As previously announced in the October Insider, Bob Bender will receive BIO’s 2021 Editorial Excellence Award, presented annually to an outstanding editor of biography, on Thursday, November 18, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, during an online event featuring several of his authors: Marie Arana, David W. Blight, Scott Eyman, and Jeff Guinn.

Registration for the Zoom event is available at this link.

Bob Bender is Vice President and Executive Editor of Simon & Schuster, where he has worked since 1981. Reflecting on the many authors he has guided over his tenure, he told The Biographer’s Craft, “As the years went by I came to appreciate more and more the importance of quality writing. If a biographer can’t bring a subject alive, all the research in the world won’t save that biography. You must capture the reader’s attention and hold it if you hope to succeed.”

Bender acquires a wide range of nonfiction, including biography and autobiography, history, current events, popular science, popular culture (primarily film and music), and narrative nonfiction with a distinctive voice. Authors he has published include Muhammad Ali, Marie Arana, Miles Davis, Jonathan Eig, David Hackett Fischer, Linda Greenhouse, John Kerry, Naomi Klein, Pauline Maier, David McCullough, Gilda Radner, James Shapiro, and Jean Edward Smith.

In regard to biographies, Bender describes his taste as eclectic and noted that he has published the stories of figures from the ancient world (Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great); as well as more contemporary figures, like Dwight Eisenhower and Eleanor Roosevelt; important figures from other cultures, like Simon Bolivar and Samuel de Champlain; and, sports figures, cultural figures, and writers. “I’m interested in people whose lives tell us something new or different about their times or perhaps about our times,” Bender said.

Kai Bird, chair of BIO’s Award Committee, with Tim Duggan, Ruth Franklin, Peniel Joseph, Candice Millard, and Will Swift, praised Bender for his “cultivation and support for so many illustrious biographers over many decades.” Tim Duggan said, “In a business of constant change, Bob has been a stalwart at Simon & Schuster for decades, and his commitment to quality biography is without peer.”

Bender also shared some advice for working biographers:

“Choosing your subject is the most important decision you can make. Ask yourself why this subject is worth a biography. Has there been a good biography of this subject before? If so, has that biography been published recently? If the answer is yes, then ask why anyone would read your biography (or, perhaps, why anyone would publish it). If there has not been a good biography of your subject, is there a reason for that? Perhaps he or she is not a good subject to begin with. If there have been previous biographies of your subject, do you have something to contribute that previous biographers did not have, such as a distinctive point of view or a reinterpretation of the person’s achievements or a re-evaluation of how that person affected his or her times? Take your time choosing your subject because everything that follows hinges on that decision.”

Additional information about the event is available here.

Editor’s note: Barbara Fisher, the 2019 recipient of BIO’s Hazel Rowley Prize, is continuing her work on a biography of Lionel Trilling, the proposal for which earned her the award. Here, Fisher has written a biographical essay on Carolyn Heilbrun, who is most famous for her classic feminist treatise, Writing a Woman’s Life. Heilbrun and Fisher crossed paths at Columbia University in 1969, when the former presided over a fellowship committee that the latter had applied to. Near the end of her life, Heilbrun authored the book, When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. Not only would Fisher take up the same subject that her professor had, but Fisher also had the unusual experience of being the unwitting model for a character in one of Heilbrun’s novels. The essay that follows is a thought-provoking meditation on choosing the models for our lives and the subjects for our life writing, as well as the mysteries that unfold as we explore who we really are in relation to others.

Carolyn Heilbrun is best known for her books of feminist theory, such as Toward A Recognition Of Androgyny and Writing A Woman’s Life, but she also wrote a small book that few seem to know: When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. Published by the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, this compelling book describes a young woman’s earnest search for an appropriate academic model when there were none.

The three models Heilbrun found for her motivation, inspiration, and fantasy were, of necessity, men. There were no older women for a young woman to admire, emulate, or imitate. The few women who were literature professors at universities were sadly deficient as models. They were unmarried, unloved, and unbeautiful. Heilbrun did not want to be them, but she did not want to be excluded from the world of male accomplishment.

Thus, she was in the uncomfortable position of wanting to join a club that did not want her as a member. Even more uncomfortable was her desire to join the club while also wanting to dismantle it.

Before recognizing her wish to be a serious student of literature, she admired the unpretentious writing of Clifton Fadiman, whose modestly titled and popular book Reading I’ve Liked, she delighted in at the age of 15. Fadiman, whom she never met, considered himself a pitchman-professor, a popular commentator, a mere book reviewer. Heilbrun writes of him with affection and admiration for his curiosity, his precision, and his unpedantic prose.

She writes about her Columbia professor and subsequently her colleague Jacques Barzun with gratitude. Although terrifying at first, Barzun was kind and courteous to students. He happily shared with Heilbrun his interest in detective novels, as well as his appreciation of high culture. Most importantly and surprisingly, he offered her something like friendship as well as encouragement.

But it was Lionel Trilling—remote, diffident, and shy—who truly captured her spirit and her mind. Although she grew somewhat disenchanted with him, she treasures what he represented to her—an important kind of honor and courage and an “enduring gift for inspiring with its essential magic a piece of literature only seriously engaged with for the first time.”

But what drew her to him most powerfully was that he seemed to offer salvation. “Not religious salvation, of course,” she explained, “but a sense of how to live in a culture I both treasured and wished to overturn. What Trilling provided was an acrobatic balance between ‘bourgeois’ values and the need radically to affect them. It was in literature that he believed this balance, and profound instruction on how to live, could be found.”

When accused of having no position, of always being in-between, Trilling responded, “Between is the only honest place to be.” Between was where Heilbrun lived at the time.

I have tried to reconstruct how I came to know Heilbrun. I believe it happened like this. Heilbrun, as the token woman, sat on a committee that awarded fellowships in the spring of 1969, when I applied for financial aid to continue on for my second year in the graduate program in English literature at Columbia. Against her strong objections, the committee denied me the fellowship that she believed I deserved. She fought for me and lost, and then she sought me out to reassure and encourage me. It was an extremely kind and generous thing to do.

Though I hardly knew her when she brought me this comfort and consolation, I came to know her, value her, and confide in her.

Some of what I confided in her about my time at Bennington College, she borrowed for a character in one of the detective novels she was working on in secret at the time. Titled Poetic Justice and featuring her female detective, Kate Fansler, the fiction was published under the pseudonym Amanda Cross in 1970. The character who resembles me has been elegantly idealized. Stunning, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she is named, like me, Barbara. She is also fierce and fearless, and the only character in the novel with enough guts to deliver a scathing put-down to Professor Cudlipp, the villain of the piece. Lionel Trilling forms the basis for a major character in the same novel. Only slightly disguised as Professor Clemance, he turns out to be the unwitting murderer in the case. Many years later, when the portrait of Barbara in the fiction was brought to my attention, I was flattered by my cameo appearance and completely surprised to learn of Heilbrun’s second career.

I knew Carolyn in 1969–1970, at a time before she became an outspoken feminist, while she was still trying to be admitted to the unwelcoming Columbia fraternity. Denying her Jewishness and disguising her feminist beliefs, she moved uneasily and probably unhappily about Columbia. As one of the very few women professors on campus, she was a person of great interest to me, but she was not a figure I wished to emulate. Only later did she herself become a mentor, a model, and a heroine for me and for a multitude of smart, ambitious women.

Barbara Fisher is currently working on a biography of Lionel Trilling.

 

What is your current project and at what stage is it?
I’m putting together a bibliography of Alice Adams for Oxford University Press because I hope more literary scholars will discover Adams’s brilliant, neglected short stories. Scribner published my Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer just before the pandemic. I celebrated that nine-year project with a visit to my son in Denver and a reading at Tattered Cover Book Store. That audience included friends from several phases of my life—from a woman with whom I graduated high school in California to one I coached at a BIO conference in New York. Then my son and I watched a frightening Australian journalist’s report from inside Wuhan. I put on an N95 mask (I keep a supply in case of wildfire smoke) and flew home to northern California.

Thus began months of thinking about but not actually writing biographies. I’ve read biographies, and thought about how biographers’ lives intertwine with the lives of their subjects. I’ve talked about biographies on Zoom and podcasts, and evaluated manuscripts of biographies for friends and publishers. Through BIO’s coaching program, I’ve worked with other biographers to help them envision a book they hoped to write, or re-shape a book they’d already researched and first-drafted. This last activity offers me, I find, some of the rewards of writing and teaching: intellectual challenge and a small income. It’s thrilling to give first-time biographers perspectives or insights that shore up their courage and make their books come to life.

Meanwhile, I’ve tried to interest myself in biographical subjects that would not require travel. But I think these COVID months have changed me, turned me inward in ways that are probably more in keeping with what I can do in the eighth decade of this life. I’ve started reading and sorting stacks of letters written to me by my mother when she was the age I am now because, as one friend puts it, I’ve been “wanting to hear the voices of the long dead in my life.”

The upshot of all this is that I might write something about myself as a biographer. It’s barely an idea now, still finding its form.

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?
That’s another thing that’s changed through the years. The first one I remember reading was The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. Later, Harry T. Moore’s The Priest of Love: The Life of D. H. Lawrence. After life tempered my romanticism, I favored John Wain’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography. Writing an article about Dr. Johnson in grad school led me to other lives of Johnson and taught me to analyze the genre. When I turned from criticism to biography, I dissected contemporary biographies to see how they were put together. Just now, I’m most impressed with biographies that have a rich historical context or controlling metaphor: Martha Bergland’s Birdman of Koshkonong; Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires; Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher; Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Rollyson’s American Isis; and, Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?
I love it when someone who knew my subject tells me I’ve taught them something or portrayed my subjects accurately. I’m equally proud when a friend of mine who doesn’t usually read biographies picks up my book out of duty and says, with evident surprise, that it “reads like a novel.” It’s also been extremely cool to see my name and the Alice Adams book cover in the Brief Reviews section of The New Yorker.

What have been your most frustrating moments?
My desire to write a biography of Raymond Carver was blocked by his estate’s objection to my project. Those objections frightened publishers and I wasted a lot of time doubting the validity of my ambition. If BIO had existed then, I would have known better.

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?
Lately, I’ve been rereading novels—Hardy, Melville, Cather, Fitzgerald, Charlotte Brontë, Sarah Orne Jewett, Woolf, Kundera; discovering books that sat unread on my shelf for years—Old Jules by Mari Sandoz, Too Strong for Fantasy by Marcia Davenport, Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson; newer work including the recently translated Lucky Per by Henrik Pontoppidan, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. Less “pleasurable” but exciting because they shake up my notions of history: Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.