2016 Election

April 18th, 2016

The following are election statements and biographies submitted by candidates for BIO’s President, Vice President, and the BIO Board of Directors. In 2016, there are nine board seats up for election, each with a two year term running from 2016 to 2018. The terms for President and Vice President are also for two years, from 2016 to 2018.

For President

Will Swift

Will Swift is a founding board member of BIO and chairs its Awards Committee. He created the Editorial Excellence Award and co-founded the BIO mentorship program. Will has served as a judge on both the Hazel Rowley and Plutarch Award committees. As president he would like to focus on four major areas: increasing BIO membership, fundraising, developing new programs to educate BIO members and the public, and increasing the visibility of BIO in the literary world. Will is working with Deidre David to set up an international biography conference at Oxford in November, 2016. He would like to see further development of such international exchanges.

Will is the author of three books on presidents and their families. His Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage (January, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Plutarch Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His previous books are The Roosevelts and the Royals (2004) and The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm (2008).

For Vice President

Deirdre A. David

Deirdre David has been a member of the BIO Board for two years; she has also served on the program and Plutarch committees. Currently, she is coordinating a collaborative effort to bring European and American biographers together for a one-day Colloquium to be held at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing in November. Last year’s Plutarch winner, Hermione Lee, will be the keynote speaker. Deirdre sees the role of the vice-president as supporting the president’s leadership and initiatives, as managing efficiently the administrative tasks involved, and as being a representative for BIO at domestic and international conferences and forums.

After a long career teaching Victorian literature and publishing five books about the novel, women’s writing, and imperialism, Deirdre became a biographer with publication of a book about the British actress Fanny Kemble, followed by a biography of the British novelist Olivia Manning. She is completing a biography of the writer Pamela Hansford Johnson, under contract to Oxford UP.

For Board of Directors

(These statements are presented alphabetically, by candidate’s last name. They will be presented on your ballot in random order.)

Kate Buford

My best-selling Burt Lancaster: An American Life (Knopf/Da Capo/UK: Aurum) was named one of the best books of 2000 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others. Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Knopf 2010; U. of Nebraska Press paperback 2012) was an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times and won several awards. I have written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Film Comment and other publications, have been a featured speaker at many events, and was a commentator from 1995-2003 on NPR’s Morning Edition and APM’s Marketplace. A member of BIO and PEN, I also serve on the board of Union Settlement Association in East Harlem, NYC.

I have been involved with BIO since its formative meeting in 2009 and have served on panels at each annual conference since then. Abby Santamaria and I created the annual BIO Biblio Award in 2012, now given at each conference to a worthy archivist or research librarian, and founded Biography By Design, LLC in 2016. I currently serve on the BIO Conference Site and Program Committees. I would be honored to continue to contribute to the hard work yet to be done to expand member outreach and to raise BIO’s public profile.

Cathy Curtis

I joined BIO in 2011 while researching my first biography. Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter was published by Oxford University Press last year. In 2017, my next book, Quicksilver: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning, will inaugurate the Oxford Cultural Biographies series.

Since 2013, I have been a member of the BIO Board; two years ago, I was elected vice president. The best part of that job has been the opportunity to work with BIO’s savvy and collegial directors. As a former chair of the Program Committee, I served as a frequent sounding board for issues pertaining to our annual conference. My other activities as vice president included writing and editing BIO communications, responding to members’ queries, helping run the Coaching Committee, and contributing a column toThe Biographer’s Craft. Recently invited to join the Rowley Prize and Plutarch Award committees, I am looking forward to engaging with a full spectrum of life writing—from proposals by newcomers to the genre to biographies by seasoned authors.

BIO is still in an adolescent phase as an organization, desperately in need of more members and increased funding even as we continue to mount stimulating, broad-based conferences featuring some of the most celebrated names in biography. As a Board member, I will continue to encourage increased participation in volunteer efforts to enlarge and sustain our indispensable organization.

Annette Dunlap

Annette Dunlap is the author of Frank, The Story of Frances Folsom Cleveland, America’s Youngest First Lady, published in hardback in 2009 and released in paperback in 2015 by SUNY Press. Her second book, The Gambler’s Daughter: A Personal and Social Memoir, was published by SUNY Press in 2012, while her third book, Charles Gates Dawes: A Life — commissioned by the Evanston (IL) History Center — will be released by Northwestern University Press in August 2016. Annette was a Hoover Presidential Scholarship recipient in 2013 and 2014 to research a biography on Lou Henry Hoover. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s First Ladies series, and her presentation at the Hoover Presidential Library on First Ladies and the Politics of Fashion aired in September 2014. She also served as a panelist at 2015’s Harding Symposium on the first ladies Florence Harding, Grace Coolidge, and Lou Hoover, which was broadcast live by C-SPAN. She is presently completing a biography of Louis Comfort Tiffany for SUNY Press.

As a Board member, Annette would like to see BIO continue to foster the professional development of biographers at all stages of their careers, and to encourage public interest in biography as a genre.

John A. Farrell

In a long career as a journalist, primarily with The Boston Globe, Jack served as White House correspondent and covered Congress, the Supreme Court and every American presidential campaign since 1980.  He also was Washington bureau chief for The Denver Post, and the MediaNews chain. He has reported from Northern Ireland, Iraq, Israel and other foreign nations. In 2011, he served as a senior political correspondent for The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit center for investigative journalism in Washington, D.C.

He is the author of Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned, a biography of America’s greatest defense attorney, and of Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, the definitive account of House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and his times. He recently completed Richard Nixon: An American Tragedy, a biography of that most enigmatic 37th president of the United States.

As a board member, he would like to explore ways to expand the BIO universe by honoring and involving folks like Ken Burns, Lin-Manuel Miranda or the American Experience gang, who bring biography to life in other media.

Gayle Feldman

I am fortunate to have been associated with BIO from its first meeting, and to have seen it grow to be a grassroots organization that really does matter to members and the field.  I bring an institutional memory of how far we have come and sense of where we might go.

My involvement has encompassed speaking on/moderating panels, publicity outreach, and spearheading as committee chairperson the Hazel Rowley Prize for best proposal for a first biography, which this year we are awarding for the second time. I’d like to remain on the board one more term to see Rowley Award firmly established and to ensure a smooth handover to a new chairperson.

I have worked in the publishing business my whole career, first as a book editor in London, then as a senior editor at Publishers Weekly, and now as New York correspondent for The Bookseller. I am writing my third book but first biography, a life of Bennett Cerf, under contract to Random House, the company he cofounded.

Beverly Gray

I’ve been a professor of English at USC, the longtime story editor for B-movie legend Roger Corman, a freelance journalist, and a screenwriting instructor for UCLA Extension’s celebrated Writers’ Program. My first book, Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, debuted on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. The updated paperback and ebook editions have been tastefully retitled Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers. I’ve also published a second Hollywood biography, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond.

As the hard-working local site chair of BIO’s 2012 Los Angeles conference, I was officially named a “goddess.” I have served for five years on BIO’s program committee, and have participated on a number of conference panels, either as moderator or speaker. I first became a member of the BIO board of directors in 2014. Given my movie interests, I’m working to see more attention paid to biopics and other non-traditional forms of biography. I am currently completing for Algonquin Books the tentatively-titled Where Have You Gone, Mrs. Robinson?, an account of the legacy of The Graduate, timed to reflect the fiftieth anniversary of the film’s release.

Dean King

Dean King is a nationally best-selling author of nine books, including Skeletons on the Zahara,  The Feud: The Hatfields & McCoys, and Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed. While conducting groundbreaking research around the globe, Dean has trekked the Sahara on camels, crossed the Snowy Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau in China on foot, gone undercover in Catalan France, and been shot at in West Virginia. He has appeared on NPR, the BBC, ABC World News Tonight, and as the lead storyteller on two History Channel documentaries. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Granta, Garden & Gun, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, New York Magazine, the New York Times, and Virginia Living, where he is a contributing editor. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Library of Virginia Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is a co-founder of the award-winning literary nonprofit James River Writers.

As a Board member, he would like to help the organization grow and broaden its appeal to a wider range of nonfiction writers. He would also like to help it improve its financial footing and continue to improve the quality and appeal of its conference. He has worked with the programming committee that past two years, contributing to a panel moderating guideline and helping to devise several panels.

Heath Lee

Heath comes from a museum education, preservation, and program background.  She holds a B.A. in History with Honors from Davidson College, and an M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. She started her museum career at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has since worked as a consultant for southern house museums such as Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee’s birthplace, and Menokin Plantation.  She recently served as the Coordinator of the History Series for Salisbury House & Gardens, a 1920’s house museum in Des Moines, Iowa.  She currently works as the Editorial Assistant forThe Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

Potomac Books, a division of the University of Nebraska Press, published Heath’s first book, Winnie Davis:  Daughter of the Lost Cause, in 2014.  Winnie won the 2015 Colonial Dames of America Annual Book Award as well as a Gold Medal for Nonfiction writing from the Independent Publisher 2015 Book Awards. Heath is currently working on her second book, a group biography entitled The Reluctant Sorority:  the story of the courageous wives of officers who were Prisoners of War or Missing in Action during the Vietnam War.

If elected to the Board, Heath would like to see BIO grow its membership with those in the 35-55 demographic.  She would also like to help BIO launch a program to help funnel biographers into speaking engagements with established museums and schools.  She believes the future of BIO depends upon its members being “out there” in the communities they live in, selling their ideas-and their books, while also helping our museums and schools access BIO’s superb speakers.

Hans Renders

Hans Renders, a board member of BIO, lives in Amsterdam and holds a chair in History and Theory of Biography. He is the director of the Biography Institute, Groningen University and Vice-President of La Société de Biography/Biography Society . He is the editor of Le Temps des Médias; of Quaerendo. A Quarterly Journal from the Low Countries; and of ZL. Literary-historical magazine. He is a book critic for the newspaper Het Parool; and is also a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography (Vienna).

Biographers write better biographies when they’re aware of the theoretical implications of their work. In my experience, there’s no necessary gap between academic justified biography and biography which is interesting for the general public. We all want a biography to be a good read. But poor writing is everywhere, in and outside the academic world. I hope to bring in the European perspective to keep BIO a real international organization.

I’m currently working on the biography of Theo van Doesburg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Doesburg), the painter, poet and art theorist who founded together with Piet Mondrian the Style Movement.

Conference Panel Offers Look at How to Choose Subjects

April 8th, 2016

In the first of several previews of panels offered at the Seventh Annual BIO Conference, moderator James Atlas takes a look at some of his panelists’ views on their topic, “Choosing a Subject.”

Maybe another way to look at this question is to ask: Do biographers actually choose their subjects at all? Do they have agency over the process of determining how they will spend the next five or ten or—in the famous case of Robert Caro, the biographer of LBJ—forty years of their lives as they immerse themselves in a life that will inevitably remain unknown once their labors are done? Or do our subjects choose us? I pose this possibility not in some mystical spirit, but in a practical sense. The subject is there, signaling to the prospective biographer that he is available, if only, as in the case of the dead, in a subliminal sense—the biographer in collusion with his own unconscious.

For Dan Max, the biographer of David Foster Wallace, the chosen subject wasn’t chosen by him, but by his editor at The New Yorker, David Remnick, who suggested he write a piece on Wallace for the magazine. “Pretty soon I found myself in the presence of the most amazing, not just writer but mind, that I had ever met,” Max recalls. “Wallace’s speed-of-thought take on the world had me hooked. I fell in love. And one of the first things I learned was that his despair was tightly linked to his wish to be a great writer. Who, as a writer, isn’t drawn to that particular accident site?”

Two words leap out here: I learned. It’s that invigorating experience that motivates us—no, inspires us—to go deeper into our subjects, to unlock their secrets and give a narrative order to their lives. But we have to be open, to recognize opportunity when it’s there. Blake Bailey is now at work on the authorized biography of Philip Roth, an assignment he feels lucky to have gotten. As Bailey recounts the genesis of this arrangement, a fellow biographer [the present writer, hereafter known as “I”] happened to mention to him over breakfast at Sarabeth’s on the Upper West Side of New York (I strongly recommend the challah French toast) that Roth and his appointed biographer, Ross Miller, had parted ways. Bailey suggested that I would be an ideal candidate for the job, upon which, in Bailey’s fanciful recollection, I “recoiled as if I’d tossed a cobra at his foot.”

If so, it was less out of fear than out of a sense that, as the biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, I had traversed the territory of the Jewish-American writer, inexhaustibly rich but by now rather familiar; Blake was more versatile, and required only a large canvas. (Among his previous subjects was John Cheever.) “Whereupon, for my part,” he wrote when I asked him about the sequence of events, “I made a mental note to write a letter to PR as soon as I returned to Virginia [he teaches at William & Mary], and the rest is history.”

For Stacy Schiff, as for Max and Bailey, the biographer is less the instigating force than a Ouija board through which the spirit dictates: “It isn’t so much that your subject chooses you as that you express some mild curiosity about her life and she retaliates by infiltrating yours.” Schiff, too, sees the biographer as a passive figure, the empty vessel for a subject—any subject—so charismatic and seductive that he demands to be written about: “A door prize to anyone who can find the connection among my subjects; I can’t, aside from a stubborn unwillingness to repeat myself.” I doubt a prize will be awarded: she has written biographies of Antoine de Saint-Exupery; Nabokov’s wife Vera; Ben Franklin and Cleopatra. Her most recent book, The Witches, isn’t a biography at all, but a work of history and sociology.

Biographers face multiple choices when they set out in quest of a new subject. We can choose not to choose; we can go in search of new subjects unlike the ones we’ve written about before; or we can prepare ourselves for “choosing” by going through life in a state of receptivity, until we find the subject that is uniquely ours. This is how writers of all kinds, not just biographers, have always worked. The success rate has been high.

James Atlas is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet and Bellow: A Biography.

Biographers Explore Points of View

April 8th, 2016

By Deirdre David

Whether strolling down St. Marks Place, wrestling with the many lives of Orson Welles, or wondering where Virginia Woolf got her clothes, the biographer must inevitably confront the vexing question of perspective: Where do you stand in relation to your subject, whether it’s a street, a cinematic genius, a brilliant novelist, or indeed yourself? At the Leon Levy Biography Conference, held on March 8 and organized around the theme of “Point of View,” an impressive roster of speakers engaged this question as they discussed their perspective on particular places and particular people.

In the day’s first panel dealing with “Place and Displacement: Looking Homeward,” Ada Calhoun, the author of St. Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, focused on the street where she grew up and its transformation from a hippie mecca to a weekend gathering place for Asian teenagers. Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction at The New Yorker for many years before becoming editor-in-chief of Random House, discussed his early life in the West Village, a “childhood Eden” shattered by the death of his brother from a staph infection. As he explicated the title of his recently published memoir, My Mistake, Menaker spoke about the connection, as he sees it, between comedy and sadness, about how humor gives us a point of view from which to deal with tragedy. For Margo Jefferson, the place of ambiguous belonging was her Chicago home, where she parsed the line between affiliation with “our people” and her family’s belief they were the “best”. Her point of view shifted as she participated in the “delicate dancing of race,” navigating an imperative never to reveal vulnerability and a pressing responsibility to write about her experience—as she did most recently in Negroland: A Memoir, which just won the National Book Critics Circle prize for memoir.

Patrick McGilligan discussed his latest biography on a panel about Orson Welles.

In the panel “The Lives of Orson Welles,” Patrick McGilligan recalled the time spent researching his book Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane. Reading some eighteen years of the Kenosha News on microfilm rendered a feel for the place where Welles was born and, at six years old, recited Shakespeare. Observing that Welles loved literature throughout his career, writing for radio, stage, and film, McGilligan adopted a literary point of view for assessing his life. In contrast to McGilligan’s exploration of Welles’s early years, Josh Karp (author of Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind) asked from what perspective should one (can one?) write about such a protean figure. Was he a closeted homosexual? How important are the boozy friendships with figures such as John Houston? What does it signify that Welles insisted all his leading ladies cut their hair short? David Nasaw, whose books include The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, asked the audience to consider Citizen Kane in terms of Welles’s complicated view of Hearst, and argued that Welles distorted Hearst’s essentially happy life in order to make a sensational biopic. All three panelists agreed that Welles is the prototypical challenging subject for the biographer. Nasaw, in particular, argued that such a massively talented actor, director, and writer can “steal your book” (as he put it): take over your life, appropriate your biographical voice, dislodge your point of view.

Painter Grace Hartigan was one of the five women discussed in “Forgotten Women’s Lives.”

The “Forgotten Women’s Lives” panel focused on five fascinating figures; moderator Annalyn Swan invited the speakers to bring them out of the shadows. Lisa Cohen discussed the three women she depicts in her book All We Know: Three Lives: Esther Murphy, a New York socialite and writer; Mercedes de Acosta, a writer and art collector; and Madge Garland, an Australian fashion editor at British Vogue. Her interest in Madge Garland began when she read Virginia Woolf’s diaries and came across the name as someone whose clothes Woolf wore; learning more about Garland led her to Murphy and Acosta, to lesbian life in Paris in the 1920s, and to the formal challenge of managing a group biography. In discussing her research for Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, Hayden Herrera evoked her experiences in Mexico, where her outsider point of view aimed to detach Kahlo from her primary identity as the wife of Diego Rivera and to place her in a larger international perspective. Cathy Curtis’s interest in the rich life of the painter Grace Hartigan, which she has traced in Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, began when she was wandering through the abstract expressionist rooms at the Museum of Modern Art and suddenly came across Hartigan’s painting of Shinnecock Canal on Long Island. Her perspective on Hartigan’s life and work began with a desire to retrieve her reputation from the male-dominated art world of the 1940s and ’50s. In contrast to speakers on the earlier panel who had explored the challenge of writing about someone almost preternaturally famous, Cohen, Herrera, and Curtis persuasively argued for writing about unknown or relatively unknown figures; the gratification in such biographical work is giving voice to the formerly unheard.

The afternoon concluded with a conversation between William P. Kelly, the New York Library’s Director of Research Libraries, chairman of the Guggenheim Foundation, and former interim chancellor of CUNY and president of the Graduate Center, and Peter Guralnick, whose most recent book, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘N’ Roll, is a finalist for the Plutarch Award. Guralnick’s point of view in exploring Phillips’s life was one of passionate involvement and steady patience. For example, after driving many miles to conduct an interview, he found himself taking notes for almost six hours. In talking about Phillips, Guralnick assumed a voice of admiring commitment, and in one way or another, all the speakers at this year’s Leon Levy Biography Conference gave voice to their subjects: famous figures, unknown women, and, of course, their own biographical selves.

Deirdre David is the author of Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (U. Penn Press, 2007) and Olivia Manning: A Woman at War (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is currently completing Pamela Hansford Johnson: A Writing Life (under contract to Oxford). Before becoming a biographer, she published several books dealing with Victorian literature and society.

Tomalin Wins 2016 BIO Award

February 13th, 2016

Claire Tomalin (photo by Angus Muir)

Claire Tomalin, winner of multiple prizes for her literary biographies, is the winner of the seventh annual BIO Award. BIO bestows this honor on a colleague who has made a major contribution to the advancement of the art and craft of biography. Previous award winners are Jean Strouse, Robert Caro, Arnold Rampersad, Ron Chernow, Stacy Schiff, and Taylor Branch.

Tomalin will receive the honor during the 2016 BIO Conference on June 4 at the Richmond Marriott Downtown in Richmond, Virginia, where she will deliver the keynote address. Tomalin first worked in publishing and journalism before turning to writing biography. In 1974, she published The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize. Her subjects have included Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy. Her 1991 book The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, won the NCR, Hawthornden, and James Tait Black prizes, and she also won several awards for her 2002 biography of Samuel Pepys, including the Whitbread Biography and Book of the Year prizes. Writing about her latest book,Charles Dickens: A Life (2011), the Guardian called it “flawless in its historical detail” and noted, “What is so valuable about this biography is the palpable sense of the man himself that emerges.”

Tomalin has honorary doctorates from Cambridge and many other universities, has served on the Committee of the London Library, is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, and is a vice president of the Royal Literary Fund, the Royal Society of Literature, and English PEN.

Plutarch Award Nominees Announced

February 5th, 2016

A distinguished panel of judges made up of members of Biographers International Organization (BIO) has selected ten nominees for the 2015 Plutarch Award. The Plutarch is the only international literary award presented to biography, by biographers.

Following the announcement of the ten nominees, BIO’s Plutarch Committee will next narrow the list to four finalists. BIO members around the world will vote for the winning biography from among these four distinguished books, honoring a writer who has achieved distinction in the art of biography.

This year’s ten nominees, in alphabetical order by title, are:

• Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell (Viking)
• Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (Knopf)
• Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini (Doubleday)
• Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne Heller (New Harvest)
• Irrepressible: A Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage, by Betty Boyd Caroli (Simon & Schuster)
• The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon 1952-1961,
     by Irwin F. Gellman (Yale)
• Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, by Cathy Curtis (Oxford)
• Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)
• Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva,
      by Rosemary Sullivan (Harper)

BIO first presented the Plutarch Award in 2013. Previous winners, in chronological order, are:

• Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
• Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore
• Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.

You can find more information about the award and past nominees here.

The BIO Plutarch Award Committee members for 2016 are:

James Atlas
Douglas Brinkley, Chair
Catherine Clinton
Deirdre A. David
John Aloysius Farrell
Carla Kaplan
Eve LaPlante
J.W. Renders
Will Swift    

The winning biography will be announced at the 7th Annual BIO Conference on Saturday, June 4, in Richmond, Virginia.

Writing a Biography about a Subject Who Left Few Records of His Own

August 9th, 2015

Newkirk’s 2000 book Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media won the National Press Club Award for Media Criticism.

At the beginning of the last century, Ota Benga, a Congolese member of the Mbuti people known for their diminutive height, was brought to the United States and exhibited to Americans including, for a while, at the Bronx Zoo. Author Pamela Newkirk has published an account of Benga’s life and his horrific ordeal. Her book is calledSpectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. “Here is a gripping and painstaking narrative that breaks new ground,” said the New York Times Book Review. “Now, after a century, Benga has finally been heard.”

(Editor’s note: Morris and Newkirk shared the same editor at Amistad/HarperCollins.)

How does one write a biographical work of someone who left no written records, well, actually almost no self-generated records?
When writing about marginalized people you often have to turn to the papers of powerful people in their lives. I first learned this when working on my epistolary collections. The letters of enslaved African Americans were found with the papers of their masters or government officials who they appealed to. In the case of Ota Benga, letters written by those who had captured or held him in captivity revealed what was going on daily behind the scenes. There were hundreds of letters that offered uncensored snapshots of him. In addition, dozens of newspapers provided first-person accounts of his daily exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair and the zoo, and also of his life once he was released. I then found him in census and ship passenger records, in an anthropologist’s field notes while in the Congo, unpublished and published accounts by those who knew him, institutional catalogues and bulletins, photographs, etc. I was able to use teams of documents to piece together his journey from the Congo, through Europe, and across the United States.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in reconstructing Ota Benga’s life?
The biggest challenge was overcoming the absence of his voice. His voice was captured in a handful of accounts, so that’s all I had to work with. However, I was able to highlight his actions that, at times, spoke louder than words. It was clear that he resisted his captivity at the zoo and that he suffered both there and on the fairgrounds in St. Louis where he was taunted, attacked, and displayed, while barely clad, on the frigid fairgrounds. As human beings, we can imagine his humiliation and degradation.

In a sense, he isn’t the story, rather our treatment of him is the tale. Am I right? If so, how did that guide your writing?
In a sense, he was a mirror of us—of society—at the dawn of the twentieth century. Our humanity and his were inextricably linked and as his was diminished, so too was ours. But we can also take heart in the fact that a handful of people defied the conventions of the time and protested the exhibition at the zoo. In them, we can find our humanity.

What did you hope to accomplish with this book?
So many distortions, half-truths, and outright deception had shrouded the truth of Ota Benga’s story. A hundred years later, the man who most exploited him was, in many accounts, depicted as his friend and savior. I wanted to correct the historical record and, in the process, reassert Ota Benga’s soaring humanity. He was so much more than “the man in the monkey house,” as he had been widely characterized. He was a sensitive, intelligent, and beloved person who had suffered a horrific injustice. But that experience alone did not define him.

Lee’s Biography of Penelope Fitzgerald Wins Plutarch Award

July 9th, 2015

Among Lee’s other books is Biography: A Very Short Introduction.

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee won the Plutarch Award for best biography of 2014, as selected by members of Biographers International Organization. The winning book was announced at the Sixth Annual BIO Conference in Washington, DC.

• 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
• Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

Named after the ancient Greek biographer, the prize is the genre’s equivalent of the Oscar, in that BIO members chose the winner by secret ballot from nominees selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft. This year marked the third time BIO bestowed the award. Previous winners were Linda Leavell for Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore and Robert Caro for The Passage of Power.

Taylor Branch: 2015 BIO Award Winner

June 14th, 2015

By James McGrath Morris

Branch’s most recent book, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, was published in 2013.

Had it not been for the civil rights movement, Taylor Branch would have become a surgeon and the movement would have been deprived of one of its most important chroniclers.

For his work in producing a three-volume biographically based narrative history of the civil rights movement, Branch received the BIO Award on June 6 at the Biographers International Conference. He was the sixth writer to be so honored since the first gathering, originally called the Compleat Biographer Conference. Previous winners are Jean Strouse, Arnold Rampersad, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, and Stacy Schiff.

Growing up white in segregated Atlanta, Georgia, Branch aspired to become a surgeon. But his father’s close relationship with an African American and the inescapable presence of the civil rights movement in the hometown of Martin Luther King, Jr., resonating in Branch’s words in “spiritual values,” replaced that life plan with another. “I wrote the civil rights triology because I wanted to know myself where the movement came from that changed the direction of my life’s interest against my will.”

To do his trilogy of books, collectively called America in the King Years, Branch told readers in the first volume that he had chosen to structure his work as “narrative biographical history.”

While he was working on it, Branch came to the conclusion that most people approach race abstractly. “Everything I learned was very personal,” he said. “I resolved to write in a narrative style if I could, without using analytical labels because where people are so skittish, defensive, and assertive on the race topic, analytical tools and labels conceal more than they reveal.”

In short, Branch said, “I chose to base it in the people because ‘the people’ is what broke down my own emotional resistance as a white southerner.”

Aside from earning Branch a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2,912-page trilogy has become one of the standard works on the civil rights movement. Unlike biographies of the movement’s figures and histories of the movement, however, Branch’s America in the King Years employs the tools of biography to tell the larger story.

This achievement was the motivation behind Branch’s selection by the BIO Award Committee. When considering who would be honored at this year’s gathering at the National Press Club in Washington, the committee was guided, as in past years, by the goal of selecting a writer who had advanced the art and craft of biography.

When Branch learned he had been selected for the 2015 BIO Award, he said he felt a bit uncomfortable because he didn’t define his work as biographical. “I didn’t want anyone to think I was fraudulently trespassing on their turf,” he said. “I think we are certainly kinsmen trying to put people at the center of historical interpretation, whether you do that through one person or a collection of characters.

“The tools of a biographer are very, very important. That’s why I am happy and honored to bring myself as a semi-biographer down there,” said the Baltimore-based author.

(In July, the BIO website and The Biographer’s Craft will feature highlights of Branch’s keynote speech at the sixth annual BIO conference.)