by Devoney Looser

The 2023 BIO Conference’s late Saturday morning session, “When Biography Is Not a Book,” explored crafting life stories for film, long-form journalism, and podcasts. It featured a leading professional from each area: Barbara Kopple (Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker), Daniel Zalewski (features director at The New Yorker), and Greg Young (co-host of The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast). (Penny Lane, advertised in the conference program as a fourth on the panel, was unable to attend.) The panel was moderated by biographer, journalist, and filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro.  

The session began with viewing a six-minute film on Kopple’s documentaries, including Harlan County, USA and American Dream, interspersed with her commentary. The conversation then turned to Zalewski, whose role at The New Yorker includes editing its colorful profiles. Zalewski described how New Yorker profiles offer a structural flexibility, because they’re designed to be experienced in one sitting. These profiles generally must resonate with a current situation, so material from the subject’s past history is gradually folded in. The pieces may be slow-growing, he explained, with a strong bit at the end. He emphasized that a New Yorker profile is an “ambivalent performance,” neither admiring nor excoriating, and must show respect to their readership by allowing them to make up their own minds. The possibility for co-existing interpretations about someone’s life are built into the pieces.  

Zalewski was asked about his greatest challenges in editing these profiles. He answered that it involves knowing there’s a risk of manipulating the reader in an 11,000-word version of someone’s life. The challenge is in finding a pairing between writer and subject, to produce a dramatic and intentional, yet not irresponsible, essay. In agreement with Zalewski, Kopple said that the point in her work, too, is not a “gotcha” documentary film but to show human foibles while letting the best come out of her subjects.  

Kopple shared anecdotes about making Wild Man Blues, featuring Woody Allen. She told stories of the long process of seeking full access to him and of fostering the best ways to prompt him to tell his story. Kopple worked with his quirks, including his hatred of elevators, all of it necessitating painstaking filmmaking and editing.  

Young then described his New York City history podcast, Bowery Boys, and how it came to be. It was first designed as a place-oriented show in 2007. Now, with more than 400 episodes, it’s a places, people, and events show, with four biographies mentioned in every segment and a book (Adventures in Old New York) having grown out of the podcast. The driving question of the podcast is: “What does this say about New York City or about America?” and Young takes full advantage of the format’s opportunities for humor and immediacy.  

In conversation, panelists found areas of overlap in both process and goals. Young and Kopple joked that, when someone asks them, “What’s the film or episode you’re working on about?” the answer is often, “I’ll let you know in a couple of months.” They described difficulties in getting access to subjects, including what Kopple called “having a relationship” with subject Jimmy Carter’s voicemail for several months, in order to get a 20-minute interview. She also shared inspiring and painful stories of raising her son on a film set and working with her director-of-photography spouse. 

All three mentioned their next projects and how they hoped their work might be seen in the future. Zalewski spoke about wanting to put [his] mark down and capture impressions of the time, while learning from mistakes.  

In conclusion, the session’s generative ideas prompted the audience not only to think more capaciously about biographical forms, and the panelists’ respective tips and tricks, but also to consider how this work necessarily shapes the lives of the editors, filmmakers, and narrators who create them.  

Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author of Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her bimonthly author newsletter on history’s strong women, from Jane Austen to roller derby athletes, is available here. 

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by Michael Perino

In an age when the rule of law seems under constant assault, the panel “Biography and the Law” could not have been timelier. Nor, as panel moderator Kathleen Stone observed, could it have been better structured; each of the panelists focused on a different branch of government. Yale history professor Beverly Gage (was also a plenary speaker at this year’s conference) focused on the executive branch in her Pulitzer Prize-winning G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Marion Orr, public policy professor at Brown University, examined Congress in The House of Diggs—a profile of Charles C. Diggs Jr., a long-serving Michigan representative who helped found the Congressional Black Caucus. And Georgetown law professor Brad Snyder took up the judicial branch, in Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment.  

The common threads linking Hoover, Diggs, and Frankfurter were their passion for government service and their willingness to disregard the norms designed to constrain the power of governmental actors. Each saw himself as a patriot. Each recognized where those ethical or legal lines were and knew when they were stepping over them. Hoover and Frankfurter were lawyers, trained in the importance of process, and each was able to neatly compartmentalize their deviations. They all believed that they were smart enough, or savvy enough, or their cause important enough that they could and should ignore the guardrails. The irony of those justifications is obvious: they are the excuses that every norm-breaker offers, and each time they say that I’m different or this time is different, they erode our norms just a little bit more.  

At many points in his long reign over the FBI, Hoover was a lawbreaker and he knew it. His goal was not to figure out how to comply with the law but to figure out how to get around it. That desire was especially powerful when he had a righteous belief in his cause. None was more strongly held than his fight against communism. But he was also an institutionalist, the product of a world of government service that stood beside and separate from the world of politics, and he always strove to protect the institution he built. One of his favorite phrases was “don’t embarrass the bureau.” Everyone knew that meant the FBI was doing something illegal that had to be kept quiet. Well-known for his surveillance and disruption of the civil rights movement, Hoover remained a complicated figure because those efforts at sabotage stood side-by-side with a few attempts in the 1930s and 1940s to advocate for federal authority to combat lynching and to bring to heel violent white supremacist organizations. But for Gage, Hoover ultimately remains a cautionary tale about concentrated power, a tale about one man who built an institution with few checks, and who possessed a sense of righteousness that he believed allowed him to go beyond the law. 

For Marion Orr, Diggs personified the movement from protest to politics. He had been an active participant in the civil rights movement. He desperately wanted the country to live up to its creed of equality. When the Detroit native was elected to Congress in 1954, he was able to wield legislative power and not just moral authority in that cause. In his 12 terms in Congress, he pushed legislation that desegregated airports and was an architect of home rule for the District of Columbia. Early in his career, he used the power and prestige of his position to highlight the horrors of the Jim Crow South. He was the only member of Congress to attend the trial of Emmett Till’s accused killers, and he helped protect a witness who had testified against them. As chair of the Africa Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Diggs was an early apartheid opponent. But those causes could not protect him from his own lawbreaking. He was forced out of Congress, convicted, and served time for taking kickbacks from staff members. 

For Snyder, Frankfurter’s life exemplified a perennial question: “What role do we want the Supreme Court to play in American democracy?” In answering that question, Snyder sought to challenge the conventional wisdom that when Frankfurter went on the court he transformed from a liberal icon to a conservative protector of the status quo. Frankfurter saw judicial restraint as a liberal theory of jurisprudence. Both before and during his time on the court, he was a skeptic of judicial power. But he strongly believed in the 14th Amendment, and that belief complicated his relationship to the civil rights movement. He believed that the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was inevitable given all the cases that had come before it, but he encouraged his fellow justices to duck cases on interracial marriage. The court was taking too much Southern fire. To preserve its legitimacy, it had to move incrementally. And like Hoover and Diggs, Frankfurter crossed ethical lines in service of what he thought was a greater good. Although he vehemently complained about other justices, like William O. Douglas and Frank Murphy, for their role in politics, he saw the advice he provided FDR as different, especially during World War II, when he believed the future of the free world was at stake. 

In addition to exploring the complicated and subtle terrain we label the rule of law, each author offered some counterintuitive advice on the craft of biography. Many of us struggle with piecing together a story from the few scraps and bits of detritus about our subject that have somehow managed to survive. Each of these panelists had the opposite problem. Hoover, Diggs, and Frankfurter each left voluminous papers and worked in institutions with even more voluminous records. Each author had to grapple with the challenge of reviewing, analyzing, and assembling that mass into a coherent story. Each author offered the same advice, which Gage neatly summarized as: “Don’t turn every page.” It seemed heretical for a conference that began with Turn Every Page, the documentary about the relationship between Robert Caro and his editor, the late Robert Gottlieb, but for each of these panelists it was a practical necessity. Thoroughness is a crucial value in research, but an obsession for exhaustiveness can sometimes be counterproductive. It is a hard balance to strike, but for subjects like these, a necessary one.  

 

Michael Perino is the George W. Matheson Professor of Law at St. John’s Law School and the author of The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (Penguin Press, 2010). He is currently working on the biography of a con man who created what is today one of America’s largest companies. 

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by Ray Anthony Shepard

The “Race, History, Legacies” panel was moderated by Caleb J. Gayle (of Northeastern) and featured Gene Andrew Jarrett (of Princeton), Kevin McGruder (of Antioch), and Rachel L. Swarns (of NYU). The room was packed—not only to hear an intimate conversation, but as if we were going to share a few bottles of rosé with these stars of academic Black biography.  

The panel addressed the following promised issues: 1) how to develop greater opportunities; 2) how to demonstrate to publishers that this is a viable market; and 3) how the academy can enhance the building up of archives for the next generation of biographers of Black lives.  

For me, a big takeaway was the quick answer to an audience question that went something like this: “Do you see yourselves as social activists?” The responses were swift and rousing from the panel: “No! We are storytellers, biographers, writers,” anything but—“Yes, we’re social activists.” 

I think the question needs more thought. 

For my part, I labor in the lower 40. That is, I write biographies for young readers and, if I do my job well, my audience will grow up to become readers of biographies for adults. Eighty percent of my market is classrooms and public and school libraries. In other words, I write for an institutional audience that is at the center of a raging, suppressive blowback by book banners Moms of Liberty, school committees, and state legislatures controlled by the “New Confederate Party of American History-Erase”—a blowback fueled by the virtual rebirth of the White Citizen Council that followed the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Supreme Court decision of the 1950s. 

Yes, I’m a biographer and yes, I’m a storyteller, but to tell the story of Black lives is to be a social activist of the literary kind. It is to correct and expand readers’ knowledge of how the lunacy of race impacts their lives regardless of their color heritage. I write about such obvious lunacy—how it took a Supreme Court decision to say I can sit in an empty bus seat. And this esteemed panel writes about subtle examples of our national lunacy: the dream of colonization, the cultural and critical cage of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the early death of Philp Payton, and how Georgetown University saved itself from bankruptcy. I believe that together we actively pull the sheet off the zombie of race in America. 

For me, this was a panel of good storytellers, excellent biographers, and social activists of the literary kind. It was an honor to be in the room, even though rosé wasn’t served.  

 

Ray Anthony Shepard’s A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race in America from Ona Judge to Barack Obama (Penguin Random House) will be in stores and some libraries on August 8. 

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by Michael Burgan

BIO’s own pop-culture guru, Brian Jay Jones, led the panel on “Graphic Biographies,” a mashup of the graphic novel format with traditional, highly researched biography.  

Panelists Dan Nadel—an expert on comics and cartooning and author of a forthcoming biography of illustrator Robert Crumb—and Ken Krimstein—author of a graphic biography of Hannah Arendt—started by offering a brief history of the genre. Crumb was one of the pioneers, Nadel said, writing and illustrating short biographies of music figures he loved, such as jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Crumb, with his early “underground comix,” helped break down the division between writer and illustrator (with even greater segmentation of roles on the illustration side) that existed in traditional comic books. Krimstein offered the Classics Illustrated series as another progenitor of the format, which often told the stories of lesser-known figures from history.  

Both Nadel and Krimstein cited Art Spiegelman as one of the most influential figures in shaping graphic biography with his two-part family memoir Maus, which describes his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust. Krimstein paraphrased a Spiegelman quote: “Comics are the greatest medium for turning time into space.”  

For his illustrations, Krimstein tries to be as accurate as possible, doing geographic research to ensure lighting and other physical details are correct. He showed an early skill with illustration, he said, impressing childhood friends with his depictions of Santa Claus. But today, he has some limits—he avoids drawing a horse at any cost. 

The panelists focused on what makes graphic biographies unique. “You can take advantage of the medium itself,” Nadel said, relying on illustrations to tell much of the story. Crumb’s 12-page work on Morton, he said, would need about 150 pages of prose to express the same content, since so many things shown in a drawing would have to be described in words. Echoing that observation, Krimstein said a good drawing could represent six pages of Dickens’s Bleak House.  

The graphic format also means “you can suspend all rules and do anything you want,” Nadel said. In an upcoming graphic biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the Nancy comic strip, cartoonist Bill Griffith (of Zippy the Pinhead fame) imagines a Bushmiller museum and includes Nancy and her pal Sluggo as characters who help tell the story. 

Krimstein gave another example of the rule-breaking that can take place, drawing on his biography of Arendt. In one scene, the philosopher is sitting in Manhattan’s Washington Park when St. Augustine approaches her to bum a cigarette. The encounter was a shorthand way to highlight Arendt’s struggling with the saint’s ideas—and her fondness for cigarettes. Krimstein said no one pushed back on the obviously fictional scene. 

But even if graphic biographers can take some license in their approach to storytelling, the best books are still grounded in facts based on deep research. For his Arendt book, Krimstein relied in part on an existing scholarly biography as a source. He also uses footnotes, including explanatory ones, to document his research, though, of course, there is no way to footnote the visuals. He also includes a list of the resources he used for further reading. Nadel noted that most graphic biographies don’t have footnotes.  

As with traditional biographies, authors need to prepare a proposal for their work. And they also count on feedback from editors. Krimstein said that for an upcoming graphic work on Albert Einstein, he wanted more text on the physics, but his editor pulled him back and asked for more illustrations. Nadel noted, however, that the editing process for illustrations can be brutal, since it takes so much more time to redo a drawing than to revise text. 

 

Michael Burgan is the former editor of The Biographer’s Craft and the author of biographies and other nonfiction books for young readers. You can visit his website here. 

What is your current project and at what stage is it?
Richard Nixon: California’s Native Son, due out September 1, 2023, by Potomac Books, is my current project. We are in the final production stage and I am over the moon excited! 

  

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?
I was born, raised, and continue to live in Southern California. Initially, I created a map “biography” of Richard Nixon’s Southern California life. In performing original research for the map, I could see that there was a biography that had to be written. I researched and compiled information, crafting a narrative ever so slowly over time. As the years went by, the more I worked on the project, the more it became my “baby” so to speak. I have never written a biography before, or anything else other than legal briefs (I am a litigator by training). Throughout the years, I attempted to obtain an agent, all to no avail. Finally, after years of forging ahead, I landed an agent and a book contract followed. Once the book was announced, I received a request to provide a well-known author a copy of my manuscript. I did so, fully expecting to be told that my work was a decent effort but likely had no audience. Weeks passed by. Weeks became months. I was certain the author hated it. Three months later the author called me. I was stunned when the first words out of his mouth were that my manuscript was brilliant and some of the most important work that has been done relative to Richard Nixon. I will never forget that moment. 

  

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?
I know that this is circular, but my gut instinct is to state that I am an attorney, so my dream profession is to be a biographer. Since I can now be classified as a published biographer, my dream profession is to be an attorney. I have always wanted to be an attorney and have always wanted to write. I absolutely love assisting people in resolving predicaments that they cannot unwind themselves. The investigation has always been my strong suit, marshalling facts and data in support of a position. As a result, especially through the process of writing California’s Native Son, what I have discovered is that my true passion is writing—writing to advocate a position, writing to inform, writing for humor, writing to communicate. All forms of writing, as I love the process of expression through writing. 

  

One research/marketing/attitudinal tip to share?
Never stop. No matter what. When it comes to research, when you hit a wall, do more research. Step back and take a look from another angle. So many times, I have begun to develop a thought or theory, then abandoned it to research some other angle and then later looked back and discovered relationships and connections to my earlier thoughts or theories that did not appear at first glance, but became apparent only after more thorough analysis and research. Never stop marketing either. Try Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, whatever fits your fancy. I didn’t know if any of them would work for me, but they are mediums through which to communicate, and if you have an idea or thought that you want to express, do so through marketing in every avenue available. The overall attitude is no matter what, never stop. No one can do what you do as well as you can do it. So never stop. 

  

What person would you most like to write about?
Mick Jagger. When I was 16, I saw the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and I have seen at least one of their concerts on every tour through Los Angeles since then. Probably 20 shows in total. Next to writing, what fascinates me is that a musician can make music, and the human body naturally responds rhythmically. It literally moves you. Having the opportunity to delve into the mind of the greatest frontman for a rock and roll band ever would be a dream opportunity. 

  

What have been your most frustrating moments?
I love research and am constantly researching. Frequently, I photograph documents and save research for later review and analysis. Sometimes, I will have an epiphany and connect current research to a previous thought or idea to which I did not originally recognize any relationship. Then, I will have it in my mind that I have a document somewhere that I must now find. While I am diligent and thorough about saving all my research, I frequently save it by date rather than topic, so sifting through computer files for me is often like searching for a needle in a haystack. For example, when I am at the National Archives, I may photograph 500 to 700 letters from correspondence files in a single day. I then save them to my computer by the research date, print them all off, and review them in more detail. While the ultimate goal is to eventually convert them to PDFs and save them individually so they are searchable, admittedly that is not my strong suit. Six months later I may be doing other research and be reminded of a letter that was directly related to my current research, and the task of going back and finding it is incredibly frustrating. But even more frustrating than that was going through the copy-editing process. I have a wonderful copyeditor, and she holds my feet to the fire. We worked from September through November virtually nonstop on California’s Native Son, and it was grueling! Especially when she repeatedly made me go back through my files to find documents—I felt as though I was finding needles in haystacks virtually every day! 

 

Learn more about Paul Carter and his work here.