Chernow Keynote Speech Highlight of Fourth BIO Conference

June 19th, 2013

With the non-stop buzz of midtown Manhattan as a backdrop, more than 200 biographers from eight countries attended the fourth annual Compleat Biographer Conference on May 18 at the Roosevelt Hotel. The day featured 19 panels, and attendees were treated to a keynote speech by Ron Chernow, winner of the 2013 BIO Award.

Chernow received his award after the conference luncheon from Will Swift, author of the forthcoming Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage and a member of the BIO Award committee. Chernow’s most recent book, Washington: A Life, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. His previous books include a look at J.P. Morgan and the financial empire he established and biographies of John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton.

In his speech, Chernow reviewed his immersion into the lives of several of these major figures in American history, explaining his interest in subjects who, he found, tried to keep their inner lives hidden. He called them sphinxes and “strangers to introspection,” and his role was to strip away disguises and probe beneath their secrecy. Rockefeller, Chernow said, often wrote letters in what seemed like a code, leaving out explicit details that might have shed light on his financial dealings. Hamilton avoided sharing information about his illegitimacy and years as a youth in the Caribbean—years Chernow called a “dark undertow” that pulled on the brilliant man throughout his life. (Chernow saw that brilliance in Hamilton’s writings, and five years of pouring over his subject’s prolific work sometimes left the biographer feeling like “a dithering idiot.”) Chernow’s suggestion to others: Follow the silences of a subject’s life, the people and events they won’t discuss or choose to discount, to find keys to their personality. On the other hand, a subject’s own writings can obscure who he or she really is: “Personality can disappear behind a fancy cloud of words.”

With Washington, Chernow was dealing with a subject whose life had been explored in depth many times before. What he wanted to do with his biography of the president was to find what his predecessors had missed: Washington’s suppressed emotions, his carefully cultivated image of himself as man always under control. Through the writings of Washington’s contemporaries, Chernow found the anger the leader usually tried to hide. Biographers, Chernow said, need to look behind stereotypes and “received wisdom” about their subjects to truly understand them.

The voluminous archives of Washington’s documents helped Chernow achieve that understanding. As with Hamilton and his other subjects, he spent several years doing research. Chernow said that searching long and hard enough can reveal the essence of a biographer’s subject.

For a link to an AP article covering Chernow’s speech, go here.

The Rush to the End

June 6th, 2013

A site familiar to many authors, here is James McGrath Morris’s manuscript of his next book as it nears its end.

Winning the Pulitzer Gets Author Free Dental Care

May 11th, 2013

by James McGrath Morris

On the weekend of April 13-14, biographer Tom Reiss was suffering from a terrible toothache. To his good fortune his dentist had an opening in the afternoon of Monday, April 15. As he took his seat in the dentist chair around 3 PM, the only thing Reiss anticipated was relief from the pain.

BIO Members Add Seven New Faces to the Board and Reelect One Incumbent

May 11th, 2013

Plutarch Award 2013

April 23rd, 2013

Announcing the First-Ever Prize for Best Biography of the Year as Selected by Biographers;
List of Nominees Revealed

New York, NY—For the first time ever, biographers will determine the best biography of the year when they bestow the Plutarch Award at a gala ceremony in New York City on May 18.

Named after the famous Ancient Greek biographer, the prize aims to be the genre’s equivalent of the Oscar, in that the winner will be determined by secret ballot from a list of nominees selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft.

The 2012 books nominated for this year’s inaugural Plutarch are:

• Deirdre Bair, Saul Steinberg: A Biography (Nan A. Talese)
• Robert Caro, The Passage of Power (Knopf)
• Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Alice Kessler-Harris, A Difficult Woman, The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (Bloomsbury Press)
• David Maraniss, Barack Obama, The Story (Simon & Schuster)
• John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown)
• William Souder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (Crown)
• Rachel L. Swarns, American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (Amistad)

“This is the first prize to be awarded to a biographer by biographers,” said BIO President James McGrath Morris. “Just as each year science fiction readers await the announcement of the Nebula, horror readers await the Stoker, and mystery fans await the Edgar, we aim to make the Plutarch a similarly prestigious and much-sought-after award for biographers and readers of biography.”

The Plutarch Award winner will be revealed at BIO’s annual Compleat Biographer Conference in New York City on May 18th, which attracts hundreds of biographers from around the globe.

New Radio Show Featuring Biographers Premieres

April 22nd, 2013

A discussion of gender and whether biographers can write about subjects of a different gender were part of a lively discussion between members of BIO on new monthly radio program devoted to biography.

The program, called “Collected Words,” is produced by Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It premièred on April 3 on KVSF. BIO president James McGrath Morris served as host to inaugural guests Carl Rollyson, who just published a biography of Sylvia Plath, and Megan Marshall, whose new book on Margaret Fuller came out last month.

The show will air weekly, but only the first program of each month will be devoted to biography. You can hear the first program on this archived podcast.

Panel Offers Encouraging News on Biography Market

April 22nd, 2013

By Dona Munker, TBC New York correspondent

The overall market for biographies remains steady, according to three trade publishing veterans who spoke at a recent meeting of the New York University Biography Seminar, organized by BIO member Gayle Feldman.

The February 20 panel comprised Jonathan Galassi, a former editor and current president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Eric Simonoff, head of the literary division of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment; and biographer James Atlas, who was recently appointed the editor of a series of biographies for a joint venture between Amazon Publishing and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and will be speaking at the 2013 Compleat Biographer conference.

Considering the turmoil besetting traditional publishing as a result of e-books, the three panelists surprisingly didn’t think that the overall market for biography had changed much. In fact, the consensus was that in 2012, biography sales in the US remained steady and were driven by the same two factors that have dominated this market niche for decades: the desire of publishers to sign up biographers who write about monumental subjects and have high name recognition, and the biography-reading public’s apparently immutable desire for familiar names and subjects. Nonetheless, Galassi said that after forty years of publishing, he didn’t think serious biography is “doing any worse than in the past.”

To add to such (relatively) good news, some publishers are showing a continuing interest in short-form biography, which springs at least in part from the digital revolution. James Atlas, who revived the popular “biographical essay” associated with Lytton Strachey by bringing it up to date in his Penguin Lives series, has a mandate from Amazon to sign up twelve similar books about well-known figures by noted authors. He is seeking writers who can cover the subject quickly and engagingly, and he’s encouraging them “to explore their own relationship with the subject” in the narrative—for example, how they became interested in the story. Atlas said that he was convinced that a market exists for “discovery biographies” of fewer than 40,000 words, of which he currently has two under contract. Amazon’s New Harvest will distribute the books electronically and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will distribute the hardcover editions.

The panelists agreed that the future of biography remains hard to predict. Both publishers and booksellers have traditionally been secretive about statistics and sales figures. Nevertheless, as Galassi observed, publishers are still buying—and getting excited about—biographies they know will be influential, regardless of how those biographies can be expected to sell. “Books that are doing pioneering work have to struggle in today’s marketplace,” he said. “But good books always have.”

Eric Simonoff, the literary agent, whose clients at William Morris may get anywhere from mid-five to low-six figure advances, cautioned that those advances don’t always amount to much over the length of time needed to research and write a biography. Galassi, however, didn’t think that biographers who write for the love of the subject or the craft necessarily need to despair, since any proposal for a biography that is sharply focused and well-written may indeed find an enthusiastic publisher, though perhaps not a large, well-heeled trade publisher.

All of which may simply go to show how little things change. As Gayle Feldman noted in her introduction, even in the early years of the twentieth century, the famed publisher Bennett Cerf, while lamenting what he regarded as biography’s general mediocrity and “lack of distinction,” nevertheless conceded that “the right book or the right author can always puncture any generalizations that can be laid down.”

Dona Munker is the writer and co-author 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 twentieth-century American poet, suffragist, and “free-lover” Sara Bard Field. She also, as time allows, has a blog about biography called “Stalking the Elephant.”

Spring Biographical Offerings

February 6th, 2013

While the fall remains the favorite season for publishers to bring out their heavy hitters, there is no lack of substantial and important biographies on the spring list of 2013. Here are some titles, among many, likely to garner considerable attention.

Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage by Jeffrey Frank will be published by Simon & Schuster this month and was touted in a recent issue of the New Yorker. In April the company will bring out the long-awaited Bolivar: American Liberator by former Washington Post book editor Marie Arana.

American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson was published in January by St. Martin’s Press. Two other books about the poet will follow it. Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson will be published by Scribner this month, and Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder will come out from Harper in April.

Another female writer on the list of subjects for the spring is Jane Austen (can one ever have too many books on her?). The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne, came out in January from Harper.

Along the lines of calling a biography “real,” Henry Holt published Andrew Marr’s The Real Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II last month.

A forgotten American president gets his due this month, when Harper delivers Amity Shlaes’s Coolidge and next month, Encounter Books offers a companion book, Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America’s Most Underrated President by Charles C. Johnson.

Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life will be published in March by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Last year, Fuller was the subject of John Matteson’s most recent biography. Andrea Pitzer’s The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov will also be published in March by Houghton.

Blake Bailey, biographer of John Cheever, is back with a new work with the unusual title Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, which Knopf will publish in March.

For readers old enough to remember what television was once like, in April Viking is bringing out Flip: The Inside Story of TV’s First Black Superstar by Kevin Cook.

Recording artist, songwriter, entrepreneur, voice actor, record producer, educator, and philanthropist William James Adams’s life is the subject of Will.i.am: The Unauthorized Biography by Danny White from publisher Michael O’Mara [Note to editor: That’s not a typo in the title].

For readers who loved the old American Heritage magazine, Scribner is publishing I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow, who edited the magazine in its heyday.

Yale University continues its tradition of producing attention-getting biographies. It already began the season with biographies of two noted subjects: The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson by Barbara Ransby

On the heels of David Nasaw’s biography of Joseph Kennedy, out last fall, comes Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch by Barbara A. Perry, which W. W. Norton & Company will publish in July.

Biography Club prize winner Clare Mulley’s The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville will come out in June in an American edition by St. Martin’s Press.

And, lastly, for those who once drove a car with an eight-track tape player, comes The Bee Gees: The Biography by David N. Meyer from Da Capo Press

Click here for a detailed listing of more than fifty spring 2013 biographies on the BIO website.