The Plutarch Award Finalists for 2017

June 30th, 2017

Here are the finalists for the 2017 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2016, listed in alphabetical order by title. The winner will be announced on May 20 at the Eighth Annual BIO Conference at Emerson College in Boston.

BIO PLUTARCH AWARD COMMITTEE MEMBERS, 2017:

Cathy Curtis
Deirdre David
John Farrell (Chair)
Anne C. Heller
Linda Leavell
John Matteson
Hans Renders
David O. Stewart
Will Swift
Amanda Vaill

Pulitzer Stirs Controversy by Awarding the Biography/ Autobiography Prize to Memoirs

June 14th, 2017

By James McGrath Morris

This year the Pulitzer Prize for “a distinguished and appropriately documented biography or autobiography by an American author” was awarded to an author who wrote neither a biography nor an autobiography. In fact, neither did the two finalists in this category. The prizewinner and the finalists all wrote memoirs.

The prize was awarded to The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar. The two finalists were In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi and When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi.

Further muddying the water was that in 2016 the prize for Biography/Autobiography went to William Finnegan’s memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, and one of the two finalists was also a memoir. The other finalist, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T. J. Stiles, was moved by the board to the History category and given that prize.

The Pulitzer Prize board’s selection of memoirs two years running for the Biography/Autobiography category has sparked a debate among biographers. Most believe that memoir is a fundamentally different form of writing about a life in that it does not require any form of documentation, especially the kind of research that often distinguishes biographies.

BIO’s board is requesting to meet with the Pulitzer Prize administrator to discuss the continued commingling of biography, autobiography, and memoir. Currently, the Pulitzer Prize organization is seeking a new administrator, since Mike Pride announced his retirement.

To help sort out this this issue, TBC turned to David Nasaw, the distinguished historian, accomplished biographer, and chairman of the advisory board of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University of New York. Nasaw is the author of three biographies: The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst; Andrew Carnegie; and The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. The latter two were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the Biography/Autobiography category.

James McGrath Morris: You were invited to chair the Biography/Autobiography Committee in 2015 for the prize awarded in April 2016, isn’t that right?
David Nasaw: I was sort of surprised that they gave it to me, if only because I had been a finalist twice but never a winner. Of my three biographies, The Chief was never submitted to the Pulitzer committee, which was a bit of a scandal with Houghton Mifflin. The New York Times wrote about it. Houghton Mifflin just forgot to give them the book. My next two books were finalists. So, everything I say about the Pulitzers should be taken with a grain of salt, because I have a particular history with the prizes.
JMM: Nonetheless, you were chosen as the chairperson for the 2015 awards and you began work by studying the guidelines.
DN: We, the three of us who were on the committee, read the guidelines that we were given very, very, very carefully. And, we interpreted the guidelines as ruling out of competition any memoirs that were not documented. The guidelines that we were given said that for the nonfiction awards it was very important that the materials in these books be appropriately documented. And, they said that there should be some references, footnotes, endnotes, or in the text itself, which gave the reader the confidence that what was being said, or what was being reported, had actually taken place. The Pulitzer guidelines made that abundantly clear.
JMM: Did you have other things by which to guide your deliberations?
DN: In addition to those guidelines, I did a little bit of research, and we all did, on what was an autobiography. How is this defined? And, it was the opinion of the three of us that an autobiography was distinct from a memoir. An autobiography is the writing of a life by the person who lived that life. It does not necessarily have to be cradle-to-grave, but it is written to show how influences of place and time, childhood, adolescence, parenthood, affect the coming-to-age, and the activities, character, personality, and achievements of the adult. It is, in other words, a biography written by the person who is the subject of that biography.

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.
JMM: What did you do then?
DN: So, we made our determinations clear to the administrator, who was in contact with us. And, we let it be known that after studying and applying the guidelines, we were not considering 30 percent or 40 percent of the books (I don’t know the exact number) that had been submitted under this category. When we finished our deliberations, we were asked to write a report. In it, we explained how we had made our decisions.

Twice afterwards I wrote to the administrator of the prize and I said, “We consider this very important, that the Pulitzer board has to make a decision as to what it’s going to do.”
JMM: What can it do?
DN: We recommended a number of changes to the Pulitzer board to remedy the situation we had encountered. It could establish memoir as a separate category; it could add memoir to the Biography/Autobiography category, so it’s Autobiography/Memoir/Biography; or, it could let publishers know that memoirs should be submitted in the general Nonfiction category. Whatever it decided to do, we argued against it continuing to accept “memoir” nominations in the Autobiography/Biography category because we thought that other jurors would do as we had done, would read the guidelines as we had read them, and not consider the memoir submissions for the prize.
JMM: Then the subsequent selections in 2016 and 2017 must have been a shock?
DN: You can imagine my surprise when, the following year, a book that we would not even have considered for the award, given our reading of Finnegan’s book, was given the prize. And the Stiles book, which was a biography, was moved out of the category, into History. And the second runner-up was a memoir. The following year, this year, there were no autobiographies or biographies. The prize was given to another memoir, and again the runners-up were memoirs.

So, I, having been a judge, I’m not saying the jurors were wrong to do this, I would never say that. But I will say that the guidelines are so written that one committee could read them in a way that appears to be almost diametrically opposed to the way the other committees read them. There’s got to be something wrong there.
JMM: If you were made emperor of the Pulitzer Prize, what would you do to fix this?
DN: I’d simply make a category for memoir. When these categories were first designed, there were very few memoirs. The committee has adjusted all the other awards, certainly all the journalism awards.
JMM: Very often they have.
DN: On a regular basis. Why can’t it pay the same attention to the arts and letters awards?
JMM: And you would be okay with keeping autobiography and biography together as one?
DN: Sure. Sure. And, if the Pulitzer board doesn’t want to do that, then it should add memoir to that list. The fact that Amazon puts memoir into the same category as autobiography and biography doesn’t mean that we should do the same. There has historically been a difference between autobiography and memoir. And a memoir, as we know, is not in the same genre, I don’t think, as biography.
JMM: I was a judge recently on the Western Writers of American prize for best biography. I took out a memoir from the pile of books I was to judge because I didn’t see how you could compare it to biography.
DN: That’s exactly what we did for the 2015 awards. And, I assume from looking at the judging, that’s what had happened earlier.
JMM: When you think of presidential autobiographies, they have a staff who uses all these memoirs and calendars to get the dates right. Their autobiographies may be self-serving, but still, they are biographies of their lives.
DN: Yeah. So, I don’t know what’s going on. I think it is an extraordinary disservice to memoir and to biography. Because these are separate literary genres. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And again, memoirs are important enough as a genre in the twenty-first century, that they should have their own award.

Candice Millard Keynote Address, May 20, 2017

June 1st, 2017

Click here.

Conference Preview: James Atlas in Conversation with Patricia Bosworth

April 9th, 2017

By James Atlas

and Patricia Bosworth will discuss breaking the rules of biography and making it work anyway.

In a panel called “Biography and Style,” James Atlas . . .

Patricia Bosworth (“Patti,” as she is known to her wide circle of friends) has been a vivid presence on the New York literary scene for as long as I can remember—which is beginning to be a very long time. Her parties, held in a book- and art-filled apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that looks as if it had time-traveled from the West Village of the 1920s, are the kind where you walk in and want to talk to everyone in the room at once. Some of them are high-profile—I have spotted Dick Cavett and Judy Collins, among other “notables,” as we call them in Chicago; others were mere “writers,” but some of the most interesting ones in town. They are the kind of parties where the host has to flick the lights on and off in order to remind guests to leave.

What’s the draw? I once moderated a panel on biography in some gilded Pittsburgh auditorium with Patti, who had written a fine biography of Brando for the Penguin Lives series, and two other Penguin alums, Wayne Koestenbaum (Warhol) and Bobbie Ann Mason (Elvis). The auditorium was packed (if you want to get an audience, leave New York), and though it was some years ago now, I remember her making the culture-hungry crowd laugh and laugh at her descriptions of Brando’s outlandish behavior.

She is as fun to be with one-on-one as in front of 600 people, at once brassy and vulnerable, warm and entertainingly direct. So it is with her books: the biographies of Jane Fonda and Montgomery Clift radiate insight and empathy; the memoirs are tragic but also manage to capture the vanity of the Actors Studio where she apprenticed for a stage career in the 1950s.

Patti’s most admirable trait is her candor. At the party for her latest book, The Men in My Life, she stood up at the podium and spoke of the suicides of her brother and father with a matter-of-factness that took her well-wishers by surprise: You can’t just talk about these things in public. But she did, and I’m sure she will—about that and much, much more—when I interview her at the BIO conference in Boston this spring. Don’t miss it.   

Finalists Announced for Hazel Rowley Prize

April 9th, 2017

Spring 2017 Biographies

March 5th, 2017

From slices of famous lives to cradle-to-grave studies and explorations of linked lives, the spring and summer biographies already generating interest in the publishing world run the gamut. As is often the case, political and literary figures dominate these books and contemporary musicians are also well represented. We’re highlighting here just some of the books likely to appeal to critics and readers, because of their subject, their author, or both, with the titles taken from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Amazon. BIO members with upcoming releases are noted in bold type.  And, keep in mind that publishing dates change, so some books may come out earlier or later than indicated here.

March

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale (Metropolitan)

Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order) by Bridget Quinn (Chronicle)

John Hay, Friend of Giants: The Man and Life Connecting Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Theodore Roosevelt by Philip McFarland (Rowman & Littlefield)

Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character by Marty Appel (Doubleday)

Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen by Giles Tremlett (Bloomsbury)

Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy by David Cannadine (Oxford University Press)

Being Elvis: A Lonely Life by Ray Connolly (Liveright)

Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976–1980 by Craig Shirley (Broadside Books) Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon by Marc Eliot (Dey Street Books)

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935–1961 by Nicholas Reynolds (William Morrow)

Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud by Barry W. Holtz (Yale University Press)

Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg W. Prince (Sports Publishing)

Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman by Itamar Rabinovich (Yale University Press)

Someone to Watch Over Me: A Portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt and the Tortured Father Who Shaped Her Life by Eric Burns (Pegasus)

Super Freak: The Life of Rick James by Peter Benjaminson (Chicago Review Press)

Pina Bausch: The Biography by Marion Meyer, translated by Penny Black (Oberon Books)

Finding Fibonacci: The Quest to Rediscover the Forgotten Mathematical Genius Who Changed the World by Keith Devlin (Princeton University Press)

The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War by James McGrath Morris (Da Capo)

The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity by H. C. Teitler (Oxford University Press)

You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret Campaign Against Joseph McCarthy by David A. Nichols (Simon & Schuster)

Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell (Doubleday)

Agent 110: An American Spymaster and the German Resistance in WWII by Scott Miller (Simon & Schuster)

Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s by Jason Turbow (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and the Battle Against Censorship by Michael Rosenthal (Arcade)

Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy by Elizabeth Winder (Flatiron Books)

Captain Fantastic: Elton John’s Stellar Trip Through the ‘70s by Tom Doyle (Ballantine)

Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf by Helene Cooper (Simon & Schuster)

April

Obama: The Call of History by Peter Baker (Abrams)

When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph, and Its Aftermath by Stuart Isacoff (Knopf )

Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe by John Julius Norwich (Atlantic Monthly)

30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South by Bill Steigerwald (Lyons Press)

Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War by Daniel J. Sharfstein (W. W. Norton)

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn (Simon & Schuster)

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg (Oxford University Press)

Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman (HarperCollins)

Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling by Michael Cannell (Minotaur)

James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years by Wayne Franklin (Yale University Press)

Sam Shepard: A Life by John J. Winters (Counterpoint)

Money Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts by Robert Hofler (University of Wisconsin Press)

Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Marriage, and Friendship by Kathy Chamberlain (Overlook)

Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life by Sally Bedell Smith (Random House)

The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History by Stephan Talty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry by Marcus Thompson (Touchstone)

Catherine of Aragon: An Intimate Life of Henry VIII’s True Wife by Amy Licence (Amberley)

The Destruction of Hillary Clinton by Susan Bordo (Melville House)

Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker by Stephen Galloway (Crown Archetype)

Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles (Basic Books)

Alexander Hamilton’s Revolution: His Vital Role as Washington’s Chief of Staff by Phillip Thomas Tucker (Skyhorse Publishing)

My Fellow Soldiers: General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War by Andrew Carroll (Penguin)

H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer (Skyhorse Publishing)

The Man Who Designed the Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth-Century America by B. Alexandra Szerlip (Melville House)

Arnie: The Life of Arnold Palmer by Tom Callahan (Harper)

The Lowells of Massachusetts: An American Family by Nina Sankovitch (St. Martin’s Press)

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year by Peter Brooks (Basic Books)

Monsters of the Ivy League by Steve Radlauer and Ellis Weiner (Little, Brown and Company)

The Dooleys of Richmond: An Irish Immigrant Family in the Old and New South by Mary Lynn Bayliss (University of Virginia Press)

May

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin)

He Calls Me by Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty by S. Jonathan Bass (Liveright)

The Late Lord: The Life of John Pitt – 2nd Earl of Chatham by Jacqueline Reiter (Pen and Sword)

Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849–1856 by Sidney Blumenthal (Simon & Schuster)

Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski, translated by David Dollenmayer (Liveright)

Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow (William Morrow)

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn (Knopf)

He’s Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly by Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson (University Press of Kentucky)

A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. by Alvin Felzenberg (Yale University Press)

Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father by Thomas S. Kidd (Yale University Press)

The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin’s House by Daniel Mark Epstein (Ballantine Books)

Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson: Volume 1: Becoming Samuelson, 1915–1948 by Roger E. Backhouse (Oxford University Press)

George Washington: A Life in Books by Kevin J. Hayes (Oxford University Press)

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore (Sourcebooks)

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly (Knopf)

The Flight: Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 Transatlantic Crossing by Dan Hampton (William Morrow)

Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Little, Brown)

Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald by David S. Brown (Belknap Press)

Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli In His World by Erica Benner (W. W. Norton)

Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler from the Vietnam War and Pop Stardom to Murder and an Unsolved, Violent Death by Marc Leepson (Stackpole Books)

Nat Turner’s Rebellion by John V. Quarstein (Westholme Books)

Sting Like a Bee: Muhammad Ali vs. the United States of America, 1966–1971 by Leigh Montville (Doubleday)

Agent M: The Lives and Spies of MI5’s Maxwell Knight by Henry Hemming (PublicAffairs)

Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life by Jonathan Gould (Crown Archetype)

Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy by James Curtis (University Press of Mississippi)

Augustus at War: The Struggle for the Pax Augusta by Lindsay Powell (Pen and Sword)

June

The King Who Had To Go: Edward Vlll, Mrs Simpson and the Hidden Politics of the Abdication Crisis by Adrian Phillips (Biteback Publishing)

The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism by Henry Olsen (Broadside Books)

Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle over Civil Rights by Steven Levingston (Hachette Books)

Max Eastman: A Life by Christoph Irmscher (Yale University Press)

Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life by Scott M. Marshall (BP Books)

The Revolution of Robert Kennedy: From Power to Protest After JFK  by John R. Bohrer (Bloomsbury Press)

The General’s Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France by Paige Bowers (Chicago Review Press)

Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation by J. M. Opal (Oxford University Press)

Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to Union Hero by Cate Lineberry (St. Martin’s Press)

The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution by Virginia DeJohn Anderson (Oxford University Press)

Through a Glass, Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All by Stefan Bechtel and Laurence Roy Stains (St. Martin’s Press)

Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge by Erica Wagner (Bloomsbury USA)

Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals by Jeremy McCarter (Random House)

July

Go Slow: The Life of Julie London by Michael Owen (Chicago Review Press) 

Marshal Malinovskii: Hero of the Soviet Union by Boris Sokolov, translated by Richard W. Harrison (Helion and Company)

Jane Austen at Home: A Biography by Lucy Worsley (St. Martin’s Press)

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (University of Chicago Press)

Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval by Heinz Schilling and Rona Johnston Gordon (Oxford University Press)

Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash by Richard Lourie (Thomas Dunne Books)

Hannibal by Patrick N. Hunt (Simon & Schuster)

Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo (Belknap Press)

The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas by Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon (Prometheus Books)

Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead by Deborah Beatriz Blum (Thomas Dunne Books)

Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by Sarah Scoles (Pegasus Books)

The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein (Henry Holt)

Edward VII: The Prince of Wales and the Women He Loved by Catharine Arnold (St. Martin’s Press)

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine M. Hayes (Ecco)

Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba by Andrew Feldman (Melville House)

August

Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews (Metropolitan Books)

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe (Sarah Crichton Books)

Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty by Jon Kukla (Simon & Schuster)

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 by Rosemary Ashton (Yale University Press)

Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas by Donna M. Lucey (W. W. Norton)

Soul Survivor: A Biography of Al Green by Jimmy McDonough (Da Capo Press)

PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire by John Wigger (Oxford University Press)

The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel (Pantheon)

Warner Bros.: The Making of an American Movie Studio by David Thomson (Yale University Press)

The Plutarch Award Nominees for 2017

January 13th, 2017

Here are the nominees for the 2017 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2016, listed in alphabetical order by title:

BIO PLUTARCH AWARD COMMITTEE MEMBERS, 2017:

Cathy Curtis
Deirdre David
John Farrell (Chair)
Anne C. Heller
Linda Leavell
John Matteson
Hans Renders
David O. Stewart
Will Swift
Amanda Vaill

BIO Conference Set for May in Boston, Offers a Wide Variety of Programming and Networking Opportunities

January 11th, 2017

On May 19–21, the annual BIO Conference returns to Boston, where the organization held its first gathering in 2010. The conference will offer research workshops, a full day of panels, numerous networking opportunities, a conversation between two highly respected biographers, and a keynote address by the 2017 BIO Award winner, whose name will be revealed in February.

“This year’s program is bound to please the membership,” said James McGrath Morris, co-chair of the Program Planning Committee. “The wide variety of topics, terrific panelists, and workshop leaders is both a testimony to the hard work of the program committee and to the excitement generated by our annual conference. If you are a biographer, or aspire to be one, you’ll want to be in Boston.”

Registration for the conference is scheduled to begin on February 1. Current BIO members will receive an email with a link to the registration site to take advantage of the early-bird discount, which runs through February 20. For more information on the agenda and panelists, go here.