Highlights of Spring and Summer Biographies

March 13th, 2016

While publishing insiders may say that the overall selection of new biographies coming out this spring and summer is not as impressive as last year’s stellar crop, the range of subjects—some tried and true, some getting their first major due—should satisfy the most discriminating readers. Here are some books most likely to receive considerable attention in the coming months. You can see a longer list of upcoming releases here. 

A literary biography is one of the most notable books in March, Clair Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart. Another March release garnering attention is Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America by Douglas Brinkley.

Books about two literary figures, one from each side of the manuscript, are among the highlights for April: The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire by Laura Claridge and Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour by Richard Zacks. April also brings us biographies on two of Hollywood’s most talented stars, Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep by Michael Schulman and Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power by Neal Gabler. Staying in the world of entertainment, Simon Callow publishes the third volume of his biography of Orson Welles, One-Man Band (a fourth volume is still to come). 

Moving to magazine publishing, the first of two battling bios about Helen Gurley Brown comes out in April, Brooke Hauser’s Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman. (Its competitor, Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown by Gerri Hirshey comes out in July.) Rounding out April, the long shelf of books about TR gets another addition with The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, A Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History by Darrin Lunde.

Speaking of subjects whom readers can’t seem to get enough of, May’s highlights include Sidney Blumenthal’s A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1849. A less-well known subject is sure to draw attention this spring with Jill Lepore’s Joe Gould’s Teeth. A notable university press release is Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots by Laura Visser-Maessen. And turning to the world of pop culture, a musical titan gets time in the spotlight in Philip Norman’s Paul McCartney: The Life. Later in the season, Mark Ribowsky looks at another pop music icon in Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines: The Life and Music of James Taylor.

Heading into the summer months, June sees new works on two great military minds, William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life by James Lee McDonough and Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior by Arthur Herman. Moving from war to affairs of the heart, Michael Shelden brings us Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick. Another notable book in June is The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower by Robert Wyss.

Another group of subjects who inspire no shortage of biographies is the Kennedy family. July brings Larry Tye’s Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, and the first of two books this summer on Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, who died in 1948 at 28: Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth by Paula Byrne. The competing title, Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter by Barbara Leaming, comes out in August. The death of a subject can stir interest in a biography, so the passing of Harper Lee last month should bring attention to Charles J. Shields’s Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee: From Scout to Go Set a Watchman, an updating of his earlier Lee biography.

Finally, while for most sports fans August means heated pennant races and the coming of football season, Roland Lazenby’s new book should have them thinking about basketball with his Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant.

Finalists Announced for 2015 Plutarch Award

March 1st, 2016

BIO is proud to announce the four finalists for the 2015 Plutarch Award —  the world’s only literary award presented by biographers, to biography.

The four finalists for the 2015 Plutarch Award are (alphabetical by author):

• The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 by Irwin F. Gellman (Yale)
• Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)
• Custer’s Trials:  A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (Knopf)
• Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan (Harper)

In February, BIO’s Plutarch Committee – an esteemed group of BIO members, chaired by biographer and historian Douglas Brinkley – kicked off this year’s Plutarch selection process by naming ten outstanding nominees.  (If you missed the announcement, you can see the list right here.)  And now, after further deliberation by the committee, that list has been winnowed down to the four finalists – one of which will be chosen as the Best Biography of 2015.

BIO members in good standing will now be asked to cast their vote for the Plutarch Award winner.  Voting will remain open until midnight on May 15, 2016, to give members plenty of time to read any of the four books before making a decision.

The winner will be announced on Saturday, June 4, at the Seventh Annual BIO Conference in Richmond, Virginia. (Still haven’t registered for the conference? You can do that right here.)

Spring 2016 Biographies

February 26th, 2016

The following list of biographies appearing between March and August 2016 was assembled using Edelweiss, a web-based interactive publisher catalog system widely used in the book industry. If we missed a title, please let us know at editortbc@biographersinternational.org

March

The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life by Jennifer A. Williamson and J. W. Loguen (Syracuse University Press)

Queen Elizabeth II: A Celebration of Her Majesty’s 90th Birthday by Tim Ewart (Andre Deutsch)

Beirut on the Bayou: Alfred Nicola, Louisiana, and the Making of Modern Lebanon by Raif Shwayri (SUNY Press) University of Pennsylvania Press

God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen by Mitchell Nathanson (University of Pennsylvania Press)

Éamon de Valera: A Will to Power by Ronan Fanning (Harvard University Press)

Young Mr. Turner: The First Forty Years, 1775-1815 by Eric Shanes (Yale University Press)

Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann by Frederic Spotts (Yale University Press)

The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern by Thomas J. Knock (Princeton University Press)

America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century by Gabriel Thompson (University of California Press)

Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America by Douglas Brinkley (Harper)

Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics by James K. Libbey (University Press of Kentucky)

Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust by Ingrid Carlberg (MacLehose Press)

The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones by Rich Kienzle (Dey Street Books)

The First Nazi: Erich Ludendorff, The Man Who Made Hitler Possible by Will Brownell, Denise Drace-Brownell, and Alex Rovt (Counterpoint)

Frederick the Great: King of Prussia by Tim Blanning (Random House)

Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman (Knopf)

Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin by Marlene Trestman (LSU Press)

April

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee: From Scout to Go Set a Watchman by Charles J. Shields (Henry Holt)

The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal by Alan Robert Ginsberg (Syracuse University Press)

Dante: The Story of His Life by Marco Santagata (Belknap Press)

Gunfighters: A Chronicle of Dangerous Men & Violent Death by Al Camino (Chartwell Books)

Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep by Michael Schulman (Harper)

The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer by Skip Hollandsworth (Henry Holt)

Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life by Thomas Alexander Hughes (Harvard University Press)

American Luthier: Carleen Hutchins—the Art and Science of the Violin by Quincy Whitney (ForeEdge)

Immunity: How Elie Metchnikoff Changed the Course of Modern Medicine by Luba Vikhanski (Chicago Review Press)

Henry IV by Chris Given-Wilson (Yale University Press)

Disraeli: The Novel Politician by David Cesarani (Yale University Press)

Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power by Neal Gabler (Yale University Press)

Édith Piaf: A Cultural History by David Looseley (Liverpool University Press)

Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life by Tamara Plakins Thornton (University of North Carolina Press)

True Reagan: What Made Ronald Reagan Great and Why It Matters by James Rosebush (Center Street)

Tomas Young’s War by Mark Wilkerson (Haymarket Books)

The Queen of Heartbreak Trail: The Life and Times of Harriet Smith Pullen, Pioneering Woman by Eleanor Phillips Brackbill (TwoDot)

26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest by Greg Vandy and Daniel Person (Sasquatch Books)

Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band by Simon Callow (Viking)

The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire by Laura Claridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Karl Doenitz and the Last Days of the Third Reich by Barry Turner (Icon Books)

The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, A Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History by Darrin Lunde (Crown)

Henry V: From Playboy Prince to Warrior King by Anne Curry (Penguin UK)

Stephen: The Reign of Anarchy by Carl Watkins (Penguin UK)

Kardashian Dynasty: The Controversial Rise of America’s Royal Family by Ian Halperin (Gallery Books)

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens by Paul Mariani (Simon & Schuster)

Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman by Brooke Hauser (Harper)

Virtual Billions: The Genius, the Drug Lord, and the Ivy League Twins behind the Rise of Bitcoin by Eric Geissinger (Prometheus Books)

Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde by John Boessenecker (Thomas Dunne Books)

Setting the World on Fire: The Brief, Astonishing Life of St. Catherine of Siena by Shelley Emling (St. Martin’s Press)

Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by James McBride (Spiegel & Grau)

Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour by Richard Zacks (Doubleday)

Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams by Louisa Thomas (Penguin Press)

The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist by Larry Alex Taunton (Thomas Nelson)

Alexander McQueen: Redefining Beauty Beyond the Borderline by Michael O’Neill (Upfront Entertainment)

Some Enchanted Evenings: The Glittering Life and Times of Mary Martin by David Kaufman (St. Martin’s Press)

May

Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed by Charles B. Strozier (Columbia University Press)

Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father of Georgia Tech by Lee C. Dunn (Mercer University Press)

James I: Scotland’s King of England by John Matusiak (The History Press)

The Last Waltz: The Strauss Dynasty and Vienna by John Suchet (Thomas Dunne Books)

The Life of Louis XVI by John Hardman (Yale University Press)

Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots by Laura Visser-Maessen (University of North Carolina Press)

Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman (Little, Brown and Company)

Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore (Knopf)

The Woman Who Says No: Françoise Gilot on Her Life With and Without Picasso – Rebel, Muse, Artist by Malte Herwig (Greystone Books)

Newsmaker: Roy W. Howard, the Mastermind Behind the Scripps-Howard News Empire From the Gilded Age to the Atomic Age by Patricia Beard (Lyons Press)

Father Lincoln: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and His Boys–Robert, Eddy, Willie, and Tad by Alan Manning (Lyons Press)

The Mozart of Basketball: The Remarkable Life and Legacy of Drazen Petrovic by Todd Spehr (Sports Publishing)

Fall from Grace: The Truth and Tragedy of Shoeless Joe Jackson by Tim Hornbaker (Sports Publishing)

A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809 – 1849 by Sidney Blumenthal (Simon & Schuster)

The Last Years of Robert E. Lee: From Gettysburg to Lexington by Douglas Savage (Taylor Trade Publishing)

Missing Man : The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran by Barry Meier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years by John Guy (Viking)

William II: The Red King by John Gillingham (Penguin UK)

Elizabeth II: The Steadfast by Douglas Hurd (Penguin UK)

Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Führer by Walter Shapiro (Blue Rider Press)

Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews by Ted Geltner (University of Georgia Press)

June

Hunter S. Thompson: Fear, Loathing, and the Birth of Gonzo by Kevin T. McEneaney (Rowman & Littlefield)

Sidney Nolan: A Life by Nancy Underhill (University of New South Wales Press)

Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares by Nils Büttner, translated by Anthony Mathews (Reaktion Books)

Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left by Gareth Dale (Columbia University Press)

The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower by Robert Wyss (Columbia University Press)

The Fighting Frenchman: Minnesota’s Boxing Legend Scott LeDoux by Paul Levy (University of Minnesota Press)

Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick by Michael Shelden (Ecco)

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow (Ecco)

In Search of Anne Brontë by Nick Holland (The History Press)

Big Game Hunter: A Biography of Frederick Courtney Selous by Norman Etherington (Robert Hale)

Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader by Matt Qvortrup (Overlook Press)

Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo by Siân Rees (Chicago Review Press)

American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World’s First Celebrity Travel Writer by Cathryn J. Prince (Chicago Review Press)

Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines: The Life and Music of James Taylor by Mark Ribowsky (Chicago Review Press)

Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England by Catherine Hanley (Yale University Press)

Henry the Young King, 1155-1183 by Matthew Strickland (Yale University Press)

Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet by Jeffrey Rosen (Yale University Press)

The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick by Kyle Arnold (Oxford University Press)

Before You Judge Me: The Triumph and Tragedy of Michael Jackson’s Last Days by Tavis Smiley and David Ritz (Little, Brown and Company)

Reaching for a Star: The Extraordinary Life of Milan Kroupa by Josef Cermák (Figure 1 Publishing)

William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life by James Lee McDonough (W. W. Norton)

Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior by Arthur Herman (Random House)

The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power, and Intrigue in an English Stately Home by Natalie Livingstone (Ballantine Books)

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises by Lesley Blume (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Fedegraphica: A Graphic Biography of the Genius of Roger Federer by Mark Hodgkinson (Aurum Press)

The Last Communard: Adrien Lejeune, the Unexpected Life of a Revolutionary by Gavin Bowd (Verso)

William IV: A King at Sea by Roger Knight (Penguin UK)

Famous Nathan: A Family Saga of Coney Island, the American Dream, and the Search for the Perfect Hot Dog by Lloyd Handwerker (Flatiron)

July

Franz Liszt: Musician, Celebrity, Superstar by Oliver Hilmes, translated by Stewart Spencer (Yale University Press)

Marie-Antoinette by Hélène Delalex, Alexandre Maral, and Nicolas Milovanovic (J. Paul Getty Museum)

Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth by Paula Byrne (Harper)

Zola and the Victorians: Censorship in the Age of Hypocrisy by Eileen Horne (Quercus)

Bush by Jean Edward Smith (Simon & Schuster)

Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown by Gerri Hirshey (Sarah Crichton Books)

Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet by Daisy Dunn (Harper)

Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth by John Freed (Yale University Press)

Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp, and Transnational Stardom by Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez (Vanderbilt University Press)

Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman by Mary Mann Hamilton (Little, Brown and Company)

Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible by Douglas Rooks (Down East Books)

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye (Random House)

Led Zeppelin Day by Day by Marc Roberty (Backbeat Books)

Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire by Bob Kealing (Crown Archetype)

The Real Peter Pan: J.M. Barrie and the Boy Who Inspired Him by Piers Dudgeon (Thomas Dunne Books)

Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow by Steve Lehto (Chicago Review Press)

No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page by Martin Power (Overlook Press)

Gene Roddenberry: The Man Who Created Star Trek: A Biography by Lance Parkin (Aurum Press)

August

Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant by Roland Lazenby (Little, Brown and Company)

The Story of Beatrix Potter by Sarah Gristwood (National Trust)

Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter by Barbara Leaming (Thomas Dunne Books)

Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy (Oxford University Press)

Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books by Christine Woodside (Arcade Publishing)

Double Ace: The Life of Robert Lee Scott Jr., Pilot, Hero, and Teller of Tall Tales by Robert Coram (Thomas Dunne Books)

The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914-1948 by Laila Parsons (Hill and Wang)

Theodore the Great: Conservative Crusader by Daniel Rudd (Regnery History)

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.

Authors Share Insights on the “Dubious” Art of the Blurb

January 11th, 2016

Both would-be authors and seasoned writers alike might have looked at a book jacket and wondered if the blurbs on the back really make a difference in propelling sales. And if they have never given or sought out a blurb, they may have wondered how the process works. To some writers, it’s not a pretty sight.

Writing for The Millions in 2011, novelist Bill Morris offered these descriptions of blurbing: “suspect,” “vaguely sleazy,” and “a sweaty little orgy of incest.” In the years since, other writers have expressed their displeasure with giving and asking for blurbs. Some authors have even suggested the process is corrupt, with agents writing blurbs and asking famous authors to put their names to the canned praise. Other writers are increasingly questioning the efficacy of blurbs in the age of social media, when readers are more apt to follow the recommendations of friends or the masses at sites like Goodreads. Still, blurbing does not seem to be going away, so BIO turned to several members and found some recent articles on blurbs to help authors navigate the blurbing maze.

(A side note: By most accounts, the word blurb was coined by humorist Gelett Burgess in his 1907 book Are You a Bromide? Burgess created a character he called Miss Belinda Blurb, who sang the praises of the book on the cover. But the practice of garnering quotes from other authors to adorn one’s book jacket predates Miss Blurb’s debut.)

Getting Blurbs
How important are blurbs? BIO board member Will Swift said, “Blurbs are important in that they encourage newspapers, bloggers, and magazines to review the book. These reviews help drive sales. They may not be as important to book buyers, but they don’t hurt.” BIO member Irv Gellman had a slightly different take, saying, “If the book hits well, [blurbs] can probably help you. If the book doesn’t hit, it probably doesn’t matter.” Another BIO board member, Kate Buford, noted that since some people find the blurbing process “dubious,” blurbs might not be too helpful for a hardcover book. But with a paperback edition, “blurbs from actual reviews can be used and are more effective.”

Part of the blurbing process is knowing who to approach. Publishers, editors, and agents will sometimes draw up a list of possible blurbers, especially if those authors also have ties to them. Writers often reach out to friends first, especially if they have expertise in the book’s topic. Often, with this arrangement there is an expectation, if not explicit statement, of reciprocity. Moving outside that circle, Gellman recommends finding someone who is nationally or internationally known or an expert in the field, though if the expert is unknown, his or her blurb might not be as valuable. And don’t be afraid to aim for the stars with your requests. For his The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961, Gellman asked for and got a blurb from former Secretary of State George Shultz, even though Gellman figured he had “a snowball’s chance in hell” of landing him. Continue Reading…

Segal Receives Editorial Excellence Award

November 7th, 2015

Jonathan Segal received the second annual BIO Editorial Excellence Award on November 4 at an event titled “How Great Biographies Get Made and Why They Matter.” Carl Bernstein presented Segal with the award, and the evening featured a panel discussion with several biographers who have worked with Segal. TBC will present highlights of that discussion and Segal and Bernstein’s remarks in the December issue. The event was co-sponsored by the New York Society Library.

A video of the evening is available here.

Bernstein (right) presents the Editorial Excellence Award to Segal.

Bernstein and Segal are joined by panelists Eric Lax, Paul Hendrickson, T. J. Stiles, and Kate Buford.

Women Writing Women’s Lives Celebrates 25 Years

November 7th, 2015

By Dona Munker
Whose life is valuable enough to deserve a biography? According to the attendees of an all-day conference on October 2 at the City of New York Graduate Center the answer was, “Any life has the potential to be a biography.” The event celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar, an ongoing independent discussion group of about seventy women journalists, independent writers, and academic scholars.

The WWWL website says the seminar’s official mission is finding “new ways of looking at and presenting women’s stories” and, ultimately, to influence the way those stories are written. Keynote speaker and co-founder Deirdre Bair recalled that the group came into existence almost by accident. In October 1990, Bair, who had just published a landmark study of Simone de Beauvoir, and the late Carolyn Heilbrun, who was working on a biography of Gloria Steinem, invited a small number of feminist biographers to meet informally to talk about their projects. But instead of the ten or twelve friends they had invited, more than fifty people showed up. Stunned, the two organizers listened as one woman after another poured out her concerns about the obstacles involved in researching and writing the lives of women—including the need to find “the courage to think that women’s lives, on their own and without any attachment to men, were important and interesting enough to deserve being put into print.”

Changing Attitudes, Persistent Problems
Before the 1970s, publishers showed scant interest in serious biographies of women, unless the women were queens, female entertainers, or recognizable public or literary figures, such as Helen Keller or Emily Dickinson. By and large, it was felt that women who were not already well known belonged in the biographical limelight only as wives, mistresses, or muses of “great men.”

As the impact of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s made itself felt, however, that situation slowly began to change, and in the decades that followed, market-conscious publishers recognized that there was an audience for books about little-known women who overcame obstacles and achieved remarkable things in their own right.

Biographers of women nevertheless face hurdles that biographers of male subjects are less likely to encounter. Carla Peterson, a historian who has written about the men and women of her prominent nineteenth-century New York African-American family, had to contend with the fact that women, far more often than men, have left little or no trace on the historical record because of their traditional reluctance to expose themselves, either by word or by deed, to public scrutiny.

A self-imposed silence can also be produced by a sense of educational inadequacy—even when the subject has led a exceptionally public life. Sallie Bingham began looking into the life of tobacco heiress and philanthropist Doris Duke and found that Duke, who was raised to be a fin-de-siècle socialite, considered herself so ignorant that she refused to write letters, forcing Bingham to reconstruct her personality from correspondence written to her rather than by her.

Women can also vanish into the historic ether when family members or heirs, either out of embarrassment or a conviction that their grandmother’s letters are of no interest or value to posterity, lose, discard, or sell off papers left by female relatives. Betty Boyd Caroli, whose biography of Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson was published last month, found herself forced to “work by hunches” about Lady Bird’s connection with her mother because of what she described as an “almost utter absence of information” about this critical relationship in her subject’s life. Still, sometimes a biographer gets lucky. Ruth Franklin, who is working on a biography of the writer Shirley Jackson, rescued a box of her subject’s letters from an old filing cabinet just before the cabinet was to be auctioned off in the estate sale.

Even when a woman’s papers end up in an archival collection that bears her name, they may remain uncatalogued, rendering them effectively useless to researchers. Furthermore, if the collection is named for a male relative, a woman subject’s documents may be subsumed to his and effectively “lost.” Franklin, for instance, discovered that many of Shirley Jackson’s letters had been catalogued under the name of her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, making them difficult to find.

Extending Biography’s Reach
The famous phrase “The personal is political” has its counterpart in feminist biography, where it is a given that the private and the public are inseparably connected. This emphasis on private lives and personal relationships has extended contemporary biographers’ ability to explore the complex interworkings of individuals, both with each other and with society. As an example, Diane Jacobs pointed out that her most recent book, Dear Abigail, a study of Abigail Adams and her two sisters, depicts “a private nation,” adding the personal to the political. “I didn’t want to write just another biography of John Adams,” she explained, noting that the psychological and social issues that emerge in the book—the nature of sisterhood, the meaning of women’s friendships in a male-dominated society—would not have emerged from a traditional biography of a man.

Do publishers still care if no one has heard of the subject? Well, yes. Even so, both Bair and Alix Kates Shulman agreed that the last twenty-five years have seen a significant shift of attitude toward women—and men—subjects who aren’t household names. “The subject,” said Shulman, a novelist as well as a biographer, “now counts less than the quality of the writing.” Bair said that by holding the biographer to a high standard of both writing and scholarship, feminist biography has succeeded in showing “that any life is an appropriate subject for exploration in the genres of biography, history, and memoir.”

It has also raised the bar for biographers as narrators. Nowadays, as Bair noted, “the biographer has to be able to write a page-turner and yet refuse to relinquish truth and authenticity.” Given the obstaclces to unearthing and depicting the complexities of women’s experience, that task can sometimes seem daunting. Nevertheless, said Bair, “We have an obligation to find the answers to our questions, and to never stop trying to find ‘the truth.’”

A video of the panel discussions will be available soon; the link will be posted on the Women Writing Women’s Lives Website and in a future issue of TBC.

Dona Munker is the writer and coauthor of Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution. She is working on a book about Sara Bard Field, a twentieth-century suffragist, poet, and “free-lover.” Her reflections, as well as an expanded version of this article, are available on her blog, “Stalking the Elephant.”

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