The Plutarch Award Nominees for 2018

January 16th, 2018

Here are the nominees for the 2018 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2017, listed in alphabetical order by author:

BIO PLUTARCH AWARD COMMITTEE MEMBERS, 2018:
Anne C. Heller, chair
Kate Buford
Nassir Ghaemi
Brian Jay Jones
Andrew Lownie
Julia Markus
J.W. (Hans) Renders
Ray Shepard
Will Swift, ex-officio

Annual BIO Conference to Be Held in New York in May

January 9th, 2018

Biographers International Organization will convene on the weekend of May 18–20, in Manhattan, for three days of discussion, camaraderie, and exploration. “BIO is especially pleased that this year’s conference will be hosted by CUNY and the Leon Levy Center for Biography,” said program co-chairs Heath Lee and John Farrell. “The scope of expertise that these two organizations, devoted to biography, bring to the table is stunning.”

Registration for the conference will begin in late January. Current BIO members will receive an email with a link to the registration site to take advantage of an early-bird discount.

The conference starts on Friday, May 18, with guided tours of New York City research libraries, readings by authors, and a welcoming cocktail party at the Fabbri Mansion on East 95th Street.

The Saturday, May 19, sessions at the Leon Levy Center will begin with a plenary breakfast at which Edmund Morris (biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) and his wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris (biographer of Clare Boothe Luce and Edith Kermit Roosevelt), will share their views about the craft of biography as it pertains to writing about the living and the dead. They have titled their plenary talk: “Dead Is Easier.”

Other featured speakers include Griffin Dunne, the actor and filmmaker, in conversation with Stacy Schiff regarding Dunne’s film biography of his aunt, Joan Didion. James Atlas will be talking about “The Soul of a Biographer” with our 2018 BIO Award winner, who will give the luncheon address. We are particularly excited about this year’s winner, whom we will announce in February.

Joe Hagen, the biographer of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, will discuss the perils of difficult subjects with biographer Kitty Kelley, who has pierced the walls around Frank Sinatra, Jackie O, and other celebrities.

In the Saturday sessions, conference attendees will be able to select from 16 panels devoted to topics such as “Issues in Biography,” “The Craft,” “Basics,” and “The Biz,” and a number of roundtable discussions. The conference will also feature a panel about the interdisciplinary use of biography, a product of a new collaboration with the Community College Humanities Association.

Saturday ends with a reception at which BIO will convey the Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2017, as chosen by BIO members, with remarks from the winner.

For those interested in more intensive study of the craft, on Sunday morning, May 20, a series of workshops will be held on writing and the art and business of biography.

Look for more information on the conference in upcoming issues of TBC.

BIO Members Explore the Role of Biography in Teaching the Humanities

January 9th, 2018

Thanks to the efforts of Billy Tooma (rear), deputy executive director of the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA), four BIO board members took part in a panel at the CCHA’s annual conference. Next year, members of CCHA will participate in BIO’s annual conference. Shown here with Tooma are Kate Buford, Dean King, Heath Lee, and Brian Jay Jones.

Four BIO board members helped kick off an affiliation between BIO and the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) on November 10, when they took part in a panel discussion at the CCHA’s national conference in Baltimore, Maryland. In front of an assembled group of two-year-college faculty and students, moderator Kate Buford introduced panelists Brian Jay Jones, Dean King, and Heath Lee. What followed was a lively discussion on the merits of biography as a focus of academic study and why such a field of study should be incorporated into higher-education course syllabi.

After the session, Jones said, “I thought it was an incredibly worthwhile ‘tech transfer,’ and so useful for us to learn and appreciate how biography is actively used (not just in concept) in teaching.” King’s assessment of the panel session reaffirmed this when he said that it “was a great opportunity to have a fruitful interaction with educators who have a deep interest in biography and are on the frontline of making biography relevant and motivational to a new generation of readers. I felt we had as much to learn from them as they did from us.” Buford noted that being able to present “the importance of biography to such a receptive group of academic professionals was a rare pleasure.”

Feedback on the panel from conference attendees was overwhelmingly positive. Jack J. Cooney, Associate Professor of History at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, made sure to spread the word to both fellow CCHA members and his own colleagues: “I was greatly heartened to hear how each biographer spoke so thoughtfully, and with candid humility, about their craft. The grace and good humor of their eloquent comments gave those of us in the audience a chance to reimagine biography. The panelists offered us ample evidence so we might better see how biography can break boundaries for humanities teaching.”

CCHA members will continue the dialogue between biographers and educators in May 2018 at BIO’s annual conference. This “cross paneling” affiliation is the brainchild of BIO president Will Swift and CCHA deputy director Billy Tooma (a biographer and a BIO member). By bringing the two organizations together, the two hope to see biography rise in prominence within the college classroom. “I think biography can go beyond the liberal arts,” Tooma said. “Educators are constantly trying to figure out ways in which we can turn STEM into STEAM, with the ‘A’ representing the arts, and I think biography is the answer. How do you humanize the study of physics? One way is to have your students read Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe.” Lee agreed with Tooma’s view when she said the “idea that biography is being woven intentionally into the humanities curricula as well as into STEM courses is revolutionary and exciting for biographers. The idea that our stories could help draw students into a larger narrative across the disciplines is thrilling!”

Thanks to Billy Tooma for his contributions to this report.

Deirdre Bair on Writing a Memoir of Beckett, Beauvoir, and Bair

November 10th, 2017

By Dona Munker, TBC New York Correspondent 

Deirdre Bair, who has written six biographies, is currently writing about her experiences while researching and writing Beckett (1978) and Simone de Beauvoir (1990). At the fall 2017 Dorothy O. Helly Work-in-Progress Lecture, presented by New York’s Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar, she talked about her reasons for doing so and the challenges for a seasoned biographer who decides to become part of the story.

Bair originally planned “a short book” about all her biographies but was unable to find a framework that would encompass them all and Beckett and Beauvoir generated more interest than any others. In addition, in the decades when they appeared, Bair had felt obligated to withhold some information her research uncovered, not only because people still living would have been hurt by it but because certain kinds of revelations were then considered “unseemly” for respectable biographies, especially of women. However, at this point, she explained, the passage of time and the shattering of cultural taboos have removed these constraints, and she now feels free to add to the public’s understanding of two major writers.

Much of the as-yet-untitled memoir will be about working with Beckett and Beauvoir in Paris, where they inhabited the same neighborhood and where Bair met and interviewed them regularly, either at home (Beauvoir) or in cafes, restaurants, and hotel lobbies (Beckett). The interview process with each, however, differed radically. Beckett, secretive and interview-averse, told Bair that he would “neither help nor hinder her,” but also forbade her to take notes. By contrast, at their first meeting Beauvoir “cheerfully” told her how they would work: Bair would take down everything she said and the result would be Beauvoir’s version of her life. “I remember how my head sank into my hands as I said, ‘Oh, dear, I think we’re finished before we even get started.’” 

Bair eventually succeeded in securing the book’s independence. Knowing that Beauvoir and Beckett detested one another, she told Beauvoir of Beckett’s promise to “neither help nor hinder.” After a long pause, Beauvoir reluctantly replied that “she supposed she would have to work that way as well.” Nevertheless, over the years Beauvoir persisted in trying to control what went into the book, at one point becoming so angry at Bair’s questions that she pushed her bodily out the door.

An important reason for casting the story of her first two biographies as a memoir, Bair said, is that when Beckett: A Biography was published in 1978, it drew ferocious attacks from male Beckett scholars infuriated that a young woman had beaten them to the draw. (“So you are the little girl,” one of them told her, “who stuck her hand in the cookie jar and ran off with all the goodies.”) Second-wave feminism was only starting to have an impact, and at first Bair was dismayed and confused by the attacks. Before long, however, she decided that having written “the best, most honest book I could” entitled her to hold her head high, ignore the unfair criticism, and get on with her life. She credits the warm encouragement of feminist friends with helping her move past the experience. Four decades after the fact, her intention is not to settle scores but to tell the story of her evolution as a feminist in those years, so that younger women, she explains, can understand “what some of us went through as our generation fought for the opportunities in life and work that we made possible for them to enjoy today.”

On the other hand, recounting that story in memoir form sets up a dilemma for a scholarly biographer and a former print journalist. As a biographer-storyteller, Bair has always maintained a balanced detachment, and inserting herself into the narrative raises the thorny question of how to write about herself without violating professional standards that she has hewed to all her life. How and when should she become part of the story? How should she write about her younger self? And how can she insure that the text “will be as factual and objective” as she can make it, even as it is based on her own memories? Above all, can she—or, indeed, should she—“bring the scrupulous objectivity and authorial distance” that she aimed for in her biographies “into a memoir of the fourteen most emotional years” of her life? 

To try and reconcile these competing claims, she told her listeners, she is consulting innovative literary memoirs like Margo Jefferson’s Negroland and reading countless biographies, autobiographies, and cultural essays in the hope of finding “points of light” to guide her in the creation of a satisfactory hybrid. She hasn’t found all the answers yet. Nevertheless, she said, in her new role as biographer-memoirist, she has taken comfort from the opening words of Rousseau’s Confessions: “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no imitator. My purpose is to display a portrait in every way true to nature, and the person I portray will be myself. Simply myself.”

Dona Munker is the writer and co-author (with Sattareh Farman Farmaian) of Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution. She is currently working on a book about the affair of Sara Bard Field and C. E. S. Wood. Her blog,“Stalking the Elephant,” is about how biographers imagine and tell other people’s lives.

BIO Announces the Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship

October 7th, 2017

In honor of the work of Robert and Ina Caro, Biographers International Organization has set up an annual research and travel fellowship. BIO members with a work in progress can apply to receive funding for research trips to archives or to important settings in their subject’s lives. This fellowship is a reflection of BIO’s ongoing commitment to support authors in writing beautifully contextualized and tenaciously researched biographies.

The Caro Research/Travel Fellowship is restricted to support of works of biography, e.g., not of history, autobiography, or memoir. The application deadline is February 1, 2018. In the spring of 2018, BIO will award either one $5,000 or two $2,500 fellowships, based on the judgment of the following panel: Kate Buford, Deirdre David, and Marc Leepson.

To apply, go here.

University Presses: A Publishing Venue for Biographers to Consider

October 5th, 2017

(Continued from the October 2017 issue of The Biographer’s Craft)

Turning to subject matter, the Chronicle of Higher Education forum noted that most acquisitions editors are overwhelmingly white and asked participants if this affects what gets published. The answers varied widely. For his part, Kulka offered this observation about race and publishing: “The enormous success of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books demonstrates there’s a real need and desire to read about race in this country from the perspective of writers who are not white. This is [a] good time, I think, to be writing a life of a writer or political figure who isn’t white. I wish I had right now a terrific biography of James Baldwin, to give one example. Is it time yet for a new biography of Zora Neale Hurston? Presumably someone is at work now on a biography of the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe?”

Looking at the financial side of university presses, Kulka said that a big New York trade house will typically offer a larger advance than a university press, but “this isn’t always the case, especially if we’re talking about a critical biography that plays to a university press’s strengths and interests.” How much a university press is willing to spend on marketing and publicity depends in part on the publisher’s expectations for a particular title. “A book for which a publisher has small expectations will receive less editorial and other support . . . than one for which the publisher has high expectations and, of course, not every press has the same resources. A university press that has annual revenue of, say, $20 million is likely to be able to do more for the promotion of a book than one that has revenue of $2 million.”

BIO Members Speak
At the 2016 BIO Conference in Richmond, board member Marlene Trestman spoke a bit about her relationship with Louisiana State University Press, which published her biography, Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin. Trestman was neither an academic nor a published author when she began her search for a publisher. But she knew her subject was a good fit for LSU Press’s Southern Biography series, since Margolin had grown up in New Orleans, as Trestman had. Trestman contacted the press with an unsolicited query; she did not have a formal proposal, but she did have an article she had written on Margolin that was published in the Journal of Supreme Court History. As an unpublished lawyer, she was thrilled when the press took an interest in her book, even if the offer did not come with an advance. Grants and a cash award for her article on Margolin brought in some money, but not enough to cover her expenses.

Going into the project Trestman knew a university press would not offer her all the support a trade house would. “I knew I wouldn’t get much and I got even less,” she stated. But balancing out that was the knowledge that she was working with a well-respected press, one that was a perfect fit for her subject.

As she went over her contract with LSU, Trestman realized that she—a lawyer—needed some guidance from someone with a legal background in publishing. She also learned to pick her battles when she wanted to negotiate certain items in the contract. The press ended up giving her what she wanted on several key points. The press was also willing to let her shop the book to trade publishers, after an agent became interested in it, agreeing to keep her on if she couldn’t make a deal.

As part of her “getting less,” Trestman had to turn in a manuscript that was publication ready; LSU was not going to provide editing or many other services. To help polish her work, Trestman hired a developmental editor the press suggested. That editor did more than copy edit; however, the writing was still all Trestman’s. As she wrote the book, she kept in mind her future marketing plan. She asked herself, for instance, “Who is going to love this person as much as I do?” Trestman has found a willing audience among legal and Jewish organizations.

Trestman has arranged book events on her own, and she learned not to rely on LSU Press for support. The press has a “9 to 5” mentality, and rather than having staff there mail out books as needed, she mailed them herself to make sure they reached a destination in time. Despite not getting the help she might have gotten with a trade publisher, Trestman was glad she ended up at LSU Press. “I really achieved what I set out to do,” she said, and LSU has already offered to publish her second book without even seeing a proposal.

For BIO member Carl Rollyson, his latest biography will also be published by a university press. In his Confessions of a Serial Biographer, he outlined some of what he went through to find a home for his forthcoming book on William Faulkner. His agent first approached many trade publishers without success before turning to university presses. At two of those presses, the response to Rollyson’s proposal was that the book was not scholarly enough. That prompted him to do more research and writing. Finally, the proposal ended up at the University of Virginia Press. As usual with university presses, the editor who received the proposal sent it to outside readers. When their reports came back, the editor let Rollyson write a response to each. As Rollyson wrote in Confessions, “The editor was . . . giving me the opportunity to put both reports into context, showing what I had learned from the submission process.”

By the time he got a contract for the Faulkner biography, Rollyson and his agent had spent almost two years trying to find a publisher. They were told over and over that literary biographies don’t sell, especially one as long as Rollyson’s. In his final proposal, the book had grown to 200,000 words. He explained in Confessions, “Even university presses are now reluctant to take on long narratives, no matter how engaging.” The University of Virginia Press requested that he cut 20,000 words. In the end, the process showed him the importance of believing there is an editor somewhere who is willing to buy his books. “After all,” he wrote, “it only takes one.”

Finally, TBC Hawaii correspondent Felicity O. Yost shared some insights on a university press in her state: University of Hawaii Press. The university has an active program in writing biography, and its Center for Biographical Research publishes Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. The press there, she said, publishes a significant number of biographies. “They do tend to be about Asians or haoles (non-native Hawaiians, usually white) who made their mark in Hawaii or Asia.” The subjects can include royals, Japanese persons interned during World War II, missionaries, famous musicians and hula-dance composers, surfers, politicians, and sugar plantation owners. While many of these subjects, Yost explained, can be “a lot of people that you and I have most probably never heard of,” the press has a significant market in Asia, as well as in the United States, “publishing biographies of people that mainland trade or university presses would never touch.”

Fall 2017 Preview

September 5th, 2017

We’re highlighting here just some of the books due out this fall and winter that are likely to garner critical and popular acclaim, because of their subject, their author, or both. The titles already getting buzz are drawn from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, and Amazon, among others. BIO members with upcoming releases are noted in bold type.
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Please note: We do our best to learn about new books, and the ongoing monthly “In Stores” feature in The Biographer’s Craft will include even more fall and winter releases. But, if we’ve missed any members’ upcoming releases, please let us know so we can add them to this list.

September

Pamela Hansford Johnson: A Writing Life by Deirdre David (Oxford University Press)

Anne Bancroft: A Life by Douglass K. Daniel (University Press of Kentucky)

A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur’s Struggle for Purpose by Paula Tarnapol Whitacre (Potomac Books)

Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman (W. W. Norton)

The Disappearance of Émile Zola: A Story of Love, Literature, and the Dreyfus Case by Michael Rosen (Pegasus)

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone (Dey Street)

Stan Lee: The Man behind Marvel by Bob Batchelor (Rowman & Littlefield)

The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham (Crown)

Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, The Early Years, 1926–1966 by Kenneth Womack (Chicago Review Press)

A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949 by Kevin Peraino (Crown)

Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist by Jennet Conant (Simon & Schuster)

The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought by Dennis C. Rasmussen (Princeton University Press)

Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote by Johanna Neuman (New York University Press)

The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russia Revolution by Robert Service (Pegasus Books)

The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker (Beacon Press)

Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College by Katherine Reynolds Chaddock (Johns Hopkins University Press)

October

Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century by Hendrik Meijer (University of Chicago Press)

Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte (Knopf)

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy (Hachette)

Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel by Francine Klagsbrun (Schocken)

Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis (Little, Brown)

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon S. Wood (Penguin)

Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster)

Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship Between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill by Deanne Stillman (Simon & Schuster)

Grant by Ron Chernow (Penguin)

A Generous Vision: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning by Cathy Curtis (Oxford University Press)

The Gourmands’ Way: Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy by Justin Spring (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Start to Finish: Woody Allen and the Art of Moviemaking by Eric Lax (Knopf)

Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero by Nancy Schoenberger (Nan A. Talese)

A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Fascism by Caroline Moorehead (Harper)

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster)

Renoir: An Intimate Biography by Barbara E. White (Thames and Hudson)

James Wright: A Life in Poetry by Jonathan Blunk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World by A. J. Baime (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley (St. Martin’s Press)

Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Époque Paris by John Merriman (Nation Books)

Fire on the Track: Betty Robinson and the Triumph of the Early Olympic Women by Roseanne Montillo (Crown)

November

The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox by Vanda Krefft (HarperCollins)

Overtaken by the Night: One Russian’s Journey through Peace, War, Revolution, and Terror by Richard G. Robbins Jr. (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 by Stephen Kotkin (Penguin)

Gold Dust Woman: A Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis (St. Martin’s Press)

Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life by Robert Dallek (Viking)

Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen (Pantheon)

The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism by Saladin Ambar (Oxford University Press)

Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film by Alan K. Rode (University Press of Kentucky)

Avedon: Something Personal by Norma Stevens and Steven M. L. Aronson (Spiegel & Grau)

The Trials of a Scold: The Incredible True Story of Writer Anne Royall by Jeff Biggers (Thomas Dunne)

Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston by Ron Rozelle (Texas A&M University Press)

President McKinley: Architect of the American Century by Robert W. Merry (Simon & Schuster)

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books)

Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford by Scott Kaufman (University Press of Kansas)

When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War by Jeffrey A. Engel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi by Thomas Weber (Basic Books)

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff (Penguin)

December

Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker by A. N. Wilson (Harper)

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age by David N. Schwartz (Basic Books)

Parental Discretion Is Advised: The Rise of N.W.A and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap by Gerrick D. Kennedy (Atria Books)

The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace by David B. Woolner (Basic Books)

Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)

An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett by Helen Smith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

January

Jackie, Janet & Lee: The Secret Lives of Janet Auchincloss and Her Daughters, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill by J. Randy Taraborrelli (St. Martin’s Press)

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot (Liveright)

The Patriot: The Stunning True Story of Aaron Hernandez: His Rise and Fall as a Football Superstar, His Two Explosive Trials for Murder, His Shocking Death by James Patterson (Little, Brown)

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers (Knopf)

The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History by William C. Rempel (Dey Street)

Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison (Ballantine Books)

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann (Knopf)

The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Simon Baatz (Mulholland Books)

Lincoln and Churchill: Statesmen at War by Lewis E. Lehrman (Stackpole Books)

The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Simon & Schuster)

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis (Twelve)

The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made by Patricia O’Toole (Simon & Schuster)

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History by Matthew Restall (Ecco)

Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires by Shomari Wills (Amistad)

February

Paul: A Biography by N. T. Wright (HarperOne)

Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times by Joel Richard Paul (Riverhead Books)

Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind by Michael Massing (Harper)

Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House by Joshua Zeitz (Viking)

Olivia de Havilland and the Golden Age of Hollywood by Ellis Amburn (Lyons Press)

The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats by Daniel Stone (Dutton)

The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold by Stephen G. Bloom (Regan Arts)

Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy by Andrew Morton (Grand Central Publishing)

Tom Yawkey: Patriarch of the Boston Red Sox by Bill Nowlin (University of Nebraska Press)

The Prisoner King: Charles I in Captivity by John Matusiak (The History Press)

The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography by David Brody and Scott Lamb (Broadside Books)

Renoir’s Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon by Catherine Hewitt (St. Martin’s Press)

BIO Calls on Pulitzer Board to Create Separate Category for Biography

August 8th, 2017

Responding to the recent trend of awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography to authors of memoirs, Biography International Organization has written to Pulitzer Prize administrator, Mike Pride, asking that the board overseeing the Pulitzer Prizes to create a separate category for biography and a new category for autobiography and memoir. Pride recently left his position but turned over the letter to Dana Canedy, his replacement as administrator.

In a letter signed by BIO Board president Will Swift and Advisory Committee chair Debby Applegate, BIO specifically asked the Pulitzer Prize Board to do the following: 
(1) review the recent history of the prize for “Biography or Autobiography”;
(2) consider biographies on their own merits and thus as their own unique prize category;
(3) consolidate autobiography and memoir into a new and distinct category.

TBC first addressed this issue in June, when James McGrath Morris interviewed David Nasaw on the topic. Nasaw, chair of the Pulitzer Prize Biography/Autobiography Committee in 2015, and a two-time finalist for the Biography Pulitzer prize, said, “It was our understanding that a memoir is a piece of a life, a moment of a life, a part of a life, and it is not documented. There is no corroborating material, there are no additional interviews, there are no newspaper articles, and there is no context provided. A memoir is a work—as the title makes clear—of memory. Autobiography and biographies are not works of memory.”

Commenting on BIO’s effort, Swift said, “I am grateful to Cathy Curtis, Steve Weinberg, Jamie Morris, Brian Jones and most of all Debby Applegate for helping me think through the complex issues we present to new Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy. I look forward to hearing from her and we would be delighted to meet with her and other representatives of the Pulitzer board.”

The entire letter is reprinted here.