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July 2015 | Volume 10 | Number 5 Lee’s Biography of We're Here Penelope Fitzgerald to Help Need help tracking down a Wins Plutarch Award source for your biography or have another question related to the craft? This month we begin Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life offering a new service: by Hermione Lee won the Author’s Queries. Our first Plutarch Award for best comes from BIO Vice biography of 2014, as President Cathy Curtis: selected by members of Does anyone have contact Biographers International information for the Knopf editor Organization. The winning who dealt with Elaine de open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com who dealt with Elaine de book was announced at the Kooning’s autobiography Sixth Annual BIO Conference proposal in the late 1980s, or, in Washington, DC. failing that, for Knopf editors “I am absolutely delighted Among Lee's other books is Biography: A Very who were employed by the to have been awarded this Short Introduction. publisher at that time? prize, especially when I look at the competition!” said If you can answer this question Dame Hermione Lee when she heard the news. President of Wolfson College, or have a query of your own, Oxford, England, Lee was not present at the announcement of the winner. let us know. The three Plutarch finalists were:

The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandria by Helen Rappaport The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 by Nigel Hamilton From the Editor Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr From the preconference research Named after the ancient Greek biographer, the prize is the genre’s equivalent of orientations to the awarding of the third Plutarch Award, the the Oscar, in that BIO members chose the winner by secret ballot from nominees annual BIO conference last month selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft. This year marked was a winner. Each year I hear the third time BIO bestowed the award. Previous winners were Linda Leavell for attendees say “This is the best one yet,” and somehow the Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore and Robert conference planners manage to Caro for The Passage of Power. outdo themselves the following year. On behalf of all BIO members, let me say a big thank you to our Conference Roundup officers, Brian Jay Jones, Cathy Curtis, Marc Leepson, and Barbara Burkhardt; Kitty Kelley for once Branch Keynote Talk and again graciously opening up her home for Friday’s cocktail Biographers in Conversation reception; Program Committee co- chairs Kate Buford and Bill Souder; open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com chairs Kate Buford and Bill Souder; Site Committee co-chairs Barbara Highlight BIO Conference Burkhardt and Robin Rausch; Will Swift, who chaired both the Almost 200 established and Coaching Committee and the BIO Award Nominations Committee; the aspiring biographers members of the Plutarch immersed themselves in their Nomination Committee and all the other committees involved in craft at the Sixth Annual putting on the conference; and Biographers International the panelists and moderators for sharing their knowledge. I’d also Organization Conference, held like to thank members who had June 6 at the National Press kind words for what we do here at Club in Washington, DC. TBC. As you might expect, this issue Amidst the various panel has plenty of conference sessions, attendees also saw BIO President Brian Jay Jones presents the 2015 coverage, along with most of our BIO Award to Taylor Branch. usual features (the Member Taylor Branch receive the Interview will return next month). 2015 BIO Award. Branch is Looking ahead, next issue has our annual review of biography on film, best known for his trilogy about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights both documentaries and biopics, movement, known collectively as America in the King Years. along with our look at some of this fall’s most anticipated biographies. The Accidental Biographer As always, please let me know about stories you’d like to see, In his keynote address, Branch called himself an accidental and partial and perhaps even write, in future biographer, as he used the life of King and others to tell the story of the civil rights issues.

movement, which he called “the last great uprising of citizens’ idealism that really Yours, changed the direction of history.” Branch wanted to better understand the Michael Burgan movement and address what he saw as problems with the existing books on it: They were “analytical and abstract” with an emphasis on interpretation. Branch open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com wanted to “feel its power, which for me was personal and quite deep.” Please Keep But before and while immersing himself in what would become a 24-year endeavor to better understand and then write about the movement and its makers, Your Info Branch worked as journalist, ghost wrote the memoirs of Watergate figure John Current Dean and basketball star Bill Russell, and spent hours recording the thoughts of an Making a move or just old friend who just happened to become US president: Bill Clinton. Branch changed your email? We ask recounted some of the recording sessions that would form the basis of Branch’s BIO members to keep their The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. Clinton wanted to contact information up to date, document the history of his presidency as it unfolded, and his sessions with so we and other members Branch remained secret through the president’s two terms. For Branch, the know where to find you. sessions gave him the chance “to get the fullest record that historians will one day Update your information in the have” of what daily life was like for Clinton in the White House. Member Area of the BIO website. Clinton and Branch had worked together in Texas during George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, and they often discussed political idealism. Branch thought he “had a better chance to influence [US politics] toward integrity as a writer than in politics.” With his King books, he explored the citizens’ idealism he Membership Up saw in the civil rights movement, the reaction to it, and its lasting effects. He said, for Renewal? “The civil rights movement set things in motion that are still benefiting our country Please respond promptly to today, including same-sex marriage…. The civil rights movement forced people to your membership renewal break down their emotional barriers against dealing with what equal citizenship notice. As a nonprofit really means in everyday life.” organization, BIO depends on Branch chose to depict the movement in as personal a way as possible, to fight members’ dues to fund our the urge in the to “reinterpret history wherever race relations are annual conference, the involved.” As an example, he cited the textbooks he read growing up in Atlanta, publication of this newsletter, and the other work we do to open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com which taught that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Many history and the other work we do to books, Branch believes, deal with what a culture is comfortable talking about. support biographers around the Telling the personal stories of the people of the civil rights movement in a narrative world. When renewing, please history, Branch hoped, would preserve some of the uncomfortable facets of race make sure the contact information we have for you is relations in the United States, thus providing a more accurate history. up to date.

Thomas and Brinkley in Conversation The conference events kicked Are You a off in the morning with a Student? plenary breakfast session Or do you know one who is called “The Art and Craft of interested in biography? BIO Biography: Evan Thomas and now has a special student Douglas Brinkley in membership rate. Visit the BIO Conversation.” Between website to find out more. them, the two have authored biographies on a wide range Brinkley and Thomas discuss their craft. of figures who helped shaped Sold to Publishers the twentieth century, from William C. Davis presidents to Walter Cronkite. They engaged in an easy dialogue as they explored Looking for Lauretta: The Elusive Life some of the challenges they’ve faced during their careers. of a Pioneering Female Confidence For Brinkley, one challenge came when writing about Rosa Parks. When she Artist and the Confederacy’s Only Media Celebrity made her historic refusal to leave her bus seat, about a dozen or so people rode sold to Southern Illinois with her. But when Brinkley did his research, he interviewed 55 people who University Press claimed to be on the bus that day. “Everybody in Montgomery was on Rosa open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Parks’s bus,” he joked. “I had no idea who to trust.” Brinkley also had personal John Oller American Guerrilla access to his subject and saw firsthand her willingness to help others, something (Francis Marion) that made writing the Parks book “probably the most moving personal biography” sold to Da Capo he’s done. by Jim Donovan at Following that observation, Evan Thomas said he had just finished a biography Jim Donovan Literary

of Richard Nixon, and the president “was not a Rosa Parks.” But Thomas did Ronin Ro come to appreciate how hard it was to be Richard Nixon, who was socially Dark Knight: Frank Miller, Batman, awkward and “a powerfully lonely guy.” Nixon’s experiences intersected with the and the Superhero Movie sold to University Press of New life of another of Brinkley’s subjects, Walter Cronkite. CBS News played a big part England in bringing Watergate to the public’s attention, and Nixon wanted to “get” by James Fitzgerald at Cronkite, who personally liked Nixon. Cronkite also interacted with another of James Fitzgerald Agency Thomas’s subjects, Robert F. Kennedy. The newsman, Brinkley said, crossed the Todd Purdum line of journalistic ethics when he urged Kennedy to run for president in 1968 Untitled biography of because of the morass in Vietnam. Rodgers and Hammerstein Another topic Brinkley and Thomas covered was how to get the biography sold to Henry Holt by Robert Barnett of subject’s family on board, which can be hard when relatives, especially children, Williams & Connolly want to preserve their loved one’s image, and their truthfulness might be suspect. Thomas also mentioned the difficulty at times of sorting out key details from Jon Pessah extraneous facts—“I wish I had a magic formula to help you figure out what’s Berra (Yogi Berra) important and what isn’t.” Another concern for biographers today: plagiarism, or sold to Little, Brown the accusation of it. One strategy, Thomas said, is to footnote extensively and by David Black at David Black acknowledge the work of experts in the foreword. Brinkley cited a slightly Literary Agency different problem, of anecdotes that get passed along as truth but without sources Alan Friedman to back them up. He relies on double sources when possible to verify information. Berlusconi open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Berlusconi After discussing some of the nuts and bolts of the craft, Brinkley ended the sold to Hachette Books session on a loftier and inspiring note. He called biography “the most indispensable by Caroline Michel at PFD art form because in America, we live by individuals… that’s how we process William Hazelgrove history, through people.” The Presidency of Edith Wilson and The Last Cowboy: How the West Preconference Events Created Teddy Roosevelt While Saturday, June 6, saw most sold to Regnery by Leticia Gomez of of the conference’s events and Savvy Literary Services festivities, on Friday some attendees explored the Library of Congress on Danika Cooley private tours. In the evening, BIO When Lightning Struck: The Story of Martin Luther members gathered at the sold to Augsburg Fortress Press Georgetown home of board member by Chip MacGregor at Kitty Kelley, where Thomas Mann, MacGregor Literary formerly of the Library of Congress, received BIO’s Biblio Award. Michael Tomasky Bill Clinton Established in 2012, the award sold to Henry Holt recognizes a librarian or archivist by Chris Calhoun of the who has made an exceptional Chris Calhoun Agency Enjoying the preconference reception, from contribution to the craft of left to right, are Kate Buford, Barbara Mark Cohen biography. Mann retired from the Burkhardt, Robin Rausch, Abigail American Impresario: The Life and Library in January 2015 after 33 Santamaria, and Sarah Dorsey. Times of Billy Rose years of service. sold to Press Also at the reception, board member Will Swift announced that Jonathan Segal will receive BIO’s Editorial Charles Casillo Marilyn: Her Genius, Her Madness, open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Marilyn: Her Genius, Her Madness, Excellence Award this November. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Carl Her Magic—Exploring the Psychology Bernstein will present the award and the evening’s events will also include a panel of Marilyn Monroe discussion. Look for more details on this event in upcoming issues of TBC. sold to St. Martin’s by Tom Miller at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates

BIO Conference Coaching Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer Gosnell Program a Resounding Success; (Dr. Kermit Gosnell) sold to Regnery New Mentoring Program Anshel Pfeffer Launches in September Untitled biography of Benjamin Netanyahu sold to Basic Books By Will Swift, Cathy Curtis, and Linda Leavell by Philippa Brophy at Sterling Lord During the June 6 BIO conference in Washington, DC, 20 BIO members met for Literistic in conjunction with Deborah half-hour coaching sessions with experienced biographers. The nine coaches (Kai Harris at The Deborah Harris Agency Bird, William Souder, Kate Buford, Justin Martin, Anne Heller, Irv Gellman, Cathy Philip Gefter Curtis, Linda Leavell, and Will Swift) read materials submitted by their “coachees” Richard Avedon prior to the convention. sold to Harper Participants rated their coaches on preparation, organization, focus, interest in by Adam Eaglin at the coachees’ concerns, and the quality of advice given. Ninety percent of the Elyse Cheney Agency coaches received excellent ratings in all categories. Duncan Hamilton These three written comments are typical of the response to this program: For the Glory “I would not have traveled from Oklahoma to this conference if it wasn’t for (Eric Liddell) the opportunity to meet with a well-known biographer face-to-face, an unheard of sold to Penguin Press opportunity in my neck of the woods. Bill Souder was very helpful and by Grainne Fox at Fletcher & Co. encouraging.” open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com “Kai Bird was outstanding…. We talked about how to engage ethical questions Walter Brown Lithium: The Biography of a Doctor, a that are contemporary... and productively about narrative pace, possible published Drug, and a Breakthrough models, and style.” sold to Liveright “Kate Buford offered a wonderful blend of kind, encouraging, and practical by Jessica Papin at Dystel & Goderich advice that both reassured me of my sanity and helped me focus on the necessary Literary Management next steps for crafting a proposal, and, ultimately, a book. I’m so grateful.” In September, BIO will offer a new mentoring program for members. This John Shaw Transition of the Ages program is designed to be helpful for biographers at all levels of experience: a BIO (Dwight Eisenhower and John member writing a first biography or a veteran biographer who would like to share Kennedy) pages or a writing dilemma with a colleague. sold to Pegasus Ten highly experienced and prize-winning authors of literary, political, artistic, by Jonathan Lyons at Curtis Brown historical, and popular culture biographies will offer coaching sessions to help writers in such areas as: Diane Simmons The Courtship of Eva Eldridge preparing pitch letters for potential agents sold to University of Iowa Press shaping a book proposal and sample chapter by Jessica Papin at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management improving interview skills

using libraries and archives effectively dealing with subjects’ families and associates Untitled narrative history of Pope Pius creating a narrative out of your facts IX and the European revolutions of promoting your book 1848 sold to Random House by Wendy Strothman of The Strothman Agency

You may sign up for one or more mentoring sessions. Based on your interests, the Bruce Hillman coaching committee (Will Swift, Cathy Curtis, and Linda Leavell) will select three A Plague on All Our Houses: Big Medicine, Hollywood, and available mentors whose expertise suits your subject area and your specific the Discovery of AIDS open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com the Discovery of AIDS concerns, and provide you with their bios. For example, if you are writing about (Dr. Michael Gottlieb) Mary Todd Lincoln, you might be presented with three mentors, one of whom has sold to ForeEdge expertise in nineteenth-century American women, another who is a presidential by Claire Gerus at Claire Gerus Literary Agency biographer, and a third who has written about mental illness. You then select one

of these. Daryl Sanders The fee will be $100 per hour. Most of that fee will be paid directly to the Thin, Wild Mercury: The Making of Bob mentor; a portion will cover BIO’s administrative costs. The mentors will be paid Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde for time spent reading submitted materials and for the time they spend in sold to Chicago Review Press by Janet Rosen at consultation. Sheree Bykofsky Associates You can begin the process by sending an email to Will Swift with a brief summary of your project and a statement about your goals for the mentoring Ryan White sessions. You will then receive instructions about payment and a list of three His Own Damn Fault: Jimmy Buffett and the Search for Margaritaville mentors with their bios. Once we receive your payment and choice, you will be sold to Touchstone given instructions for setting up phone, email or Skype sessions, according to your by The Schisgal Agency mutual preferences. Jon Kelly The Hit: Greed, Violence, and the Tackle Conference Sessions Roundup that Changed Football Forever (Darryl Stingley and Jack Tatum) sold to Blue Rider Press The TBC staff and our guest correspondent, Patricia Albers, attended six of the by David McCormick at nineteen conference sessions; here’s a capsule review of each of them. McCormick Literary Lessons Learned from Four Decades of Hunting Facts Andy Furillo His years of experience as a journalist and nonfiction author have given James The Steam Room: Bud Furillo and the Golden Age of LA Sports McGrath Morris a wealth of tips for gathering and organizing research, and he sold to Santa Monica Press shared them in this session. by Chip MacGregor at open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com by Chip MacGregor at One point he mentioned several times was looking for “bread crumbs” in any MacGregor Literary given document a biographer uncovers. The content of the individual document is important, but so too are the tidbits of information that lead to more sources. One example from Morris’s own work came from his experience while researching his biography of Joseph Pulitzer. An obituary had the name of a Pulitzer relative, and by contacting that person Morris made contact with another relative whom he never would have found through an online search. The source, in turn, had valuable information for his book. Another tip, again from his Pulitzer experience, was to look for the archived papers of people a subject interacted with. Morris found glowing letters written to Pulitzer in the publisher’s papers, but when Morris tracked down the papers of one of the writers, he learned the writer’s true feelings about Pulitzer. Using Census records as a starting point, Morris also was able to track down a butler who worked for Pulitzer and found that some of his letters were archived. They offered private views on Pulitzer Morris might not have found elsewhere. A Letter from the Looking at research from a larger perspective, Morris said. “Research and Vice President writing are symbiotic twins, not separate tasks.” While biographers have to do initial research before writing, what they actually decide to include in the beginning A Book Talk in a Villa will drive them to research other topics and personalities. For Morris, the research A wealthy woman who was never ends, even as more of his time is spent on the writing. friendly with my subject, artist When working in archives, Morris suggests keeping track of every box and folder that biographers explore, making a brief note on its contents. Since writers Grace Hartigan, during the last don’t know what might become important later on the writing process, the notes years of her life offered to host a will make it easier to go back and review material that suddenly becomes relevant. talk about the biography. Morris’s other tips included: Although my interview with this woman a few years earlier had Talk to archivists, who might know about papers held in other archives that its disappointing moments—she open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com its disappointing moments—she relate to a subject. Use remote researchers, who are often eager graduate students, to access claimed to have forgotten all the information held in distant locations. confidences Grace had imparted When using databases such as ProQuest, check if the library has access to —I was delighted. This would be all the periodicals available; some libraries might not subscribe to the my first book talk, and the complete package of newspapers. audience would likely include Keep a small notebook handy to jot down ideas for future research topics. many people who knew the Contact newspaper morgues for articles that might not be available online. artist. Consider performing a “truth test” to gauge the reliability of memoirs; for The woman did not offer to Morris, this means seeing how the writer treats an embarrassing moment in pay my coast-to-coast airfare, his or her life and then comparing it to other sources’ depiction of the but she said she would be happy event. The more open the autobiographical account, the more Morris is apt to pick me up at the airport and to trust other emotional truths (though memoirs can be unreliable for put me up for two nights. She historical facts). also planned to purchase 30 copies of my book from the The Doctor Is In publisher, which I would sign for Neurasthenia, alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, heart failure: how can some of her guests. biographers best research and address their subjects’ medical conditions? A few weeks before my talk, Heath Hardage Lee discussed her subject, Winnie Davis (the daughter of the woman emailed me: She was Confederate President Jefferson Davis), who suffered from a cluster of ailments very sorry, but I would have to diagnosed in Davis’s lifetime as neurasthenia. Lee said that the nineteenth century’s neurasthenia is the twenty-first century’s anxiety and depression. Medical stay in a hotel and make my own conditions are social constructions and thus don’t easily translate from one culture way from the airport. Unhappy to another. Neurasthenia, for one, is a gendered social construction. For Theodore about the mounting costs of this Roosevelt and other men, Lee pointed out, the cure for ailments was the active life; trip—nothing was said about for Davis and other women, it was passivity. reimbursing me—I booked open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Joshua C. Kendall’s most recent biography presents seven well-known myself into the smallest room in Americans whose self-induced obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, he a B&B down the road from her argues, made them the super-achievers they were. According to Kendall, both villa, the former estate of opera psychiatry and biography are hermeneutic. Biographers must summon up singer Rosa Ponselle. convincing interpretations of their subjects’ mental conditions. There will always The woman promised to pay be competing interpretations. Biographers have to make a strong case. Lawrence K. Altman, MD, a clinical professor of medicine at New York for the taxi rides, and to pick me University, surveyed the pitfalls of writing about illness in both medical and non- up for lunch. As we chatted over medical biographies. Altman offered suggestions for biographers seeking medical deli sandwiches purchased by information about their subjects. Although medical records are confidential, there is her housekeeper, the subject of more and more transparency about medical conditions. Possible sources of reimbursement didn’t come up— information include doctors, some of whom break confidentiality, and family though I did hear some good members, though biographers must be wary. It’s also possible to read subjects’ stories about Grace, now that correspondence looking for comments about the effects of health problems, from there was no danger of including which biographers can work backwards. them in my book. So I smiled Moderator Robin Rausch then opened the discussion. One audience member brightly and handed the woman inquired about helpful publications. Altman mentioned the Merck Manual of my $75.50 taxi receipt. With a Diagnosis and Therapy, the Merck Index, medical textbooks, and the website of the US National Library of Medicine. Another audience member recommended sigh, she poked through her medical school professors, especially at universities like Stanford that have wallet and came up with $140 in programs to explore the connections between medicine, the arts, and the twenties. humanities. The session ended with a discussion of terms like alcoholism, which That evening, while the can be more cover-up than explanation. guests chatted and munched on —Patricia Albers hors d’oeuvres, I quelled my nervousness with a glass of Writing About Writers sparkling wine proffered by a waiter. Finally, it was time for open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Panelists Valerie Boyd, Brian Jay waiter. Finally, it was time for Jones, and Martha Nell Smith and everyone to assemble in the moderator Deirdre David explored baronial living room for the talk. the challenges of writing literary As I recounted the high and low biography. To facilitate the points of Grace’s life, I noted discussion, David handed out a list disparagingly that her third of nine quotes related to the topic, husband had tried to cozy up to and the panelists came back to several of them a few times. the “wealthy, brass-buttoned Two of the quotes discussed the blazer types” of Southampton, idea that biographers are somehow New York. Only afterward did it competing with their usually better- dawn on me that similar “types” known subjects and their literary were sitting right in front of me. Boyd is currently editing the journals achievements, with the biographers I was so caught up in my of Alice Walker. sometimes offering “pedestrian” story that I related the verbatim prose to describe the creators of response of a curator whom I “words of genius.” Valerie Boyd, who wrote a biography of Zora Neale Hurston, had asked for advice before dealt with that issue as she contemplated how to write about Hurston’s life. “I starting my research. He spent months trying to figure out, how do you write a book that is worthy of a suggested that I stick with the great writer.” She didn’t see herself in competition with Hurston, but Boyd did want her words to stand up to her subject’s. Overall, Boyd said, “biographers need 1950s, when Hartigan was “f---- to raise the standard of narrative to the point where we are not simply relying on - all those guys.” As I circulated facts”—though, of course, facts are important. among the guests later, I heard For Brian Jay Jones, his biography of Washington Irving was less about that someone referred to as “the Irving’s words than what he did away from the page: Irving created a public old admiral” was upset by such persona for himself, focused on the business of writing to maximize control over frank language. I can only his words, and traveled in upper echelons of society. Documenting that story for assume that, like the First Lord open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com assume that, like the First Lord the first time left Jones feeling he was not competing with his subject. of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Doing the research for a literary biography, Boyd and Smith agreed, means Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, he separating the writer’s public voice from his or her private one. Reading the has never been to sea. subject’s letters is one way to do this. Smith, who has written extensively about Emily Dickinson, is now working on a biography of the poet’s sister-in-law and This was a unique editor, Susan Dickinson. One of the literary biographer’s goals, Smith said, is to experience, in more ways than find “a personal voice that’s not in the fiction.” Smith’s subject does not have a one. From now on, I’m going to well-known public voice, but she still wants to find the personal, through both insist on full reimbursement for Dickinson’s writings and something as simple as sitting in her home. travel expenses, no matter how Smith is also dealing with a subject who is not well known but played a key keen I am to spread the word role in literary history through her relationship with Emily Dickinson. One of her about my book. challenges is dealing with an “ancillary figure” while not letting the huge figure of the poet dominate the story. Cathy Other topics that came up in both the panelists’ discussions and the questions Cathy Curtis that followed included: BIO Vice President Is the literary biographer’s responsibility to the subject or to posterity? The consensus seemed to be to posterity, though Boyd suggested they are necessarily in conflict and the equation could be a little different if the BIO's Board of subject is still alive. Directors Can you write an interesting biography about a dull life? In response, Smith Brian Jay Jones, President asked, “Is anyone’s life really uneventful?” Boyd countered by asking, is Cathy Curtis, Vice President anyone’s life really that exciting? Especially if the subject spent most of his or her life in front of a typewriter? The biographer has a challenge to Marc Leepson, Treasurer “choose a writer who has a balance” of interesting external events and Barbara Burkhardt, Secretary literary accomplishment. Lois Banner How much of the subject’s output should the biography touch upon? Boyd Carol Berkin open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Carol Berkin said she felt a need to at least mention all of Hurston’s work, though she Chip Bishop explored major works in greater detail. Kate Buford Literary biographers should correct false stories or try to address past biographies of their subject that may have created a false impression. Jones Deirdre David felt an obligation to do this with Irving, as the previous biography of him Gayle Feldman was 75 years old and the biographer had an obvious bias against Irving. Beverly Gray Smith, though, doesn’t think a current biography should be strictly reactive Kitty Kelley to other biographies and past myths. Joshua Kendall What happens if there are limited “private voice” sources? Smith suggested taking the evidence from the sources that are available and synthesizing James McGrath Morris them to get at the truth, “knowing that something is lost.” Hans Renders William Souder Biographer for Hire Will Swift Realizing that not everyone wants to write a full-length biography or that some writers need work between large projects, moderator Charles J. Shields introduced Advisory Council this panel by noting that a biographer’s skills can be used in other ways. The four panelists then explored some of the possibilities. One of them is acting as a personal historian, documenting the lives of , Chair everyday people. That’s what Dalene Bickel does with her company, Lasting Deirdre Bair Legacies. Some clients seek a record of their lives for family members, while Douglas Brinkley others want a biography for their business or a corporate history. Bickel called it a Catherine Clinton privilege “to sit with individuals and in some cases entire families and preserve their Amanda Foreman stories.” Often subjects are more willing to recount their lives’ experiences with an Doris Kearns Goodwin outsider than with a relative, and Bickel’s finished products often surprise relatives Joan Hedrick who learn details they never knew before. Marian Carpenter’s work often has her documenting life stories of an entire Michael Holroyd Eric Lax open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com community, particularly in African American towns of the Mississippi Delta. As a Eric Lax public historian, she works with local museums and other organizations that preserve a particular community’s history. She collects oral histories to prepare exhibits and helps communities preserve artifacts they’ve gathered. Carpenter William S. McFeely stressed the need to talk to clients to see who the target audience is for their presentation and what they want to focus on. “Learn to listen and listen to learn” is Marion Meade one of Carpenter’s mantras, both as she determines the scope of the project and collects the oral histories. Nancy Milford Interviewing subjects is just one part of the job for Adam Nemett, creative Andrew Morton director at The History Factory. As a “heritage management firm,” the company Martin J. Sherwin prepares corporate histories for companies of all sizes, especially when they want T. J. Stiles to mark a milestone anniversary. The finished products include books, exhibits, documentaries, and online material. Rather than write a sanitized history, Nemett Terry Teachout and his collaborators strive to convince clients to take a warts-and-all approach. A company’s failures and challenges add drama to the narrative The History Factory wants to tell. While the company does most of the research and writing in-house, Nemett said it does have some freelance opportunities, and there are other companies in the field doing this kind of corporate history. The Biographer's Craft The last panelist was Raphael Sagalyn, a literary agent whose clients include several well-known biographers. Complementing Nemett’s presentation, he said Editor that writing company histories “is a major opportunity for writers today” because Michael Burgan companies “need storytellers to tell their story.” Sagalyn also talked about Consulting Editor ghostwriting opportunities. In some cases, a publisher might go to an agent that James McGrath Morris specializes in ghostwriting projects; in others, the subject and the writer already

have a relationship. Copy Editor Starting and sustaining a career in any of these fields requires marketing. Bickel Kay Bird open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com relies, in part, on word-of-mouth contacts and her website. She also targets Correspondents individuals and organizations that can afford the services of a personal historian United Kingdom and might be celebrating an important event, such as an anniversary. The History Andrew Lownie Factory does the same kind of targeted outreach, though its clients usually have a significantly larger budget—sometimes reaching seven figures. Netherlands Hans Renders Summing up the session, Shields said that the take-aways of the panel included

targeting potential clients, doing your homework before meeting with them, and India listening to the stories they tell. Ashok R. Chandran

Does Gender Matter? Australia/New Zealand Todd Nicholls Moderator Abigail Santamaria and panelists Kitty Kelley, United States Sandra Kimberley Hall Linda Lear, and James (Hawaii) McGrath Morris answered

this session’s titular question Pat McNees with a collective (Washington, D.C.) “Sometimes.” For Lear, it definitely did Dona Munker (New York) as she tried to expand a

doctoral dissertation on New To contact any of our correspondents, Dealer Harold Ickes into a Moderator Santamaria stands behind panelists click here. biography. Going through Lear, Kelley, and Morris. private papers she had not seen before, Lear discovered traits in her subject that made it hard to empathize with Ickes—abusing his open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com children and cheating on his wife in particular. And to Lear, empathy for a subject is crucial for a biographer. “It is the fundamental empathy for the life… that is lived that carries the biographical relationship.” Learning what she did about the private Ickes made her “finally admit total failure of empathy with Harold. And so I left him.” Lear turned over years of research to another biographer—a man—who wrote the Ickes biography she felt she could not write. While a female subject might have had the same unpleasant traits as Ickes, for Lear his gender was a reason why she could no longer empathize with her subject. For Kelley, the gender of her subject has had varying impacts. Writing about Jackie Kennedy Onassis, for example, Kelley was perhaps more likely than a male biographer to note the social importance of Onassis eschewing stockings during the 1950s—something women of her station rarely did at the time. That little detail suggested the young Jackie’s willingness to flout convention. When writing about Frank Sinatra, who famously sued Kelley to stop her work on the unauthorized biography even before she wrote a word, gender was an issue, Kelley said, “because I was a woman writing about a powerful man who was alive.” But her and her subject’s genders did not shape the research and writing process. Kelley did say that women biographers might have an advantage when interviewing subjects, since studies show they tend to be better with relating to others than men. Morris had never tackled a female subject before undertaking his biography of pioneering African American journalist Ethel Payne. With Payne, both gender and race were an issue for the white biographer. Morris realized, though, that in a way he was facing a similar challenge Payne did when she was writing about mostly white, male politicians. While differences of race, gender, and class can’t be changed or ignored, Morris could still strive for the standard he thought Payne applied to her writing—to be fair. And despite the differences with his subject, open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Morris definitely had empathy for her. He admitted, though, that as a man he failed to notice something a woman might have noticed early on: Payne wore wigs. Morris stressed the importance for him of having women read his book to look for gender issues he might have missed. And he noted that coming from a different gender or background from a subject does not have to be an issue, because biographers have “an unlimited license to ask people questions.” The answers sources provide can help fill in the holes in the biographer’s experiences. Overall, Morris, said, “The presumption that we shouldn’t write about the ‘other’ is not a healthy one.” Santamaria, whose recently published first biography was of Joy Davidman, said that in some cases, even being the same gender as your subject can be an issue, if the biographer and the subject have fundamentally different values. Santamaria was pregnant during the writing process, and her own emerging maternal instincts conflicted with Davidman’s lack of them, which made it harder for Santamaria to empathize with her. The panelists’ repeated references to empathy sparked discussion on that topic after the formal presentations. Lear said a writer can have empathy for a subject who was unpleasant. Kelley said that when writing about the sexist Sinatra, “I had no problem with empathy; empathy didn’t even enter in to it,” despite his often despicable behavior. To Morris, a subject’s bad habits may not be excusable, but empathy can help “provide you the understanding of why they did something.”

The Biographer’s Voice

Moderator Beverly Gray opened the session by quoting Stacy Schiff in her keynote address to last year’s BIO conference: “You can write without theme but not without voice.” How do biographers find the right distance and the right open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com relationship with their subjects? How can they use voice to engage readers and gain their trust? Linda Leavell opened her presentation with the first sentences of three biographies of Emily Dickinson, each with a different agenda and, thus, a different voice. Voice exists, whether a writer intends it or not. A compelling and convincing biography requires a strong voice. Leavell’s goal in writing her life of Marianne Moore was to re-establish Moore as a major poet; her challenges were to tell a good story and inspire trust. Biographers must do both. They are like the detectives in mystery novels: Readers are as interested in understanding the detectives as they are in unraveling the mysteries. Leavell also spoke about specific decisions she made (no first person except in the preface) and problems she faced (finding the right voice in her interpretations of Moore’s poetry). Evelyn Barish argued that one’s subject should determine one’s voice. Moreover, Barish said, the writer’s voice should shift as the narrative evolves. She presented examples from her biography of literary theorist and once highly respected scholar Paul de Man, in which she pulled skeletons out of de Man’s closet, including his collaborationist articles during World War II. Amanda Vaill first became aware of voice as a girl discovering the work of Charles Dickens. Vaill is looking to cast the kind of spell she felt in reading Dickens, but believes that the subject should guide the biographer’s voice. In her double biography of Lost Generation expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, Vaill aimed for an F. Scott Fitzgeraldian voice with bits of jazz. Her Hotel Florida, which entwines the stories of three couples in and out of Madrid’s Hotel Florida during the Spanish Civil War, required a more thriller-like and cinematic approach. That approach made it all the more important that her sources be impeccable. In that same book, some chapters are twenty pages long; others are only three. Pacing is another element in voice. open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com During the lively discussion that followed, Vaill told the audience that taking command of one’s book means avoiding most short quotes. Leavell pointed out that fudge words like perhaps can also weaken a biographer’s voice. Notes are valuable tools for explaining problems and doubts and including information that would undermine the narrative. It’s your subject’s life but it’s your life of the subject. —PA

Research in the Digital Age

By Carl Rollyson

I have been using computers to research and write my books since the mid-1980s, when I purchased my first machine. It was an unnerving experience to begin with. I remember I could not somehow grasp what “save” meant in my Word Perfect processing program. Each time I “saved,” I renamed the file. I don’t know why. I wasn’t trying to preserve different drafts. But somehow I thought I was obliterating history in a way I never did when working on a typewriter. I was a keyboard man, having taught myself to touch type. Soon enough, I got the hang of word processing. Ever since those early days of transitioning to word processing, I have made all sorts of accommodations to PCs and Macs, to laptops and iPads. I never write longhand. I don’t print out what I write. I google, use databases, make iMovies for book trailers, and consider myself reasonably adept at learning new technological skills. A recent research experience made me wonder, though, if I have quite left behind the paper files, index cards, and the panoply of tools I used in the analog open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com age. To complete the updated biography of Susan Sontag that my wife and I published in 2000, I went to UCLA to look at the emails she had stored on her computer (actually several different computers). UCLA had put all this material onto a laptop—as I knew from reading several articles about the thousands of her emails now available to researchers. When I arrived, I took a cursory look at the finding guide, but I had only a few days to complete my task and I just went to the file folders Sontag had set up. The UCLA archivists assured me that everything was there on that one laptop and that no material had been removed except for two items that the Sontag estate had withheld before delivering the material to the university. So I began going through the file folders systematically, believing that as with paper files, I could quickly skim through and even ignore trivial or repetitive material and get to the heart of her collection. I was shocked to find that most of the file folders were empty. I asked an archivist again if everything was indeed on the laptop. He assured me it was. By the end of the day, I did find some good items, but overall I was perplexed. The articles I had read about the Sontag collection had alluded to much more revealing emails than I had found. I left feeling suspicious. Sontag had given my wife and me a hard time while we were working on her biography, and she also had an authorized biographer who, I suspected, had exclusive access to some of the evidence I wanted to peruse. But then I re-read the articles about the UCLA collection and noticed that all of them mentioned keyword searches. I had not thought about simply doing key word searches because I thought that I would miss material by not systematically going through the files. Before I returned the next day to the Sontag collection, I sent emails to the archivists once again—this time asking about those empty file folders. I was open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com assured the UCLA archivists had removed nothing and were just keeping Sontag’s file folder structure intact—kind of odd, I thought, since looking through file folders was mainly a waste of time. At any rate, when I did key word searches for important figures such as Annie Leibovitz, what I was looking for turned up. I still marvel that it did not occur to me earlier to dispense with the files and do the keyword searches. But then, I have always systematically worked my way through files. I still think the keyword searches were an odd way of getting to research gold. I can see why the archive did not want to tamper with Sontag’s file folder structure, but those blank folders now stand for the ruins of what was once Sontag’s way of organizing her world. Are you, too, still held back by certain habits of the analog world?

Carl Rollyson’s biography of Walter Brennan will be published in September.

Shorts

Biographer Battles Website Biographer Ashlee Vance did not take kindly to Business Insider’s liberal use of quotes and summations of facts from his Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. The website used the material in a series of articles published soon after the book was released. As Fortune described it, Vance used Twitter to inform Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget that he thought the content featured on the website went beyond fair use. Blodget disagreed but offered to take down some of the offending material. Fortune noted that while Vance may have had a moral case against Business Insider, he probably did not have a legal one. Some of the material lifted, one legal expert suggested, probably was not content open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com that falls under copyright law, and the total amount of material Vance could claim ownership of was too small to violate the fair use doctrine. As Observer.com reported, Vance later learned that Business Insider normally posts content from books until an author complains.

“How Much is Too Much? Excerpts of Elon Musk Bio Raise Copyright Questions”

Unauthorized Bios Get Legal Approval in Brazil Brazil’s Supreme Court last month unanimously overturned a 2002 law that let the subjects of unauthorized biographies move to block a book’s publication or have it removed from store shelves. The court ruled that the law was a form of censorship that violated Brazilians’ constitutional rights to freedom of expression, a right that trumps the claims of a right to privacy that defenders of the law asserted. The most famous legal battle involving the now-overturned law featured the Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos, who in 2007 forced biographer Paulo Cesar Araújo and his publisher to remove an unauthorized biography from Brazilian stores. TBC reported in 2013 on the experience of journalist Isabel Vincent, whose biography of Brazilian philanthropist Lily Safra was banned from being published in Brazil, though it did appear in other countries.

Research Tip

Carl Rollyson shared this tidbit on the BIO Facebook page: The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center has completed Project REVEAL, which offers free online access to almost 23,000 documents related to US and British writers. During the yearlong project, the center digitized 25 manuscript collections, including those of Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London. open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Some of the documents available include Oscar Wilde’s handwritten draft of Salomé, in French; Robert Louis Stevenson’s list of his favorite books; and letters by Julia Ward Howe.

Prizes

Longford Prize Ben Macintyre won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography for A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. The £5,000 ($7,805 US) prize is one of several awarded each year by the Society of Authors, a UK organization that protects the interests of professional writers. The Longford Prize is sponsored by Flora Fraser and Peter Soros and is named for Elizabeth Longford, an acclaimed biographer whose subjects included Wellington, Churchill, and Queen Victoria.

Lionsgate has optioned the TV Lambda Literary Awards rights to MacIntyre's book. Biographies took several honors at the Lambda Literary Awards. John Lahr was one of two winners in the Gay Biography/Memoir category. His Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh shared the honor with Richard Blanco’s memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos. The winner of the Lesbian Biography/Memoir award was Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com with Barbara Smith, edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks, with Barbara Smith. Martin Duberman’s dual biography Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS took the honor for best LGBT nonfiction.

Cross British Sports Book Awards Matt Dickinson’s Bobby Moore: The Man in Full won in the Biography category of the 2015 Cross British Sports Book Awards, while Alone: The Triumph and Tragedy of John Curry by Bill Jones took the General Sports Writing award. Those victories made the books eligible for the overall Best Sports Book, which went to the autobiography of rugby star Gareth Thomas.

Carey Institute Residencies The first five recipients of the Carey Institute for Global Good’s nonfiction residencies include Jefferson Morley, who is working on the first biography of James Jesus Angleton, the long-time chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. The residencies last from two weeks to three months and include lodging, meals, and mentoring, if needed. The institute is still accepting applications for the first residency session, which begins October 15, through July 15. You can find more information here.

Call for Entries

PEN Center USA Accepting Applications PEN Center USA is accepting application for its Emerging Voices Fellowship through August 10. The eight-month fellowship is open to poets and writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. Fellows receive a $1,000 stipend and must live in the Los Angeles area or be willing to relocate there for the duration of the open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com fellowship. For more information and to apply, go here.

University of Virginia Press Seeks Submissions The University of Virginia Press plans to publish a collection of essays commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was published in 1967. So that the commemorative book can be published in 2017, essays of 6,000 to 10,000 words must be submitted no later than February 15, 2016, to editor Michael Lackey. One possible topic is Styron’s work as an example of the biographical novel, a genre that has only increased in popularity since the publication of Nat Turner. For more information on the types of essays sought, go here. Please use the UVA Press’s style and guide sheet for formatting your submission.

The Writer's Life

So You Want a Review in the New York Times If you’ve ever wondered how the New York Times Book Review goes about choosing its books, a recent Book TV interview with Review editor Pamela Paul and preview editor Parul Seghal provided some answers. Seghal noted that the percentage of books reviewed is small, compared to the number the paper receives, and editors have to give a written reason for passing on a book. Paul said that certain big-name authors will almost always be reviewed, even if their latest book is not stellar. The Washington Post had excerpts of the interview, which you can read here. The entire interview is available here. open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless! —Joyce Carol Oates

Robots in the Newsroom Will robots highly skilled in conducting research and writing scintillating prose one day be competing for BIO’s Plutarch Award? We’d like to think not, but automated writing software is already writing copy for news outlets such as the Associated Press. As reported by CNNMoney, the AP uses computer algorithms developed by Automated Insights to cull through data and turn it into sentences good enough to use in thousands of news reports. The AP says no journalists have lost their jobs because of the robo-reporting, which is best suited for combing through such things as corporate earning numbers and sports statistics. Giving that task to the computer frees up human reporters to do more analysis and investigative reporting, the AP said. No news on whether the software is adept at putting together newsletters.

“Robots Write Thousands of News Stories a Year”

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. —Lady M. W. Montagu

The Regretful Biographer With success in various literary fields, Neil Gaiman hardly seems like a writer who would have regrets. But the author of graphic novels, books, poems, etc., recently admitted to one regret about his career: Writing The First Four Years of the Fab Five, a quickie biography of the ‘80s band Duran Duran (he turned down the chance to write about Def Leppard or Barry Manilow). As Gaiman described in a talk at the Hay Festival, a UK festival of ideas, in the days before the Internet he had to rely on press clippings from the BBC as the main source of information. open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com The book was a best-seller for a week, then the company that published it went out of business. Gaiman did not make the fortune he hoped to from the book, but he’s done all right since.

“Neil Gaiman: ‘The Book I Wish I’d Never Written’”

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” ―Mark Twain

Obituaries

Graham Lord Graham Lord, a journalist, novelist, and biographer, died June 14. He was 72. Lord began his journalism career while still a boy, writing weekly and monthly magazines and then a daily paper at his private school in Rhodesia, where he was born. He attended college in England and began his professional career there in 1965 with the Sunday Express. He became the paper’s literary editor and launched its annual book prize in 1987. During this time, he also wrote several novels. Lord left the paper in 1992 to write biography. His first was Just The One: The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard. He wrote six more biographies, and his subjects included James Herriott, David Niven, and Joan Collins.

Barbara F. McManus Barbara F. McManus, a professor, biographer, and BIO member, died June 19 at her home in Rye, New York. She was 73. The following is a tribute to McManus by BIO member Dona Munker, who like McManus was also a member of Women Writing Women’s Lives: open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Barbara F. McManus was a professor of classics emerita at the College of New Rochelle in New York and on the steering committee of Women Writing Women’s Lives, serving for many years as our web manager. Right from the beginning, she was an enthusiastic member of BIO—I think she attended every conference but this year’s—and some members may remember her splendid presentation on Scrivener at the 2013 conference panel on research software in New York. She was also a biographer of extraordinary courage, intellectual generosity, perseverance, and humor. For years, she seemed able to simply ignore the fact that she had stage 4 colon cancer and needed to be in and out of chemotherapy to keep it at bay. When she had to go to Sloan-Kettering for yet another treatment on the day of her Scrivener presentation, she went off lamenting that she couldn’t go to all the panels she had hoped to attend. Barbara’s greatest ambition was to complete the biography she had been working on of Grace MacCurdy, a pioneering woman classicist. To everyone’s amazement, she succeeded, in spite of being unable to see well enough at the end to read what was on her computer screen. Not long ago, the WWWL steering committee received a weak but jubilant message from her that the manuscript was under serious consideration by a university press and awaiting peer review. In addition to being an absolutely dedicated scholarly biographer, Barbara was a superb, award-winning teacher and lecturer who knew how to bring her subject alive and an incredibly generous researcher who, until very recently, continued to help and advise her less technologically gifted fellow biographers with the challenges of online research and organization. Even though she couldn’t live to see her book published, those of us who knew her will never forget how high she set the bar for humanity, scholarship, and courage in the writing of biography.

open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com News and Notes

This month’s listing of new books includes the latest from Irwin Gellman, whose expertise as a presidential biographer was noted several times during the recent BIO Conference. His new book is The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961. Just out in paperback is

Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Gellman was one of the Robbins by Diane Diekman. In 2013, the book coaches at the annual BIO won the Best Book on Country Music Award from conference. Belmont University. Under this month’s Sold to Publishers, we feature William C. Davis and his upcoming biography of a woman who went by the name Madame Loreta Janeta Velasquez, but as William told us, it was certainly not her birth name, though no one knows for sure what it was. William wrote, “She used several aliases as a New Orleans prostitute, then posed as a man as Lieutenant Harry Buford of the Confederate Army, then was briefly a Union secret agent, Venezuelan settler, fortune hunter in the gold and silver fields of Nevada and Utah, newspaperwoman, occasional social reformer, diplomatic aide, and confidence artist.” Also making a recent sale was John Oller, with a biography of American Revolution hero Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox. The American Library Association’s Booklist recently featured the top ten biographies it reviewed between June 2014 and May 2015, and heading the list was James McGrath Morris’s Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press. You can see the complete list here. Also on it is Jonas Salk: A Life by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs. That book was also recently named an Editors’ Choice selection by the New York Times Book Review. Last month, open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Catherine Reef talked about her The Bronte Sisters on the Australian book blog Read Me. You can read the interview here. Also last month, delivered one of the Seven Lectures at Seven Gables, held at the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts. Margaret discussed her Pulitzer Prize- winning biography of . Nigel Hamilton recently had a piece in the Huffington Post called “On Being American,” which you can read here. Producers Laurie MacDonald, Walter Parkes, and Evan Hayes are turning ’s The Good Spy, the story of CIA operative Robert Ames, into a movie. Kai will be a consultant on the film. On Independence Day, Carol Berkin appeared on Book TV to discuss her new book, The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America's Liberties. The program was a repeat of an interview she originally did in May, which you can see here. The July 5 edition of the New York Times Book Review included a positive review of Emily Bingham’s Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham, and Amanda Foreman contributed a review of the latest biography of Joan of Arc. The issue also had a letter from Laura Claridge addressing a previous review of the new William Shirer biography. Laura’s current subject, publisher Blanche Knopf, had encouraged Shirer to keep the journals of his time in Nazi Germany that led to his famous Berlin Diary. Abigail Santamaria will be discussing her debut biography Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis with Anne Heller on Tuesday, August 4, at Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, 47-49 East 65th Street in New York. The free talk begins at 6 p.m. and will be followed by a book signing and reception. RSVP by emailing here.

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The President and the Apprentice: The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 Whistler, Wilde & Sargent in Tite Street by Irwin F. Gellman by Devon Cox (Yale University Press) (Frances Lincoln)

Civil Rights in the Texas The Chamberlains: The Legend Behind Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon The Lancaster and Black Activism by Roger Ward by Will Guzman (Fonthill Media) (University of Illinois Press) open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life Sidney Nolan: A Life and Times of Calixa Lavallee, 1842-1891 by Nancy Underhill by Brian Christopher Thompson (NewSouth Publishing) (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer Charles Corm: An Intellectual Biography by Martha Fay of a Twentieth-Century Lebanese “Young (Harry N. Abrams) Phoenician” by Franck Salameh (Lexington Books) Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr O. D. Skelton: A Portrait (Backbeat Books) of Canadian Ambition by Norman Hillmer (University of Toronto Press) The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal The Reverend Pearl May Patrick, an by David E. Hoffman Indiana Progressive 1875-1962: One of (Doubleday) America’s First Ordained Women by Patrick Brantlinger First Principles: The Official (Edwin Mellen Press) Biography of Keith Duckworth OBE by Norman Burr They Fought Alone: A True Story of a (Veloce Publishing) Modern American Hero by John Keats Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus (Turner) Jimmy Hoffa by James Neff Under the Wing of a Patriot: The Life (Little, Brown) Story of USAF Fighter Pilot Col. Jim Ryan Motherless Child: The Definitive by Shane Allen Biography of Eric Clapton (Tate Publishing and Enterprises) by Paul Scott open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com by Paul Scott (Headline Book Publishing) The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen by Dipesh Chakrabarty of Poet Philip Whalen (University of Chicago Press) by David Schneider (University of California Press) Arthur Lydiard: Master Coach by Garth Gilmour Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s (Exisle Publishing) Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey The Reign of King Henry: How Graham (Crown) Henry Transformed the All Blacks by Gregor Paul American Interior: The Quixotic (Exisle Publishing) Journey of John Evans, His Search for a Lost Tribe and How, Fuelled by Lois McMaster Bujold Fantasy and (Possibly) Booze, He by Edward James Accidentally Annexed a (University of Illinois Press) Third of North America by Gruff Rhys The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of (Penguin UK) Sartre as a Public Intellectual by Patrick Baert Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of (Polity) Empire by Carla J. Mulford Domhnall Ua Buachalla: Rebellious (Oxford University Press) Nationalist, Reluctant Governor by Adhamhnain O’ Suilleabhain Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the (Merrion) Invention that Launched the Military- Industrial Complex Antonio Pedro: Just a Story by Michael Hiltzik by Claudia Pazos Alonso, Mariana Grey (Simon & Schuster) open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com (Simon & Schuster) de Casto, and Bruno Silva Rodrigues (Aris & Philips) Samuel M. Gore: Blessed with Tired Hands The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three by Barbara Gauntt Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue (University Press of Mississippi) in an English Stately Home by Natalie Livingstone The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of (Hutchinson) Defiance and Deliverance in Burma by Delphine Schrank John Fogerty: An American Son (Nation Books) by Thomas M. Kitts (Routledge) Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway Homage to a Broken Man: The Life of J. by Siobhan Roberts Heinrich Arnold - A True Story of Faith, (Bloomsbury USA) Forgiveness, Sacrifice, and Community by Peter Mommsen The General and the Genius: Groves (Plough Publishing House) and Oppenheimer—The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Political Wings: William Wedgwood Bomb Benn, first Viscount Stansgate by James Kunetka by Alun Wyburn-Powell (Regnery History) (Pen and Sword)

Hit the Target: Eight Men who Led A Very Private Celebrity: The Nine Lives The Eighth Air Force to Victory over of John Freeman the Luftwaffe by Hugh Purcell by Bill Yenne (Biteback Publishing) (NAL)

The Duke’s Assassin: Exile and Death of The Acid Bath Murders: The Trials Lorenzino de’ Medici and Liquidations of open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com and Liquidations of by Stefano Dall’Aglio, translated by John George Haigh Donald Weinstein by Gordon Lowe (Yale University Press) (The History Press)

Becoming a Romanov: Grand Duchess Abbé Sicard’s Deaf Education: Elena of Russia and Her World 1807- Empowering the Mute, 1785-1820 1873 by Emmet Kennedy by Marina Soroka and Charles A. Ruud (Palgrave Macmillan) (Ashgate Publishing Company)

Harnessing the Sky: Frederick Enoch Powell: The Outsider “Trap” Trapnell, the U.S. Navy’s by David Clarke Shiels Aviation Pioneer, 1923-1952 (I. B. Tauris) by Frederick M. Trapnell Jr.and Dana Trapnell Tibbits The Unexpected Story of Nathaniel (Naval Institute Press) Rothschild by John Cooper Diane von Furstenberg: (Bloomsbury) A Life Unwrapped by Gioia Diliberto Maneater (Dey Street Books) by Harold Schechter (Head of Zeus) Stagg vs. Yost: The Birth of Cutthroat Football Admiral Collingwood: by John Kryk Nelson’s Own Hero (Rowman & Littlefield) by Max Adams (Head of Zeus) Sniper of the Skies: The Story of George Frederick ‘Screwball’ Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Beurling, DSO, DFC, DFM Conservative Who Changed America by Nick Thomas by Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com (Pen and Sword) (Penguin)

Fighter Pilot: The Life of Battle of The Private Life of General Britain Ace Bob Doe Omar N. Bradley by Helen Doe by Jeffrey D. Lavoie (Amberley) (McFarland Press)

The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure Family Saga by Deborah Davis by Jane C. Beck (Atria Books) (University of Illinois Press)

W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Fear and the Muse Kept Watch: The Intellectual and Activist Russian Masters—from Akhmatova and by Shawn Leigh Alexander Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein (Rowman & Littlefield) —under Stalin by Andy McSmith M-Mother: Dambuster Flight (New Press) Lieutenant John ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood by Jenny Elmes One Man Against the World: The (The History Press) Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner Steel Gate to Freedom: The Life of (Henry Holt) Liu Xiaobo by Yu Jie, translated by H. C. Hsu Aftermath: The Makers of the Post-War (Rowman & Littlefield) World by Richard M. Crowder William Dobell: An Artist’s Life (I. B. Tauris) by Elizabeth Donaldson (Exisle Publishing) Murder in the Family: The Dr. King Story by Dan Buchanan open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Edward Thomas: from Adlestrop to (Dundurn) Arras: A Biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Bloomsbury USA)

Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf & the Bloomsbury Group by Amy Licence (Amberley)

Brave as a Lion: The Life and Times of Field Marshal Hugh Gough, 1st Viscount Gough by Christopher Brice (Helion and Company)

Being Berlusconi: The Rise and Fall from Cosa Nostra to Bunga Bunga by Michael Day (Palgrave Macmillan)

Omar Al-Bashir and Africa’s Longest War by Paul Moorcraft (Pen and Sword)

Florida Founder William P. DuVal: Frontier Bon Vivant by James M. Denham open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com (University of South Carolina Press)

Paperback

Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of The Last Love of George Sand: Marty Robbins A Literary Biography by Diane Diekman by Evelyne Bloch-Dano open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com (University of Illinois Press) (Arcade Publishing)

The Secret History of Wonder Woman Beyond the Cross Timbers: The Travels by Jill Lepore of Randolph B. Marcy (Vintage) by W. Eugene Hollon (University of Oklahoma Press) Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War Ned Wynkoop and the Lonely Road from by Helen Thorpe Sand Creek (Scribner) by Louis Kraft (University of Oklahoma Press) The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather Licoricia of Winchester: Marriage, by Rick Kennedy Motherhood and Murder in the Medieval (Eerdmans) Anglo-Jewish Community by Suzanne Bartlet The Short and Tragic Life of Robert (Vallentine Mitchell) Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League Richard III: England’s Black Legend by Jeff Hobbs by Desmond Seward (Scribner) (Pegasus)

Chosen for His People: A Biography Churchill’s Anchor: The Biography of of Patriarch Tikhon Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound by Jane Swan by Robin Brodhurst (Holy Trinity Publications) (Pen and Sword)

A Most Unusual Life: Dora van Joseph Goebbels: The Nazi Leadership Gelder Kunz: Clairvoyant, at Rest and Play Theosophist, Healer by Curt Riess by Kirsten van Gelder (Fonthill Media) open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com and Frank Chelsey (Quest Books) Martin Leake: Double VC by Ann Clayton Balanchine and the Lost Muse: (Pen and Sword) Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer Thomas Varker Keam: Indian Trader by Elizabeth Kendall by Laura Graves (Oxford University Press) (University of Oklahoma Press)

The Complete Muhammad Ali Operation Mexico! Carl Kiekhaefer vs. by Ishmael Reed the 1951-1953 Pan American Road Race (Baraka Books) by Karl Pippart III (Mill City Press) The Many Faces of Herod the Great by Adam Kolman Marshak Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music (Eerdmans) by John Caps (University of Illinois Press) Bearing Witness: The Remarkable Life of Charles Bean, Australia’s Greatest Kings & Queens of Wales War Correspondent by Timothy Venning by Peter Rees (Amberley) (Allen & Unwin) Chopin’s Prophet: The Life of Pianist Prendergast: Legal Villain? Vladimir de Pachmann by Grant Morris by Gregor Benko and Edward Blickstein (Victoria University Press) (Rowman & Littlefield)

Jim: The Life and Work John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary of James Griffiths in Fourteenth-Century Italy by D. Ben Rees by William Caferro (Welsh Academic Press) (Johns Hopkins University Press) open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Double Agent: The First Hero of Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert World War II and How the FBI Punishment of a Cold War Heretic Outwitted and Destroyed by David Caute a Nazi Spy Ring (Yale University Press) by Peter Duffy (Scribner) Tigress of Forli: The Life of Caterina Sforza Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the by Elizabeth Lev Pulse of History (Head of Zeus) by Rhonda K. Garelick (Random House) Woody Guthrie, American Radical by Will Kaufman Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at (University of Illinois Press) the Dawn of a New America by Jonathan Darman George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait (Random House) by Walter Rimler (University of Illinois Press) Angry Optimist: The Life and Times of Jon Stewart Marcel Mauss: A Biography by Lisa Rogak by Marcel Fournier, translated by (St. Martin’s Griffin) Jane Marie Todd (Princeton University Press) Kierkegaard: Great Thinkers on Modern Life Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of by Robert Ferguson W. D. Hamilton (Pegasus) by Ullica Segerstrale (Oxford University Press) The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual Constantine, Divine Emperor of the by Patrick Baert Christian Golden Age open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com (Polity) by Jonathan Bardill (Cambridge University Press) Cecily Neville by Amy Licence Raymond Carr: The Curiosity of the Fox (Amberley) by María Jesús González (Sussex Academic Press) Kanye West by Mark Beaumont Keep On Fighting: The Life and Civil (Omnibus Press) Rights Legacy of Marian A. Spencer by Dorothy H. Christenson Richard III’s ‘Beloved Cousyn’: John (Ohio University Press) Howard and the House of York by John Ashdown-Hill Dave Grohl: Times Like His: Foo (The History Press) Fighters, Nirvana and Other Misadventures Dirty Bertie: An English King by Martin James Made in France (Music Press Books) by Stephen Clarke (Random House UK) The Death of Marco Pantani: A Biography Kitty’s War: The Remarkable Wartime by Matt Rendell Experiences of Kit McNaughton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Janet Butler (University of Queensland Press) Young Lawrence: A Portrait of the Legend as a Young Man The Life of Schumann by Anthony Sattin by Michael Musgrave (John Murray Publishers) (Cambridge University Press) Gudinski: The Godfather of Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music Australian Rock by Joel Sachs by Stuart Coupe open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com (Oxford University Press) (Hachette Australia)

Hazel Wolf: Fighting the Diego Costa: The Art of War Establishment by Fran Guillen by Susan Starbuck (Arena Sport) (University of Washington Press) Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Pixie Annat: Champion of Nurses Rezanov and the Dream by Colleen Ryan Clur of a Russian America (University of Queensland Press) by Owen Matthews (Bloomsbury) William Cullen Bryant: Author of America Gustave Whitehead: First in Flight by Gilbert H. Muller by Susan Brinchman (SUNY Press) (Apex Educational Media)

Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape: The Slats: The Legend and Life of Jimmy Remarkable Life of Jacques Anquetil, Slattery the First Five-Times Winner of the by Rich Blake Tour De France (No Frills Buffalo) by Paul Howard (Mainstream Publishing) Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer by Tracy Baim Teacher of Civil War Generals: Major (CreateSpace Independent Publishing General Charles Ferguson Smith, Platform) Soldier and West Point Commandant Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. by Allen H. Mesch Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle (McFarland) for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff Surgeon in Blue: Jonathan Letterman, (This One Thing) the Civil War Doctor Who Pioneered Battlefield Care open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com Battlefield Care by Scott McGaugh (Arcade Publishing)

Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces by Miles J. Unger (Simon & Schuster)

Amanuensis

Amanuensis: A person whose employment is to write what another dictates, or to copy what another has written: Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913).

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work…. We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect…. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing- open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame….such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. [more]

Thomas Macaulay, “Selection from Macaulay’s Essay on Croker’s Edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson”

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