The year 2023 is off to a busy start for BIO. Last week, our first ever one-day online event, the 2023 Biography Lab: An Online Forum On Craft, brought together more than 160 biographers. (More on this in next month’s Insider.) Below you will find photos from two fundraising dinners in New York that were held on the eve of, and in support of, the 2023 Biography Lab. This issue also brings a detailed announcement of the longlist for the 2023 Plutarch Award and that means we are ramping up to the annual BIO Conference, which will return to New York this May. (Registration opens in February!) An article on Young Adult biographies offers fresh insights into the art and craft of biography, and, as always, you will find our Member Interview (this time with BIO member Barbara Jones) and another member’s response to last month’s Amanuensis below. Finally, with a heavy heart I share that Dona Munker, our faithful and brilliant New York correspondent for The Biographer’s Craft, passed away recently. Her obituary follows as well. 

The inbox, as ever, is open. Please send along any news or updates you have for the February Insider.

Sincerely,

Holly

A distinguished panel of judges from the Biographers International Organization (BIO) has selected 10 nominees for the 10th annual Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. This year’s Plutarch Award Committee members are Deirdre David, Roy Foster, Charlotte Jacobs, Tamara Payne, and Will Swift.

Deirdre David, chair of the committee, says, “The judges this year were impressed by the remarkable variety and stellar quality of the books on our longlist. They showcase a diversity of subjects, intrepid scholarship, and an admirable illumination of both cultural and political achievement in an historical context. They also offer examples of the skills that enhance the art and craft of biography: how to work around black holes in a subject’s life and how to present a fresh portrait of a well-known figure in addition to bringing forth relatively unknown subjects to vivid life. The longlist [books] provide splendid evidence of how to write movingly and creatively about vastly different personalities representing many fields of accomplishment. We are pleased to present biographies about a poet, a novelist, a choreographer, a portrait painter, a civil rights lawyer, an iconic US president, a revolutionary, a US senator, an FBI G-man, and a misunderstood British monarch.”

Below is a synopsis of the biographies on the Plutarch Award longlist:

Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

(Pantheon Books)

In Civil Rights Queen, Tomiko Brown-Nagin illuminates the career of the first African American woman appointed to the federal bench. During the opening remarks of her confirmation hearing in March 2022, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited Motley as the judge whose legal shoulders she stands upon. In this exhaustively researched biography, Brown-Nagin convincingly demonstrates how instrumental Motley’s work was in the dismantling of Jim Crow laws. She provides a riveting depiction of James Meredith’s battle to desegregate the University of Mississippi and shows how, in one of her most crucial cases, Motley assisted Meredith through a mental breakdown, until they won in court. Brown-Nagin details the pain and trauma of those who stood up and fought segregation, while exposing the courtroom antics of segregationist lawyers and judges. Highlighting Judge Constance Baker Motley’s personal and historical importance, Brown-Nagin unveils how Motley won some of her most important civil rights cases and examines the impact of many of the other decisions she handed down during her judgeship.

 

John A. Farrell, Ted Kennedy: A Life

(Penguin Press)

In his fresh, briskly paced, and novelistic Ted Kennedy, prize-winning biographer John Farrell brings the “Lion of the Senate” to his own place at the center of the Kennedy political dynasty and the conflicts between the forces of liberalism and conservatism in late 20th-century and early 21st-century America. Through meticulous research, including delving into Kennedy’s diary entries, family papers, and interviews with family members, Farrell crafts an even-handed but ultimately sympathetic account of the insecurities and recklessness that led Kennedy to the edge of self-destruction. In his masterful account of backroom deal-making, he shows us how Kennedy led the way with empathy and determination in championing AIDS funding, gay rights, healthcare reform, voting rights, and anti-apartheid activism. This is an edifying story of the expiation of personal failings through committed political action.

 

Paul Fisher, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In The Grand Affair, Paul Fisher, a professor of American studies at Wellesley College, presents a bold, enthralling narrative of the life of legendary painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), whose audacious and sensual portraits brought him fame and notoriety. Within his vivid depiction of the fin-de-siècle world Sargent inhabited, Fisher illuminates Sargent’s expatriate family in Europe, the evolution of his artistry, and the divergent aesthetic circles in which he moved. Fisher also offers compelling insights into the multi-layered process of making great art. In addition, he is circumspect in examining the ambiguities and uncertainties of Sargent’s sexuality and adept at exploring the profound complexities of human intimacy.

 

Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

(Viking)

In G-Man, Beverly Gage examines the man who was the face of the FBI for 48 years (1924–1971). Through extensive research, which includes newly released documents of Hoover’s personal and official files, Gage peels back the layers to reveal the world and the forces that shaped Hoover. Through this exploration of his views on masculinity, racism, and what he deemed as threats to American security both externally and internally (e.g., communism, organized crime, and Black agitators such as Martin Luther King Jr.), we gain a deeper understanding of Hoover—the man, the country he served, the tactics he used to serve it—and how his legacy looms over us today.

 

Jennifer Homans, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century

(Random House)

In this brilliantly researched biographical journey, Jennifer Homans takes Balanchine from being a nine-year-old student at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, scavenging for food in the early days of the revolution, to his emergence as the world-renowned magnificent choreographer who in 1948 co-founded (with Lincoln Kirstein) the New York City Ballet. Drawing on her experience as a trained dancer, Homans elegantly integrates analysis of Balanchine’s choreography with historical research to demonstrate Balanchine’s tumultuous, 20th-century artistic life. She creates a thrilling narrative of choreographic innovation that was developed, displayed, and applauded in Russia, Weimar Germany, Paris, and eventually New York. Attuned to Balanchine’s lifelong devotion to seeing everything in his life to an expression of his art (he was an impresario of cooking and ironing, as well as much else), she explores how his friends, his lovers, and the dancers he worked with (and often adored) were all seen as serving the world of ballet. Mr. B presents us with a splendid tribute to a dazzling 20th-century genius.

 

Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle 

(Random House)

In undertaking this admirable biography, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jon Meacham said he set out to determine not only how Lincoln did what he did but also why. As a result, he demystifies Abraham Lincoln as a saintly hero, portraying him as an imperfect human being. Meacham details the early experiences that shaped Lincoln’s moral vision and the challenges he faced balancing pragmatic compromises with higher goals in his political career. Despite his foibles and his inconsistencies regarding racial differences, the president’s belief in a covenant with God, who created all men equal, ultimately forged his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Meacham shows us how profoundly Lincoln relied upon religious language in some of his most important public speeches, notably his second inaugural address. In this intensely soulful and moving biography, Meacham allows us a greater window into the deepest dimensions of one of our greatest presidents.

 

Jane Ridley, George V: Never a Dull Moment

(HarperCollins)

In her new biography, Jane Ridley seizes upon the paradox observed by one of King George V’s advisers—that although the monarch seemed a dull man, his reign (1910–1936) spanned a period of continuous crisis and upheaval, both internationally and domestically. Illuminating the relationship between the apparently limited and unimaginative sovereign and his tumultuous times requires formidable abilities of psychological perception, as well as heavyweight scholarship, and Ridley possesses these in full measure. She also displays a witty comprehension of significant minor incidents and foibles of character: the bizarre rituals and practices of royal lives are woven into the larger human comedy, above all in her portrait of the marriage that underpinned the creation of the first “family monarchy,” and the implications of this for the future of democracy in Britain. This is a long book, exploring a wide range of original sources including an impressively thorough use of the legendary Royal Archives. Nonetheless, it is rivetingly readable, often very funny, and fully lives up to its quizzical subtitle—as well as showing that the lives of crowned heads can be treated in a way that breaks new ground in the treatment of major historical themes.

 

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Using superbly vivid prose, Katherine Rundell gives us this joyful, scholarly, and informative biography of the poet she declares to be “the greatest writer of desire”  in the English language. She takes us from Donne’s Catholic boyhood, through his various secretarial positions to aristocrats in both the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, to his eventual celebrity as Dean of St. Paul’s, in 1615, where thousands clamored to hear him preach. From her flawless research, we learn fascinating details of how his poems were circulated to his friends (often on tiny scraps of paper), of how he studied the law, and of how he married a sixteen-year-old girl and struggled to support a family of 10 children. For Rundell, Donne was a poet who in the process of constantly transforming himself and his art, reconciled the sacred and the profane, the soul and the body. And, in her strikingly creative biography, she herself transforms familiar images of Donne as distantly mysterious, even unknowable, into a portrait of glorious poetic genius that is present both on the page and in his life.

 

Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

(Little, Brown and Company)

In this luminous, often dazzling work of art, Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff conducts a master class in dealing with black holes in biography. She resurrects Samuel Adams, an elusive and crucial revolutionary who changed world history. Adams destroyed his documents and letters and reveled in secretly masterminding the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. Schiff’s exemplary research reveals him to be a virtuous, persuasive, and devious political activist who had the fortitude to “wire a continent for rebellion.” In creating a brilliant sense of place, she brings us a fresh view of Colonial New England and the seminal events in the birth of our nation, while illuminating Adams and the world he transformed.

 

Miranda Seymour, I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

(W. W. Norton)

Miranda Seymour describes her subject’s life as “haunted”—and therefore, the considerable achievement of this compelling book is to trace the ghosts of an unhappy existence back to their origins and bring them into the light of day, showing how they impelled an original writer to produce a small but classic oeuvre. Despite the cult status now rightly accorded to Rhys’s fiction, it seems extraordinary that no previous biographer has fully investigated her roots and background in Dominica, which is illuminated here. So are the obscure years between her first publications and her life in literary Paris during the 1920s, and her extraordinary renaissance and rediscovery in the 1970s. Seymour conveys the grit and creative commitment, as well as the addictions and deliberately “impossible” behavior that lay behind “the Jean Rhys woman”—a figure who appears and reappears in the novels. She indicates with delicacy as well as decisiveness the points at which Rhys’ life and books diverge, and she further navigates a careful course between the many figures in Rhys’s later literary life who claimed responsibility for bringing her back to notice. This kind of empathetic disentanglement is what literary biography must do, and this book is an example of the best kind of that genre.

Editor’s note: There is a proliferation of interest in writing biographies for young readers and many who write biographies for adults likely have some desire to understand the space better. The BIO membership now includes many fine practitioners of this subgenre, and I sought the expertise of several of them to form the basis of this article. 

When researching and writing her biography for young readers, Susan Wider was most surprised by the assumptions she heard from those outside the subgenre that such a book “needed less care and research” than an adult biography. “For me it’s the other way around,” she explained. “Young readers need just as much rigor on the page as do adults.” Wider spent seven years researching  It’s My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon: An Artist in Hiding During World War II, her middle grade biography published by Norton Young Readers, in August 2022 (which just won the Jewish Book Council’s Young Adult Literature Award). “Being squeaky clean with the facts goes without saying, but delivering those facts in a relatable way is important for a younger audience,” Wider said. 

Once she began writing the book in 2015, Wider’s critique partners, she said, “were often critical of my sentence structure, worried that longer sentences and ‘overly adult’ vocabulary were too complex for a middle grade audience. But children often like to ‘read up.’ I also remembered that when I was a young reader, I picked up whatever looked interesting in the library, or on my parents’ bookshelves at home. I didn’t care about categories.” 

A technique that Wider employed constantly was to read out loud “even while drafting—to be certain I was using a voice to create relatability so that readers might get inside Charlotte’s head and heart.” She elaborated, “Once I signed with Norton, my editor weighed in with his suggestions of biographies for young readers that he felt I should study. When he was comfortable with the voice I was using, I charged ahead.” Ultimately, Wider says, the book has been selling well “with lots of crossover into YA and adult markets, especially as an art book.” 

 Ray Anthony Shepard is the author of Now or Never!: 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery (Calkins Creek, 2017), and Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2021), which was illustrated by Keith Mallett. His next book, A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race in America from Ona Judge to Barack Obama (Calkins Creek), will be published in August. Shepard says he writes biographies that “provide young readers with an engaging and corrective understanding of race in American history.” Now or Never!  is the dual-biography of two African American Union soldiers in the Civil War: George E. Stephens and James Henry Gooding. Runaway is the story of Ona Judge, a woman enslaved by Martha Washington.  Kirkus praised  Now or Never!  for “its “powerful use of primary resources, one that illuminates the lives of its subjects but never gets in the way of their remarkable stories.” 

That distinction is key to Shepard’s work, as he told The Biographer’s Craft: “The primary task of a writer is to tell a good story. The structural forms and rules of a poem, whether a rondeau, sestina, or sonnet, don’t restrict an able poet from doing justice to her subject. The same can be said for biographies for younger readers—from picture books to Young Adult books—knowing how to engage the reader, regardless of age, is the only thing that matters.” 

The dual goals of telling the truth and writing a compelling story, important to all biographers, can get a bit trickier with young readers, who need some amount of modulation in narratives where a subject traverses difficult experiences. In her efforts to create a vivid and honest account of Charlotte Salomon for young readers, Wider explained: “Charlotte’s life was messy. She was trying to establish herself as an artist, handle family suicides, accept her imposed refugee status, resist psychological abuse and racism, navigate falling in love with her stepmother’s lover. . . . I used her own words and paintings wherever possible to describe these situations and tried to temper my descriptions of things like the suicides and the gas chambers. Brief factual passages are fine and deliver plenty of heartbreak. I was also careful when selecting images. I avoided anything in Charlotte’s art that was too grim.” 

Michael Burgan, the former editor of The Biographer’s Craft, has been a freelance writer of children’s biographies and histories for more than 25 years. In that time, he’s written over 250 books for a variety of publishers and editors who all tackle sensitive matters differently. He said: “My latest book was a collection of short profiles of ‘deadly hearts’—world leaders who ruthlessly killed thousands of people. One challenge was, who to pick? There is a certain subjectivity with that kind of book that I had never faced before.” 

Burgan elaborated, “Probably unlike most of the YA biographers in BIO, all my projects are work for hire—I rarely get to choose who I write about, and the publisher sets the parameters, including, in some cases, how and whether to touch on certain topics. But, in general, I’ve found most publishers do not want to shy away from life struggles—they just have to be approached delicately. And more than once, my definition of delicate was not theirs!”  

On the subject of how to select appropriate themes and topics for inclusion in Young Adult books, Shepard said, “Age interest is critical. A subject tied to the school curriculum is also critical—or was in the past, before the current rage of erasing Black history from schools.” As previously reported in the BIO Insider, school library censorship is rising sharply, and many parents, educators, and citizens are concerned about preserving and expanding children’s freedom to read. 

Virginia McGee Butler is the biographer of children’s book author, Ezra Jack Keats; her forthcoming Becoming Ezra Jack Keats is due out in April from the University Press of Mississippi. Young people, Butler said, “like nonfiction better than most people give them credit for.” In fact, Butler initially intended to write her biography for children, but an editor changed her mind by noting that the picture book audience intended for Keats’ books would likely have outgrown interest in Keats by the time they were old enough to read biographies. But there was the other children’s book market to think about: librarians and teachers.  

The editor advising Butler thought “that librarians and teachers would love to have [my biography] and suggested that I approach an academic publisher. My colleagues suggested University Press of Mississippi, and I was familiar with their work. They were interested for their academic children’s literature line.” In writing for a younger audience, Butler says, “It’s important to write about the parts of the subjects’ lives that young people can relate to.” While a biographer with direct experience of the age group they are writing for helps, any biographer can channel what Keats called his “ex-kid” and figure out how to convey a story, Butler said. 

It is interesting to see how writers of biographies for young readers are banding together to support each other in their quest to tell important stories. For the 2022 BIO Conference, for instance, Shepard led the virtual roundtable on young adult biography, which both Butler and Wider attended. The original roundtable participants continue to keep in touch with each other. Wider characterized this informal group as “like-minded writers who all care deeply about sharing with young readers the life stories of individuals that history may have neglected, overlooked, or marginalized. Our research interests range from enslaved people and African American Union soldiers to author-illustrator Ezra Jack Keats to composer Augusta Browne to dramatic English queens”—an array of subjects as varied and compelling as those of any randomly sampled group of adult biographers. 

The entire genre of biography benefits when gifted, meticulous, writers persevere in telling important stories for young readers. Michael Burgan’s next book to be published will be Who Was John McCain? for Penguin Workshop in February. He said, “Writing biographies, or kids’ nonfiction in general, is certainly not lucrative, but it is very rewarding when you get that handwritten note from a fifth grader telling you how much they liked one of your books. Equally rewarding is being able to donate extra author copies to a teacher who knows how much their students will appreciate them.”  

 As Shepard concluded, “Biographers for young readers nurture adult readers of biographies.” 

The Biographer’s Craft mourns the loss of BIO member Dona Munker, a longtime correspondent to the newsletter you are now reading. Dona was kind and generous to all three editors of TBC. James McGrath Morris, our founding editor, recalled, “I met Dona through TBC and later, when we launched BIO, I had many occasions to work with her. She was always willing to lend a hand when it came to supporting the craft of biography. But more than being just a foot soldier in our cause, Dona was a delightful conversationalist. Her projects were fascinating. Coffees with her required paying careful attention and getting an education on modern Iran or the beginnings of psychology.”

Former TBC editor Michael Burgan noted, “Dona was already a TBC correspondent when I took over from Jamie Morris, and I came to rely on her nuanced coverage of many events in New York City. She was always eager to share what she learned at the various events she attended, and I was grateful for her enthusiasm and expertise. She was a key part of BIO and she will be deeply missed.”

As is true of so many of my meetings with the great people of BIO, I first knew of Dona when I was a young acolyte of the organization. At the 2013 BIO Conference in New York, at the Roosevelt Hotel, Dona was on a panel that showed biographers how to use Scrivener, a new software that helped writers organize their research and drafts. I was impressed by the sense of fun, candor, and “let’s get to work” attitude that she embodied. When I later got to work with Dona through The Biographer’s Craft, I always felt lucky that such an accomplished writer was willing to help out as a reliable correspondent. She was a dignified and dedicated biographer, but in a field where practitioners seem predisposed to seriousness, Dona was also funny.

My interactions with Dona were far too few, but there is one small exchange I will always cherish. As an aside while communicating with Dona about a piece she was working on, I told her the story of how I knew of her work (even before I saw her on that BIO panel in 2013): a former beau had given me a copy of her book, Daughter of Persia, and told me that I reminded him of its subject, Sattareh Farman Farmaian. Dona’s response to my anecdote had me in stitches: “I’m not sure it was a compliment . . . to compare you to Sattareh, who was actually rather a mixed bag. You probably did well to be divested of him.” It was truly an insight only a biographer could deliver.

Many of us at BIO will miss Dona. Louise Knight, her friend and a fellow BIO member, wrote the following obituary for TBC readers:

Biographer and editor Dona Munker died on January 6, in New York City, after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 77.

Munker was the co-author of the 2006 book Daughter of Persia (Crown) and, at the time of her death, was working on a biography of the suffragist activist Sara Bard Field and Charles Erskine Scott Wood, tentatively titled Sarah and Erskine: An American Romance. She was a founding member of BIO, a frequent contributor to The Biographer’s Craft, and sometimes wrote book reviews for Publishers Weekly and the New York Times Book Review.

Munker, a Los Angeles native and a longtime New Yorker, began her career as an editor at Little, Brown and Company and Arbor House Publishing. She was a co-founder of Women in Publishing and chair of the steering committee of the New York City discussion group Women Writing Women’s Lives, whose meetings are hosted by the City University of New York Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities and Center for the Study of Women and Society.

Dona was passionate about the art of biography and about supporting biographers. Her longtime agent, Joy Harris, recalled, “The standards Dona set for herself were high and led to fascinating conversations about the biographer’s responsibilities to her subject.” Her friends at Women Writing Women’s Lives provided the following statement: “We will miss her enthusiasm and her penetrating thoughts about the craft of biography.” They also recalled that she was always “eager to help others” and happy “to share her useful analyses of . . . writing problems.”

What is your current project and what stage is it at?

I recently completed a biography entitled Tula Pendleton: The Life and Work of a Forgotten Southern Writer, and it will be published in the spring by Butler Books. Pendleton was a writer from Kentucky who published several dozen short stories in American magazines in the 1910s. She was in the middle of a promising career, having also had a screenplay made into a silent movie, completed a draft of a novel, and worked on a biography of Poe. But as her career was blossoming, her beloved husband was becoming increasingly incapacitated from then-untreatable asthma. The couple, childless, ended up committing double suicide in Richmond in 1924, an event covered by more than 120 newspapers at the time. As a Southern white woman and daughter of a Confederate officer, Pendleton was unusual in her sympathy for Black people and her worship of Abraham Lincoln.

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?

Robert Caro, and his magnificent multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

Finding a trove of Pendleton’s personal letters in an archive at the University of Virginia. I had expected the letters to be a businesslike exchange concerning my subject’s submissions to a magazine, but they turned out to contain the most intimate picture of her inner life [that] I [had] found.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

Being unable to learn with certainty what happened to my subject’s private papers after her suicide.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

I did practice my dream profession—clinical psychology and psychoanalysis—for more than 40 years and only turned to biography in the past 10 years.

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure, and who are some of your favorite writers?

Fiction: Tolstoy, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen, and Shirley Hazzard.

 

Learn more about Barbara at her website.