Gems to be Found on 2014 Spring List of Biographies

February 9th, 2014

Begley was the books editor at the New York Observer before starting his Updike biography.

The 2014 spring list of forthcoming biographies is not as robust as that of previous spring seasons. Yet there are plenty of works that will attract attention and readers.

As usual, BIO is posting a complete list of the works on its website and, as in the past, the list will be continually updated as we learn about forthcoming books that we may have missed. Here, however, are some from the list bound to attract considerable notice:

A literary figure’s life is expected to garner the bulk of biographical attention this spring when Harper publishes the long-awaited biography of writer John Updike by Adam Begley in April. Simply called Updike, the book is the first biography of the late writer to cover his entire life.

Among other books this spring that focus on literary lives are The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West: A Biography by Lona Gibb, which Counterpoint will publish in May, Maeve Binchy: The Biography by Piers Dudgeon, coming from Thomas Dunne in July, and The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff, a March book from Penguin.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt as war leader will be the subject of two works this spring. First out will be No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation Into War by David Kaiser from Basic Books. Nigel Hamilton, former BIO President, will offer the first of what is expected to be a two-volume look at FDR at war. His Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 will be published by Houghton Mifflin in May.

Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Kai Bird will be out with his The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, which Crown will publish in late May.

Washington writer Mark Perry will publish his take on one of the twentieth century’s most controversial military leaders. His The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur will be in stores in April from Basic Books.

Joseph’s previous book was
Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama.

Stokely, Peniel E. Joseph’s biography of civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael, will be published by Basic Book in March. Joseph was a Compleat Biographer panelist in 2013 and is previously the author of Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama.

Those who have wondered how a mausoleum-like building on Capitol Hill in Washington came to house one of the world’s great depositories of William Shakespeare’s works will find their answer in Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen Grant that Johns Hopkins University Press will bring out in March. The same month Thomas Dunne will publish Joan Barthel’s American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton.

Conservative columnist, occasional candidate for president, and former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan will be out and about with a new look at his former boss. His The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from the Dead to Create America’s New Majority will be out from Crown in July.

Sports fans are likely to grab copies of Michael Jordan by Roland Lazenby when Little, Brown and Company brings out the title in May. And watchers of another kind of court will be on the lookout for Scalia: A Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy from Simon & Schuster.

Not on this list, but to be added to the growing number of books using the subtitle “biography” will be the May book, The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmitt, detailing the 700-year “life” of the English-language novel.

Compleat Biographer Preview: Panelists Megan Marshall and Linda Leavell in Conversation

February 9th, 2014

Linda Leavell

Megan Marshall

BIO members Megan Marshall and Linda Leavell will present “Making Modernism: A Conversation Between Biographers” at the BIO conference on May 17. As a prelude to that, Marshal interviwed Leavell about her new book and a recent honor.

Megan Marshall is the author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. She is at work on a short biography of Elizabeth Bishop for the Amazon “Icons” series.

Spring 2014

February 6th, 2014

March

• Marjorie Harris Carr: Defender of Florida’s Environment by Peggy Macdonald (University Press of Florida)
  Suffer and Grow Strong: The Life of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1834–1907 by Carolyn Newton Curry (Mercer University Press)
• Stephen Ward: Scapegoat by Douglas Thompson (John Blake)
• Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment by Robert K. Musil (Rutgers University Press)
• Leaving Home: The Remarkable Life of Peter Jacyk by John Lawrence Reynolds (Figure 1 Publishing)
• The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur by Arthur Hoyle (Arcade Publishing)
• Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul by Daniel Gordis (Schocken Books)
• A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man by Holly George-Warren (Viking)
• Pete Rose: An American Dilemma by Kostya Kennedy (Sports Illustrated Books)
• Stokely by Peniel E. Joseph (Basic Books)
• Faisal I of Iraq by Ali A. Allawi (Yale University Press)
• American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton by Joan Barthel (Thomas Dunne)
• Brooks: The Biography of Brooks Robinson by Doug Wilson (Thomas Dunne)
• Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong by Juliet Macur (Harper)
• The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age by Myra MacPherson (Twelve)
• Alvin York: A New Biography of the Hero of the Argonne by Douglas V. Mastriano (University Press of Kentucky)
• The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography by Miriam Pawel  (Bloomsbury)
• The Double Life of Paul De Man by Evelyn Barish (William Morrow)
• Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant (Johns Hopkins University Press)

April

• Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life by Stephen Parker (Bloomsbury)
• The Butcher of Poland: Hitler’s Lawyer by Hans Frank, Garry O’Connor, and Michael Holroyd (Spellmount)
• Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels by Janet Todd (Andre Deutsch)
• Russell Long: A Life in Politics by Michael S. Martin (University Press of Mississippi)
• The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur by Mark Perry (Basic Books)
• Julian Hawthorne: The Life of a Prodigal Son by Gary Scharnhorst (University of Illinois Press)
• Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams by Margery M. Heffron and David L. Michelmor (Yale University Press)
• Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Charles Marsh (Knopf)
• Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great To Bear by Richard Striner (Rowan & Littlefield)
• Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet by Robert J. Mayhew (Belknap Press)
• No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation Into War by David Kaiser (Basic Books)
• A Very Principled Boy: The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior by Mark A. Bradley (Basic Books)
• James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano by Dan Bischoff (St. Martin’s Press)
• John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster)
• Updike by Adam Begley (Harper)
• Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause by Heath Hardage Lee  (Potomac Books)
• A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand by Philip Short (Henry Holt)
• Tom Horn in Life and Legend by Larry D. Ball  (University of Oklahoma Press)

May

• The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty by J. Randy Taraborrelli (Grand Central Publishing)
• Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones on the Road to Exile by Robert Greenfield (Da Capo)
• The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames by Kai Bird (Crown)
• John Quincy Adams: American Visionary by Fred Kaplan (Harper)
• The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin by Richard Bradford (Biteback Publishing)
• The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West: A Biography by Lorna Gibb (Counterpoint)
• Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby (Little, Brown and Company)
• Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman (Grand Central Publishing)
• The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark by Meryl Gordon (Grand Central Publishing)
• The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America by John F. Kasson (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Martin Freeman: The Biography by Nick Johnstone (Andre Deutsch)
• Mildred on the Marne: Mildred Aldrich, Front-line Witness 1914-1918 by David Slattery-Christy (Spellmount)
• Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst by Adam Phillips (Yale University Press)
• The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor by Jonathan Rose (Yale University Press)
• Jabotinsky: A Life by Hillel Halkin (Yale University Press)
• The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence by David Bromwich (Belknap Press)
• The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps by Michael Blanding (Gotham)
• James Madison: A Life Reconsidered by Lynne Cheney (Viking)
• The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 by Nigel Hamilton (Houghton Mifflin)

June

• A Man Called Harris: The Life of Richard Harris by Michael Sheridan, Anthony Galvin (History Press)
• Scalia: A Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy (Simon & Schuster)
• Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space by Lynn Sherr (Simon & Schuster)
• Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce by Sylvia Jukes Morris (Random House)
• Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness by Paul Binding (Yale University Press)
• Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire by Paul Sorrentino (Belknap Press)
• Young Ovid: A Life Recreated by Diane Middlebrook (Counterpoint)
• Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work by Susan L. Mizruchi (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s by Tom Doyle (Ballantine Books)
• The Real Custer: From Boy General to Tragic Hero by James S. Robbin (Regnery)
• Olivier by Philip Ziegler (MacLehose Press)
• Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions by Matthew Dennison (St. Martin’s Press)

July

• The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from the Dead to Create America’s New Majority by Patrick J. Buchanan (Crown)
• Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces by Miles J. Unger (Simon & Schuster)
• Robert Morris’s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder by Ryan K. Smith (Yale University Press)
• The Search for Anne Perry: The Hidden Life of a Bestselling Crime Writer by Joanne Drayton (Arcade Publishing)
• Fierce Patriot : The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell, (Random House)
• Maeve Binchy: The Biography by Piers Dudgeon (Thomas Dunne Books)
• Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight by Jay Barbree,  (Thomas Dunne Books)
• Joe and Marilyn by C. David Heymann (Atria/Emily Bestler Books)

August

• Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left : A Northwest Writer Reworks American Fiction by T.V. Reed (University of Washington Press)
• Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano by Dana Thomas (Penguin)
• Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• William Wells Brown: An African-American Life by Ezra Greenspan (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Bolano: A Biography by Monica Maristain (Melville House)
• The Good Son by Christopher Andersen (Gallery Books)

Stacy Schiff Wins 2014 BIO Award

January 21st, 2014

Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence “even if forced to at gunpoint,” said 2013 BIO Award winner Ron Chernow.

Stacy Schiff is the winner of the fifth 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. The award has previously been given to Jean Strouse, Robert Caro, Arnold Rampersad, and Ron Chernow.

Schiff will receive the honor during the 2014 Compleat Biographer Conference on May 17 at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she will deliver the keynote address.

“Through her writing, Schiff has been, and remains, an inspiration to biographers worldwide,” said James McGrath Morris, president of BIO. “But also she demonstrated her devotion to biography through her willingness to lend her support when we first began to create our organization. She is a remarkably generous writer whose devotion to her art and craft extends beyond the written page.”

Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique.

Her most recent book, Cleopatra: A Life, was published to great acclaim in 2010. Cleopatra appeared on most year-end best books lists, including the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. A number-one bestselling book, Cleopatra was translated into 30 languages.

Praised for her meticulous scholarship and her witty style, Schiff has contributed frequently to the New York Times op-ed page and Book Review. A fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a 2011 Library Lion of the New York Public Library.

A Biographer’s Journey through Social Media Marketing

January 21st, 2014

By Will Swift

How did a liberal Massachusetts Democrat come to write a book on the Nixon marriage, and how in the world could he sell that book through social media?

Swift’s book is the first scholarly look at the Nixons’ 53-year marriage.

As a psychotherapist who likes healing historical reputations, I wondered when I started my new book Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage if the Nixons’ partnership was as dreadful as commonly portrayed or whether its image was tarnished because scholars had not adequately studied the primary sources. I dug into newly opened Nixon archives, and the Nixon Foundation began to release love letters written during their courtship and when they were separated during the Second World War. As I slowly gained access to Nixon insiders, an entirely different Nixon marriage emerged: complicated, stressful, but grounded in love and commitment.

Now I had a compelling and surprising story. But how could I, as a liberal Democrat who had protested against the Vietnam War, reach a receptive audience?

Everyone reports the power of social media to sell books in these days of disappearing bookstores and dying book review pages. For me, going beyond a casual acquaintance with Facebook felt like having to take a computer apart and put it back together again without instructions. When faced with technical challenges like this, my mind goes blank. My friends Anne Heller and Kate Buford came to the rescue, telling me about their great experiences working with Ken Gillette of Target Marketing to promote their respective books on Ayn Rand and Jim Thorpe. I hired Gillette, and here’s a brief look at what he’s done for me.

Dramatic Rise in Numbers

I started a Facebook account for Pat and Dick on May 23, 2013, and by December 10 I had only accumulated 85 followers, despite my diligent twice-weekly postings. Twitter seemed even more daunting. I learned how to tweet my posts on Facebook by adding a #NIXON at the end of the post, but I only intermittently re-tweeted other people’s posts. I had managed to accumulate the underwhelming stable of 23 followers on Twitter by mid-December.

I was amazed that in the first week of target marketing, Gillette’s team doubled my numbers on both sites and quadrupled them by the launch date. I asked Gillette how they did it. “Considering your existing online audience was quite modest, we wanted to create a high-impact first impression,” he said. “Inspired by the book’s cover and content, we created a custom-designed look and feel across all of your social properties. The design was based on our design team’s research on what phrases and types of photographs people respond best to on social platforms. Then we installed and launched your newly skinned Facebook and Twitter pages.

“The published design carries over the design from the book cover and represents the branding in a sophisticated and interesting way. Our goal? When a new user first visits either site, not only do they know this is a site about Pat and Dick Nixon, but that it is part of a new book about them.”

Gillette said the next step for any social media marketing strategy is to execute a landscape review. What does this mean? “We needed to find where the book’s potential readership existed and identify all the social accounts where they reside,” he said. “My team did an extensive research on all social platforms (primarily Facebook and Twitter) related to the Nixons, Richard Nixon, presidential history, and biographies. This was time intensive, but we wanted to get a clear picture of where your potential customer base lies.

“In addition to social media, we identified the top 50 presidential history and biography blogs and websites. Not only did we target based on topic, we identified online sites with influential/sizeable audiences. Our research to date has a cumulative audience of over 500,000+.”

In early December, Target Marketing initiated a social promotion campaign on both Facebook and Twitter. It promoted the corresponding sites to the people who were fans of other pages and identified people in the social stratosphere by keywords and interests, according to Gillette. “By dramatically expanding your audience we were creating a potential customer base in prep for your book’s on-sale date. To date, we’ve had a 300% increase in the number of fans and followers across both platforms.”

From Awareness to Sales

Gillette explained that the next step is to push for sales once the book is officially available (January 7th): “We switch all branding to a picture of the book cover and a series of promotional ads that invite people to become more involved with your book, learn more, share news of its release and, of course, purchase it.”

My job during this time? Publish postings that emphasize my personal experiences in creating the book.

Next month, I’ll report on how well the social media efforts went.

Will Swift is a BIO board member. His previous book was The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm, which covered the Kennedy family’s coming of age in London during the controversial ambassadorship of Joseph P. Kennedy.

2014 Master Classes

January 13th, 2014

The following Master Classes will be offered Sunday morning May 18th at the University of Massachusetts Boston during the Compleat Biographer annual conference.

Promoting Your Biography: Hiring a Publicist or Going it Alone
Carl Rollyson, instructor
A do-it-yourself workshop conducted by an experienced biographer, for all of us who can’t afford to pay for others to promote our work. We will explore the usefulness of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, other social media, and other sources of free publicity. We will also discuss how to arrange for talks and other promotional activities.

Carl Rollyson is working on A Real Character: Walter Brennan and the World of Hollywood Players, the third volume of his New England trilogy, which includes Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography and American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath. His other books include Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, an updated edition of Marilyn Monroe: Life of the Actress (available June 1), and two studies of biography, A Higher Form of Cannibalism: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography and Biography: A User’s Guide. His reviews of biography have been collected in Reading Biography and American Biography.

Biography Workshop: Writing the Proposal
Susan Rabiner, instructor
For many would-be biographers, more daunting than researching or writing the book is often writing the proposal. So what makes a good proposal? A passion for your subject, superb research, and good writing all count. But most important is that you understand that, while it’s your subject’s life, it’s your story. Great proposals get control of that story and never let go of that control. Great biographers never fall into the trap of believing that the story is just the sum of the facts you’ve uncovered about your subject’s life. This session will teach you how to write that great proposal and, even more important, how to know you have done so.

Susan Rabiner was an editor for more than thirty years and currently runs Susan Rabiner Literary. She is the co-author (with Alfred Fortunato) of Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get It Published. Two of the biographers she represents won the Pulitzer Prize for their work.

Registration Opens this Month for 5th Compleat Biographer Conference

December 12th, 2013

Registration for the fifth annual Compleat Biographer conference opens this month. All BIO members will be notified by email when the registration site is open for business. Active BIO members will also receive information on using their member’s discount as well as how to obtain the early-bird registration rate.

The 2014 conference will be held May 16 to 18 at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the site of the first conference and the founding of BIO. Unlike the first, simpler conference, this fifth gathering will include a full day of research workshops in the Boston area on May 16, followed by an evening reception; twenty panel sessions on May 17 along with a luncheon address by the 2014 BIO Award winner (who will be announced in January); our popular networking reception at which the Plutarch Award winner will be revealed; and four master classes on May 18.

“As in past years, our panels deal with the entire process of writing a biography: research, writing, publishing and marketing,” Cathy Curtis, chair of the Program Committee, told TBC. “What’s new is a special emphasis on what my committee likes to call the ‘core curriculum’—the information beginning biographers need as they contemplate choosing a subject and embarking on years of research and writing.”

In addition, conference organizers continue to broaden BIO’s reach to embrace nontraditional forms and subject matter, including group biographies and biographies of marginalized gay subjects. “And because we are convening in Boston,” added Curtis, “we’re devoting a panel to a discussion of biographical subjects whose lives were inseparable from the city of their greatest triumphs.”
A preliminary description of the panels may be seen here.

Biographer-Subject Friendship Presents Challenges and Rewards

December 12th, 2013

Along with writing a biography of Mailer, Lennon edited Critical Essays on Norman Mailer (1986) and Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988).

When J. Michael Lennon was pondering where and how to begin his recently published biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, he found his solution while taking a morning walk with his wife Donna Pedro Lennon. “We walk two miles every morning,” he said, “and answers, ideas, new perceptions came unbidden about halfway through our little stroll.”