by Eve LaPlante

Throughout the years I worked on my new book, Who Needs a Statue?, I never considered it to be anything but a departure from my previous work as a biographer. Unlike all my prior books, Who Needs a Statue? is a picture book illustrated by a painter, coauthored by a children’s book author, and published by a children’s book publisher for readers age 7 to 10. So, I was pleasantly surprised when BIO member Carl Rollyson requested the new book for review in his New York Sun column “On Biography.” Now, having realized that Who Needs a Statue? is indeed a work of biography, I wish to share what I learned about the process with others who wish to write for young readers.

In writing for young readers, as in all things related to publishing, persistence is key, as is the need to continue revising and even reframing your topic. Who Needs a Statue? is a group biography of people of color and women who have been immortalized as statues. It arose from an encounter I had with a successful children’s book author, Margy Burns Knight, more than a decade ago at an author talk I gave in Maine. Margy astonished me by asking for my help with a picture book project about statues of women. Who’s That Lady? was her title. She showed me a list she’d made of statues of women across the country, which amounted to less than 5% of all statues in the United States. 

Intrigued, I began collaborating with Margy on a proposal for Who’s That Lady? We couldn’t find a publisher, so Margy and I continued to research the idea. After learning of a collection of 100 statues of esteemed Americans—93 men and seven women—inside the U.S. Capitol, we decided to begin our book there: “One hundred statues of famous Americans, two from each state, stand in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. How many are statues of women?” As even fewer statues in the collection depicted people of color, we added men of color to our book and changed the title. Soon afterwards, our agent sold Who Needs a Statue? to Tilbury House. 

Among the many challenges in writing biography for a young audience is making the story accessible and interesting to a child. One way to accomplish this is to feature children in the text. In Who Needs a Statue?, we call our subjects by their first names to bring them closer to readers and, wherever possible, describe them when they were young. For example, our readers encounter George Washington Carver as a 12-year-old botanist, Judge Laura Cha-Yu Liu learning English in kindergarten, and 16-year-old Barbara Johns leading a school strike. 

Another challenge of the genre is having so few words to work with, in contrast to writing for adults. A picture book for elementary-school-age children can have no more than a few sentences on each double-page spread. It was daunting for me, the author of a 103,000-word biography of Anne Hutchinson, to have to sum up her life and contributions in only 60 words.

A complication we faced, which will be familiar to anyone writing about current events, was keeping up with changes pertaining to our subject—in our case, the Capitol statue collection. In 2000, after people in many states (especially those in the former Confederacy) began to demand their statues be replaced, Congress passed a law permitting states to switch out their statues. During our collaboration, Margy and I saw the number of women and people of color in the collection almost double, to 12 and 9, and the number of white men drop from 90 to 81. Just before publication we updated the text because in 2022 one of our subjects, Mary McLeod Bethune, became the first Black person represented in the Capitol collection. Another, Barbara Johns, will soon become the collection’s third Black person. It’s challenging to keep your text up to date while ensuring your book is evergreen.

A delightful aspect of writing a children’s book is the opportunity to work with an illustrator, conceptualizing images and considering how they interact with and enhance the text. Margy and I had encountered Alix Delinois’s beautiful paintings in Edwidge Danticat’s Eight Days in Haiti and were thrilled when he agreed to work with us. It’s somewhat unusual that we had a role in choosing the illustrator; many authors of children’s books don’t. A crucial first question for us and Alix was: Should the illustrations show the statues themselves, or should they show the subjects of the statues in life? We decided on a combination: about half of the illustrations depict statues; the rest depict the statues’ subjects engaged in activities like combat, running in the Olympics, and viewing the night sky through a telescope. 

A related challenge was ensuring the historical accuracy of illustrations of subjects whose lives spanned four centuries. I remember receiving an email from Alix asking, “How would an African American girl in the 1880s dress?” and realized he was working on a painting of Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) at age 10. Historical research and accuracy are as important in picture books as in books for adults.

Illustrated books for children demonstrate how much can be accomplished with just a few words and images. “Who Needs a Statue? addresses not just who is worthy of commemoration but why we need statues at all,” Carl Rollyson wrote in the New York Sun. “Who Needs a Statue? is meant to raise questions, provoke thought, start discussions, and show that history is never a settled matter. . . .” These aims—raising questions, provoking thought, and starting discussions—are as important to writing biography for children as for adults.

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BIO member Eve LaPlante is the author of several biographies for adults, including Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother (Free Press, 2012) and Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall (HarperOne, 2007). Who Needs a Statue? (Tilbury House Publishers, 2024) is her first book for children.

By Martha Wolfe

In the summer of 2020, BIO member Steve Paul put out a call to BIO members asking if those of us writing literary biographies wanted to join a Zoom group to discuss our projects. COVID had hit and Zoom had become an epidemic. A dozen or so responded and since then we have grown to 24 strong. We meet every other Friday. Mirroring the art of biography, our conversations range from the profound to the trivial. Recently, Pat Billingsley sent a group message: 

Hi everybody. I suspect we can all relate to the sentiment expressed at the end of this article. —Pat B.

Attached was an article on NPR’s website about a discovery Sophie Oliver, a lecturer in modernism at the University of Liverpool, made while perusing the Virginia Woolf Collection at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. While reading through a folder of letters that Woolf had written to her niece, Oliver found two folded pieces of paper containing poems handwritten in pencil. “Well, that’s odd,” Oliver thought, “because Virginia Woolf isn’t a poet.” The poems led Oliver down a trail she had not intended to tread, but she has no regrets. “This kind of research is very addictive,” she told NPR, “and it’s one of the joys of archival research.”

This particular article prompted us to share some of our own discoveries.

William Souder:
When I was working on Rachel Carson at the Beinecke, I stumbled on something not consequential, but to me, ironic. Among the hundreds of fan letters Carson received following the publication of The Sea Around Us in 1951, was an admiring note from a young physician in Michigan who praised her work and asked if she could direct him to further resources on bathyspheres. The writer was Jack Kevorkian. Carson would go on to be known as the godmother of the environmental movement, while Kevorkian would become infamous around the world as “Dr. Death,” the godfather of assisted suicide. The archivists at the Beinecke were excited by this discovery. But writing about it seemed to interrupt the mood I was going for in the section on Carson’s great breakthrough book . . . so I left it out. BUT . . . I put it in the endnote!

Carl Rollyson:
At the Beinecke, I waited for almost two hours for them to find their unprocessed Rebecca West collection, which had been there for decades under an embargo. When the first mislabeled box arrived, out tumbled the love letters between West and Nuremberg prosecutor Francis Biddle.

Richard Kopley:
Studying James Russell Lowell at the Houghton (for his connection to Poe and Hawthorne), I found a child’s letter to him—this was the first letter of Virginia Stephen—later Virginia Woolf! Lowell was a good friend of her father Leslie Stephen and had served as her godfather.

Pat Laurence:
My group biography of the relationship between writers and intellectuals in Bloomsbury and a Chinese literary society began by chance when I attended a literary auction with a friend at Sotheby’s in London. There in a corner of the Sassoon sale I discovered a cache of papers. The catalog entry read: 

“Woolf (Virginia) and the Bloomsbury Group. Collection of Papers of the Artist Su Hua Ling Chen, including series of letters to her by Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville-West and others.” 

Unable to believe the serendipity—finding a Chinese Bloomsbury that no one had written about—I read on. You never know where letters will appear. . .

Aleta George:
In 2012, I found a letter at the Huntington Library proving that Ina Coolbrith’s caretaker had been abusing her. Before that moment I had only circumstantial evidence. I was getting ready to type it into my computer (this was before we could scan everything on our phones) when the fire alarm blared. We had to exit and leave everything at our tables.

“I hope the place doesn’t burn down,” I said to my table mate. “I just found a really good letter.” He asked about the letter and my subject, and I gave him an earful about Ina when he said he had never heard of her.

The curators greeted him with respect and reverence, so I made note of the name on his tag.

The alarm turned out to be a drill. Back inside I finished typing the contents of the letter and then googled his name: “Tony Grafton, Princeton history professor and author.” Now he knew something about California’s first poet laureate.

Our group often shares things we find here and there across the internet and printed media.  Discussions ensue. Tangents entangle. But we always come back to our common interest, the joys and pitfalls of reading and writing a biography.

——

Martha Wolfe is a BIO member and author of The Great Hound Match of 1905: Alexander Henry Higginson, Harry Worcester Smith, and the Rise of Virginia Hunt Country (Lyons Press, 2015). She is currently hard at work on a literary biography of Mary Lee Settle.

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

I’m currently working on the first biography of the Scots-American singing sensation Ella Logan who, despite leading a roller-coaster of a life and being a star on both sides of the Atlantic, has been almost completely forgotten since her death in 1969. I have written around a third of the book and am now seeking a publisher, either in the United Kingdom or the United States. I was extremely lucky to receive a grant from Creative Scotland that allowed me to focus on research for six months. (I have now spent five and a half years on the research!).

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

I have three favorite biographies—or at least three that I remember reading and not wishing them to finish. The first is Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought With Good Manners by Andy Merriman (Aurum, 2011). I have always loved Margaret Rutherford as a screen actress but I didn’t know much about the real-life woman. As a result of reading Andy’s book, my affection for Rutherford as a person grew considerably. I especially loved her and her husband’s habit of cooking bacon and eggs late at night, wherever they were staying, after they had returned from a day’s filming or an evening at the theatre. I really missed them when I finished the book, and I hadn’t wanted it to end.

Similarly, I grew fond—more in an admiring sense—of groundbreaking film actress Anna May Wong when earlier this year I read Katie Gee Salisbury’s dazzling biography Not Your China Doll (Dutton, 2024). Katie brought Hollywood of the 1920s and 1930s vividly to life and provided terrific insight into the particular challenges faced by her subject as an American-born Chinese girl who found herself battling other people’s insistence that she be either American or Chinese. 

Probably the biography I’ve enjoyed most of all, however, is Craig Brown’s hilarious and kaleidoscopic one of the Beatles: One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time (Fourth Estate Ltd., 2021). It zooms in on such aspects of the Fab Four as their haircuts or their fan mail and wittily presents such vignettes as the scene in the Hamburg hotel room where George’s vomit took on a life of its own. Among the other most memorable chapters is the one that tells the story behind the video for “Hey Jude.” The book’s chapters are in a loosely chronological order so that the reader gets a strong sense of the narrative arc of the Beatles’s story. 

Despite not being a diehard fan of the band, I absolutely loved this book. It made me feel tremendous affection for its subjects who were, after all, very young when most of the events and experiences documented by Craig Brown took place.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

Managing to track down people—after a huge amount of detective work involving genealogy websites, social media, and newspaper archives—who initially seemed impossible to find. And then persuading them to talk to me!

What have been your most frustrating moments?

Most of the frustrations have subsided as I’ve solved problems, but the frustrations that are ongoing relate to people who have said they will help me—but then don’t. It is particularly frustrating because there aren’t many people around these days who have had firsthand experience of my subject Ella (or people whose parent knew her well), so to have tracked such folk down and then to not succeed in gaining their cooperation is very upsetting. Luckily, this has only happened twice (touch wood!).

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

Well, I’m a journalist, and I love my profession but it was much more of a dream job 20 to 30 years ago. Now it is a struggle. So, I guess my dream job is my own job as it was back when I was regularly flying to London and Paris to interview subjects for magazine articles and there were significantly more editors commissioning the kinds of features I enjoy writing.

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

I love humor. My favorite authors are P. G. Wodehouse, Damon Runyon, and Garrison Keillor, and I adore the Mapp and Lucia books by E. F. Benson. I’m also a fan of the droll wit in the “hard-boiled” detective novels by Raymond Chandler. Over the last year, I have become hooked on Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels (translated into English, I’m afraid)—the French police inspector has become a constant in my life as I’ve also been enjoying TV adaptations in French, and I miss him when I’m not reading about him or watching him. He’s even made me want to start smoking a pipe. I am planning a Maigret-themed trip to Paris in the New Year, and hope to write about it.

——

Alison Kerr is an award-winning journalist, based in Glasgow, Scotland. Over the course of a 30-year career, she has written for most British broadsheets and has specialized in covering film, jazz, beauty, and style. She is currently a regular contributor to The Times, The Telegraph, and the Sunday Post. Her favorite interviewees include Fay Wray, Robbie Coltrane, Tony Bennett, and Ken Burns.