Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography

I like William Zinsser's down to earth approach to writing. He was a very interesting person. If you are thinking of writing a memoir, a better public letter. Computer writing. The books plural by William Zinsser will be your best friend.

Conceived in 1985 by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the New York Public Library as a series of six lectures by noted biographers, Extraordinary Lives was tidied up for publication by William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, a first-rate how-to book for writers. Fortunately, Zinsser also included parts of the question-and-answer sessions that followed the lectures. As he notes, these exchanges frequently sent "the speakers off on flights of anecdote and memory." Although the subjects of the biographies are themselves extraordinary, the editor and the biographers are exceptional craftsmen as well. (For that matter, the biographers Robert Caro and David McCullough are probably more historically significant than Alice James, one of the subjects.) This is a book meant for reading rather than for study--which among other things means that it's fun to read but has no index. Nevertheless, the book does have a fascinating annotated bibliography, compiled by the biographers, which includes comments on both biographies and books about writing them. I'm embarrassed to say that I ran into Extraordinary Lives by accident a few months ago while browsing the aisles of my public library. This fine book should be better known.

This book, based on a series of talks given at the New York Library, biographers Robert Caro, David McCullough, Paul C. Nagel, Richard B. Sewall, Ronald Steel and Jean Strouse explain how and why they went about writing biographies in the way that they did.Each biographer explains well how the life of the biographer becomes intertwined with that of the person they are researching. In each case, they stress that biography writing is both intense and time-consuming. Lyndon B. Johnson biographer, Robert Caro, recommends Francis Parkman's "Montcalm and Wolfe" for two reasons. One, to show that the job of the historian is to try to write at the same level as the greatest novelists. Second, that the duty of the historian is to go to the locales of the events that will be described, and not to leave, no matter how long it takes...until the writer has done his or her best to understand the locales and their cultures and their people.In the end, it means that the biographer must not only understand the person, but also needs to intimately know the area where the person grew up and lived.

This book gives its readers new insights into the lives of some of this nation's most prominent figures, through the eyes of six well-known biographers. In "The Unexpected Harry Truman," David McCullough shows the life of Truman through new eyes. McCullough stresses that a biographer must genuinely care about his [or her] subject because you are living with that person every single day. The process is like that of choosing a spouse or roommate, therefore, the subjects that he chooses must have a degree of animal, human vitality. In Truman, he said, as with Theodore Roosevelt, he found no shortage of vitality. McCullough created a detailed chronology, almost a diary of what Truman was doing from year to year, even day to day if the events were important enough. He also used primary sources, such as personal diaries, letters and documents from the time period. Truman poured himself out on paper and provided a large, wonderfully written base of writing for McCullough to sort through and "find" the man. McCullough says that the magic of writing comes from not knowing where you are headed, what you are going to wind up feeling and what you are going to decide. Richard Sewell's "In Search of Emily Dickinson," research process took twenty years and he says, "In the beginning I didn't go searching for her, she went searching for me." The process took him two sabbaticals, years of correspondence and meetings with Mabel Loomis Todd's daughter Millicent Todd Bingham to uncover the whole truth. Paul Nagel's "The Adams Women," gives readers a sense of how important the women in the Adam's family were. Nagel said that contemplating the development of ideology is good training for a biographer. After all, he said, the intellectual historian takes an idea and brings it to life. For Nagel, working with ideas establishes a bridge into the mind and life of the people who had the ideas he studies.Nagel said that he likes and admires women and this is why, after writing about the Adams' men, he wrote about the Adams' women. Nagel also said that he has learned and taught his students that our grasp of history must always remain incomplete. Ronald Steel said, that the hardest job a biographer has is not to judge his or her subject, however, most fail to keep their judgements out of the biography. In Jean Strouse's, "The Real Reasons," she explains that the modern biography examines how character affects and is affected by social circumstance. Biography also tells the reader a great deal about history and gives them a wonderful story. In writing about Alice James, Strouse found that there was not an interesting plot line to her life other than that her brothers were writers Henry and William James. Strouse, when asked by another writer about the descendents of the three James' children, she said that William's great-grandson in Massachusetts, tired of being asked whether he was related to Henry or William, moved to Colorado wher