform,
enlighten, and entertain an audience.
E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, once said, apropos of audiences, that he
wrote for himself and a few friends. I’m sure Forster meant “friends” figuratively: friends
as reliable stepping stones to that hopefully larger audience, whose highest standards of
expectation he thereby disciplined himself to fulfill. Conversely, if he had reason to fear
an audience’s hostility, he shelved his work. The manuscript of Maurice, his novel of
same-sex love written in 1913, has the words “Publishable, but worth it?” scribbled across
the top. Uncertain of an audience for a book about a homosexual character in a
homophobic age, he wisely didn’t publish it in his lifetime—and thereby gave no one the
opportunity to subject him to the same fate as Oscar Wilde.
Asking yourself who, ultimately, will be interested in, or willing to read, the life you’re
recounting should be your constant concern. When biographies fail to spark interest,
become tedious or unsatisfying, it is usually because the biographer has lost his
commitment to engage the reader and is taking the audience for granted, by getting too
self-absorbed in the life he is depicting. Never forget or neglect the reader!
Perhaps the most vivid recent example of the need to remember your audience is that
of Edmund Morris. A Pulitzer prizewinner for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, his
wonderful biography of the young twenty-sixth president, Morris was asked to set aside
his second Roosevelt volume in order to tackle the life of the fortieth president, Ronald
Reagan, who was still living—indeed, was still president when Morris began his work. The
story of the subsequent “fiasco,” as Morris himself called it, is instructive, for it goes to
the very heart of what the biographer wants to do, as opposed to what the audience
wants him to do.
Commissioned in 1985 as President Reagan’s official, authorized biographer, Morris
found himself, after seven years, simply unable to write the same sort of “conventional”
biography of Reagan that he had written of Theodore Roosevelt. And so, in 1992, like
Virginia Woolf (who had thought she could “revolutionize biography in a night” by writing
the life of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, as a fictional spoof-biography, Orlando), Morris
realized that he, too, could do something “revolutionary.” “I had spent a couple of years
trying to write about Reagan in the orthodox fashion,” he afterward confessed, “and he
simply eluded conventional description. So I came upon this device, more or less, in a
moment of inspiration.”
Standing under an elm tree in Eureka, Illinois, where Reagan had been to college,
Morris came up with an unusual device: he would enter the past himself, as a fictional
narrator. “I knew what it was like,” Morris explained. “I’d studied that period intensely. I’d
read all the documents and interviewed people. So I decided to give a physical, fleshly
presence to this biographical presence, this [authorial] mind, and I created a narrator,
who throughout the book observes Ronald Reagan in action, but of whose scrutiny
Reagan remains unaware.”2
Interviewed in 1999, when the biography was released to widespread criticism and
condemnation, Morris was unrepentant. “I understood that it was going to be
controversial. I knew the moment I began to write it in the fashion in which it’s now been
published. So in a sense,” he confessed, “I courted the controversy because I think that
biography needs expansion, an adaptation to the values of a new century. So I knew this
was going to happen.”3
Dutch was, then, a form of professional suicide—followed, it may happily be said, by
professional resurrection two years later, in 2001, when the second volume of Mor ris’s life
of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, was published to universal acclaim.
Dutch, by contrast, remained a blot on the biographical landscape—not because people
abhorred Morris’s hubris in inventing himself as a participant-observer in Reagan’s life, but
because he had rejected the expectations of the audience for an official biography.
To Conform—or To Challenge?
There are, of course, differing audiences for biography— general and specialist—and each
one will alter its expectations according to the cultural moment. This can be difficult to
know in advance—especially when your planned biography may not appear for several
years, by which time the social context may have changed. One thing you can do,
however, is check to see whether biographies of your subject already exist, and, if so,
what sorts of works they are. If, for example, a good conventional biography of a certain
figure has already been published, there may be little point in replicating it, whereas
readers may well be receptive to a different, fresh, perhaps more imaginative “take” on
the individual—since no single biography can ever be definitive.
At the point in time when Morris was commissioned to write his biography of the
fortieth president, for instance, there had been no scholarly account of Reagan’s life. As
official biographer, Morris had been given unique access to the president, his staff, his
friends, and—most important of all—Reagan’s unpublished documents, which remained
inaccessible to other biographers and scholars. As a consequence, general readers, who
expected a straight, solid, substantial account based on unprecedented access to sources,
found it galling that, after fourteen years of waiting, the Reagan who appeared in Dutch
was almost double-Dutch: Morris’s eclectic, unconventional vision, in which fact and
fiction were indistinguishable. Meanwhile, specialist readers—particularly historians of the
period—were outraged at having been denied access to vital documents merely so that
Morris could produce a profoundly personal, essentially dramatized-documentary version
of Reagan’s life.
Had there already been a conventional “official biography” of Ronald Reagan, Morris’s
biography would probably have been lauded for its innovativeness, its copious insight, its
wit, its sheer descriptive narrative power. But there was no such book—and the public felt