Massie Embraces the Story
by New York Correspondent Dona Munker
Robert K. Massie, a journalist and historian whose gift for vivid narrative has made him the preeminent American biographer of Russian royals, makes his job sound easy. “I am a storyteller,” he explains modestly, adding that he writes biography because “telling stories about peoplpe in the past is important to everyone trying to understand who we are and where we come from.”
Massie’s remarks came as part of the fifth annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture, held last month at the CUNY Graduate Center. The talk followed his recent winning of the 2012 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Catherine the Great: A Woman’s Life. Among his other literary successes, Massie’s life of Peter the Great won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, while Nicholas and Alexandra was a durable New York Times bestseller.
Massie told the audience that the biographer whose aim is to “fully embrace the story being told” will find himself working with three key ingredients. The first of these, he said, is relevance. The reader must have the sense that the life under study is important because it is “part of a chain that affects his own life.” This sense of connection may simply be the result of the subject’s fame or the fame of the times in which she or he lived. Conveying that sense of relevance, however, is vital for holding the reader’s interest. Continue Reading…