Repost: A Sense of Place

The Narrows, with Staten Island in the foreground and Long Island to the right, 1854

From time to time, I'm reposting earlier entries on the art of writing biography. Here's one of them.

One of the most important things for a biographer—perhaps for any writer—is a sense of place. But this is trickier than it sounds. When writing historical biography, space and time are inseparable.

My previous biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, was very well received by the people of Missouri, where most of its action takes place. But every now and then I would hear grumbling that I wasn't "from here," that as a New Yorker I couldn't write authoritatively about the creekbeds and woods of Clay, Jackson, and Lafayette counties. Maybe the grumblers had a point. But no one alive today, I should point out, is from the nineteenth century. Missouri today is a very, very different place than it was in 1855 or 1875. I immersed myself in this lost place, trying to build a rich, complex, and complete world.

Naturally I tried to do the same in my new book, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Here I had the advantage of living in New York (and later San Francisco, another scene of the action, where I now reside). But, after writing Jesse James, I was wary of assuming that I knew nineteenth-century New York just because I lived in the current version. More than that, I realized that a sense of place must extend to more than physical geography. I had to range from colliding ferryboats to genteel Washington Square, from docks and railroad depots to corporate boardrooms. But I also had to recapture the social life of New York's aristocrats, the business culture (or cultures) of bankers and steamboat men, the violent poverty of Five Points and Corlear's Hook. Multiple layers of society overlapped—and some of those layers were themselves divided.

Vanderbilt's life was so far-reaching, I had to try to breathe life into anarchic early San Francisco, provincial and corrupt Washington, D.C., war-torn Nicaragua, and the stuffy London offices of English investment houses. But trickiest of all was the fact that these places changed dramatically over time. When Vanderbilt first started to pilot a sailboat back and forth across New York Harbor, the city was described by a visitor as "an overgrown seaport village." It was ruled by eighteenth-century landed gentry. By the time he died, a million people crammed onto Manhattan, home to factories, gasworks, the nation's leading stock exchange and biggest banks, not to mention the hemisphere's largest railroad depot, Vanderbilt's own Grand Central. Society and culture were transformed over that same period, in part due to Vanderbilt's own efforts.

So I've done my best to create a sense of place that seems true, yet incorporates these complexities and changes. Whether I succeeded or failed will determine much of the value of my book.

Addendum:

It's a curious fact that I was a passenger on the Staten Island ferryboat Andrew J. Barberi on the fatal voyage in October 2003, when it crashed into a service pier, killing eleven passengers. Being present at that event was revealing, for I was already at work on The First Tycoon, which includes numerous nautical disasters (including on the Staten Island Ferry). I don't know that I actually wrote anything differently because of that experience, but it deepened my sense of what such disasters were like. The impact of being there was subtle, but I am left with the feeling that it was important. In any case, I was nowhere near the carnage, and was in no sense a victim. My heart still goes out to those who suffered, died, or lost loved ones that day.

Biography: Pointless Exercise?

The figure shown here is John Calvin, the Reformation theologian best known for advocating the doctrine of predestination. Put rather simplistically, predestination is the result of a rigorous logical analysis: If God is omnipotent, then humanity cannot choose or reject salvation, for that would be a limitation of God's power. Rather, God extends grace to some humans, giving the gift of salvation. We are powerless over our fate.

And that (put rather simplistically) sums up the historical profession's attitude toward the individual, and thus toward the genre of biography. Academia has rejected the Great Man school of history; instead, it addresses the human experience in the aggregate, in terms of societies, polities, and cultures.

For the most part, that's as it should be. History was once little more than the study of kings, presidents, and generals—a kind of hero worship that ignored most of the people in the world. The new social history (no longer new—it began before I was born) has remade the field for the better.

But Protestants eventually rejected predestination. I suspect the doctrine's denial of free will simply couldn't be stomached for long. We exist as individuals; our ability to go on living is predicated upon a sense of agency. And that may have something to do with the popularity of the genre of biography, despite academic discomfort with it.

We believe that individuals matter. For most of us, this is not so much a conscious philosophy as fundamental fact of our psychological make-up, one of the most basic elements in how we see the world and function in it. We brush our teeth because that act will prevent the loss of our teeth. We make proposals at work because they may be adopted and change the way our employer operates. We choose mates, elect to have offspring, join organizations, and vote. In every moment, we believe that we have choices, and that the choices we make affect ourselves and the world around us.

This presents biographers with a dilemma. We, too, believe that the individual matters, or we wouldn't be writing biographies. And yet, we cannot get carried away with this proposition, as the field of history once did. A successful biography identifies where its subject made an impact on the world, and where its subject exemplifies larger developments.

In many cases, the reason the subject of a biography is worth reading about at all is because he or she represents the big themes that conventional histories address. In my own work, for example, Jesse James's family offers insight into the role of slavery in the outbreak of the Civil War in the border states, and the deep changes wrought by the war itself. Cornelius Vanderbilt's career opens a window on the rise of the corporate economy, and its widespread repercussions in politics, culture, and society. Indeed, I dare say every biography should be written with an eye toward this intersection of the individual with broader issues.

And yet, it must be kept in mind that the individual does matter. We usually pick biographical subjects not because they are representative, but because they were personally influential. Jesse James did not simply exemplify the impact of the Civil War—he deliberately exacerbated postwar bitterness, helping to shift Missouri state politics. Commodore Vanderbilt's life did not just illuminate the rise of big business—he led the way, forcing others to follow his example as he helped to create the giant corporation.

The key is to avoid taking this point a step too far. Jesse James was far from the only factor shaping Missouri politics; Vanderbilt was not the sole architect of the modern economy. There has been a fad in recent years for subtitles that go something like this: "The Man Who Eliminated Scurvy, Invented the Color Blue, and Invented Modern America." Please, don't do this. Anyone with the smallest amount of common sense knows that no one moves the world by himself. You only lose credibility with exaggerated claims.

Biography can be the best kind of history—and the best kind of nonfiction—by exploring big questions through dramatic, important lives. It can also be the worst kind of history, by either ignoring the larger issues or overstating the subject's role. To use a tired metaphor, you always walk a tightrope in writing a biography.

But, as my high-school wrestling coach liked to say, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Now as Leading Man

Having covered some important ground in my earlier posts, I thought I would, from time to time, repost them—now that my readership has grown from one (thanks Brian) to two or three. Here's one from about the time I started to blog about writing biographies:

There's a general issue in biography writing that came up when I tried to get a grip on the personality of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the subject of my latest book. In virtually every historical or biographical account, the Commodore (as he was known) comes across as relentlessly consistent, even monotonously so. He is depicted as crude, cruel, and boorish, a man of force and not much else. Inevitably, I found him to be much more complex.

Now, there are factual roots to some of these accounts. It took decades for genteel New York to accept him as a social equal—though they did, in time. He could be incredibly ruthless when locked in combat. He was remorselessly competitive, in his personal life as well as profession. But all this is only part of the picture. There is abundant evidence that he experienced doubts, fear, love, loss, and loneliness. Even in business, he was true to his word and practiced patient diplomacy. He was famous for exacting revenge, but he also consistently forgave his rivals (once they admitted defeat, that is). In short, he was a three-dimensional figure.

Am I a genius for figuring this out? I don't think so—and if I was a genius, I think I would be smart enough to know it. So why have writers depicted Vanderbilt so shallowly? Indeed, why have they been so willing to believe stories that are entirely without basis? Most descriptions of the Commodore uncritically recite utterly apocryphal tales. Why?

I think the answer is that he has always been a supporting actor in other people's stories. Serious biographies have been written about just about every prominent figure whom Vanderbilt dealt with in his long life, from Daniel Webster to John D. Rockefeller, including Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Victoria Woodhull. In many of these cases, Vanderbilt has been treated as an outsized but easily caricatured figure who lends color to the narrative. Why investigate well-worn stories about Vanderbilt, if the writer is focusing on a different figure entirely? Why be skeptical, when he makes for good copy?

In researching this book, I learned why historians and biographers have left Vanderbilt alone. He lived an incredibly long and active life, yet left no collection of papers to paw through. To write authoritatively about him, then, I had to engage in a lot of creative research, get some lucky breaks, and accept the long, long hours of digging through archives and newspaper accounts in pursuit of an elusive, secretive businessman. But I put in the work, building a portrait of a round, full, complex (yet still outsized) character. Many canonical stories fell away, to be replaced by previously unknown ones; his monotonous consistency evaporated, replaced by a strong personality laced with contradictions. Now, as leading man, Vanderbilt finally came into his own. And the real figure was a lot more interesting than the caricature.

Biography: Where History Meets Literature

History Today, a blog of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has posted a Q&A with me. It's located here. The Institute also has published (in History Today) an article I wrote that surveys the career of William Walker, the filibuster who upset Vanderbilt's plans for Nicaragua. That piece is located here.

In the Q&A, I addressed some of the issues that I reflect upon regularly, in my vocation as a biographer. Perhaps the most important is what I see as the central conundrum of the genre of biography: the way it marries history and literature—analysis and narrative. Of course, straightforward history can do the same thing, and often does, but biography must do so, or it fails.

Allow me to quote myself, in reference to The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Here I'm discussing the problem posed by Vanderbilt's long lifespan:

"I couldn't honestly strike a single interpretive note, as I did with the short-lived Jesse James. So, too, was there a great deal of change over the decades in Vanderbilt's personality and private life. But I had to provide an organic unity to both my historical interpretations and my portrait of him as an individual. Though I took years to write it, I had to make sure it didn't feel disjoined or pasted together. That meant that I had to rewrite extensively. One reviewer mentioned that the book is full of surprising turns. That's terrific, as long as I managed to present them so that they make sense, emerging organically out of what came before, and not as jarring departures. The Vanderbilt of later years, the diplomatic empire-builder, should seem like the same (if changed) person as the combative monopoly-destroyer of his youth; and both should seem to logically reflect the deeper changes in the American economy and society."

This aspect of biography can be a bit awkward for the professional historian. History tells the story of change over time, of course, but scholars like to pin things down. Example: Historian Glenn C. Altschuler wrote a quite positive review in the Tulsa World, but he was uncomfortable with my account of how Vanderbilt's personality changed, how he became far more gentlemanly in his old age. Altschuler thinks my evidence is "thin." An entirely fair criticism—though I would argue that evidence to the contrary is virtually nonexistent, so thin wins out (not that I agree that it's thin). Such are the ordinary debates of history. But I wonder if it's not evidence that creates the discomfort here, but the very idea of Vanderbilt changing.

In academic writing, individuals are too often nailed down, turned into factors that can be accounted for in our calculations, whereas we know from experience that people are complicated, even contradictory. We know that people change. Indeed, if I had written a novel that depicted Vanderbilt evolving in this way, I doubt that anyone would find it unusual, let alone unbelievable.

But that is what literature is all about: that slippery thing we call the human experience—the Heisenberg-effect reality of individual lives. E.M. Forster observed that fiction is truer than history, because it can breach the surface and get at what lies below the evidence, plunging into the turmoil of the mind. As he wrote, we all know that there is more than the evidence will ever show. History, on the other than, sweeps across vast acreage of the surface, dealing with cultures, societies, polities. It is about the aggregate reality—and it demands evidence.

Biography tries to bring the two together. It is about the individual within a larger world. It demands evidence, but it recognizes the reality that lies beyond the evidence.

You Get the Picture

It's an old joke: In reference to a big, fat tome, someone says, "I just look at the pictures." To that I say, well, good. I put a lot of effort into the pictures.

I think it's worth a few words to stress how valuable illustrations can be in even the most serious book. The most brilliant wordsmith still cannot evoke a scene as powerfully as a well-chosen image. Indeed, a close study of engravings and photographs was crucial to my own understanding of the world I tried to depict in my writing.

Given the length and breadth of Cornelius Vanderbilt's life, I included no less than 79 of them in The First Tycoon. That's a lot. I insisted on grouping them into photo inserts, rather than distributing them throughout the book, because the reproduction quality is far better on the special paper of the inserts. (Not that Knopf resisted my request; it's pretty common.) I still take pleasure in going through them from beginning to end, to see the evolution of Manhattan, the changing clothing and hair styles, the appearance and development of steamboats, steamships, and railroads. More than that, a well-chosen set of illustrations (and well-crafted captions) can encapsulate the story, offering a visual summary of the book's contents. Frankly, that makes images a valuable marketing tool, as much as the jacket flap copy or cover design.

So, too, are maps critical to many books. I commissioned six of them for The First Tycoon. I felt that they were essential for understanding a life that was all about geography—a career that centered on transportation. I admit, I'm a bit of a map nut, but the visual depiction of a region makes all the difference, to my mind.

But it's important to note that publishers make authors pay for illustrations and maps. With the industry in financial trouble, I refuse to attack "greedy publishers," as some customers do when they think a book is overpriced. But it is one of the many ways in which this low-margin business squeezes authors. It's a shame. Financially, the author has every incentive to limit the number of images and maps in a book. Even though they should help sales of a book, the author pays the costs up front, and waits many months for a royalty check—that is, if sales are sufficient to earn out the advance. Many books never reach that point. That means we see fewer and fewer good-quality maps and illustrations in books. I left out some images that I wanted to include (such as the one above, showing the gate to the Staten Island ferry in the 1830s), because I couldn't afford to pay for the reproduction rights.

But I swallowed the bill for enough images to be happy with the illustrations in my latest books. Because illustrations matter.

In All Humility

I'm back from vacation, so I should write a new post for both of my loyal readers (thanks Mom, Brian). This one will sound like a Sunday-school lesson: it's about the importance of humility.

In my last post, I continued a discussion about how to respond to reviews. Though I zeroed in on Alain de Botton's response to Caleb Crain, the same week saw over-the-top responses by other authors. Ayelet Waldman notably wished for The New Yorker's Jill Lepore to rot in hell for a scathing review of Waldman's Bad Mother. And I expressed sympathy for de Botton, even though I liked Crain's review as a piece of writing. I have even more sympathy for Waldman. I respect and admire Jill Lepore's writing very much, but I didn't like this review. I felt that Lepore was too close to the subject, and offered a much too personal response to a book that seems to be deliberately idiosynchratic.

My impression was that Crain's review of de Botton was an honest attempt to identify the failings of a book that clearly rubbed him the wrong way. By contrast, I came away from Lepore's review with a sense that she was just pissed off, because she was a mother and didn't want any advice on the subject. Let me stress: I emphatically say this as someone who has not read the books in question, nor has gone back for a careful rereading of these reviews. These are my gut-level reactions after one reading. But no reviewer can possibly expect readers to carefully reread and dissect a book review—a first impression is the only kind anyone is likely to form.

And yet, Waldman was wrong to wish eternal suffering on Lepore, who has the right to write any damn thing she wants to about anyone's book. When a writer publishes, she or he is deliberately seeking reactions, and cannot reasonably expect them all to consist of praise.

It is often said that we are proud of our scars, because we are only wounded when we take risks. I have practiced traditional karate for 29 years; during that time, I've broken eight bones and had my face cut open several times, leading to literal scars. Yes, I admit, I'm proud of them, even though I would never have been injured at all if I had been more skillful. The point is, I was only hurt when I moved toward my opponent. Scars do not indicate talent or ability, but rather some level of courage. (Or, perhaps, stupidity.)

It takes guts to publish a book, especially one that purports to add to our knowledge, to set a new standard of understanding, as a biography does. (Guts or, perhaps, stupidity.) And, if the book is to be readable, it must be written with confidence. But once it appears in print, confidence must give way to humility. Some will find fault where none exists; others will find fault where it emphatically does exist, having escaped your consideration. Some will ignore the book entirely, the worst insult of all. As a writer, you have to figure out some way of accepting that all of this is out of your hands.

Even worse, someone may publish a book on the same subject that overshadows yours, either with new research, a fresh interpretation, or simply better writing. Scratch that: not may, but almost certainly will. So be it. If it was impossible to write about a subject that has been written about before, almost none of us could write about anything.

And let's not forget literary prizes. Like the Oscars, such awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award often come in for criticism because they overlook deserving books. The writers who are finalists must sometimes grind their teeth down to the gums. But this frustration stems from the mistaken idea that it is possible to objectively identify the single best book in a given category in a given year.

Maybe it is sometimes. When I was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography, I didn't entertain the notion that I might win; Robert Caro came out that year with Master of the Senate, and I thought Caro clearly deserved to win. And he won. But usually it's hard to pin down the best half-dozen books in a category in a given year.

The point is, no matter how good you are, there are a lot of other writers who are as good or better. If you happen to win a prize, then honestly you should accept it in deep humility, because someone else deserves it just as much. Maybe even more.

Of course, I may simply be preparing myself for the likelihood of not winning any prizes. But that doesn't make my advice any less true. All writers benefit from the attention to writing created by literary awards, even when we think the prize juries have gotten their selections all wrong. And all writers benefit from reviews, even when they miss the target. The last thing we want is for books to be forgotten.

On Vacation

I know I won't be missed. Back in a couple of weeks.

How Not to Respond to a Review

I've posted previously about when to respond to a critic. The answer, I wrote, was "almost never." Now comes a lesson in how to respond—or, rather, how not to respond. It comes courtesy of the gentleman pictured here, Alain de Botton.

On June 28, 2009, Caleb Crain published a review of de Botton's new book, Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in the New York Times Book Review. As is typical of Crain's essays, it was intelligent and entertaining. It was also sharply critical of de Botton's book—not typical of Crain's criticism, for he is in no sense a literary hit man.

The next day, de Botton posted a response on Crain's blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. You can read the full thing here, but allow me to excerpt from it:

"It is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. . . . You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. . . . I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude."

Now, let me say that I have not read de Botton's book. I frankly have no basis to tell whether Crain's review is on the mark, off the mark, or is not "sane," as de Botton writes. More important than that caveat is the fact that I sympathize with de Botton's anger. The part of his response that was quoted in my hometown book review, the San Francisco Chronicle, was the "I will hate you till the day I die" sentence. But the most telling part is in the middle: "You have now killed my book in the United States. . . . So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900-word review."

That sums up every writer's attitude toward reviews. Some guy on a deadline rushes through your book (or so you imagine), and delivers a summary judgment that can make or break the product of years and years of effort. Then the critic merrily goes on to demolish another life, as you sit in the ashes. Or so it seems. It's stressful, to say the least.

Indeed, I've been a reviewer, and the experience of being an author led me to temper my criticisms. I pulled back from some of my most negative feelings about the books I've reviewed, precisely because I didn't want to damage the prospects of something an author has labored so hard on—and because, on deeper reflection, I could see the strengths more clearly.

With that said, de Botton's response only reinforces my earlier statement that it almost never pays to respond to a negative review. At best, you look somewhat quarrelsome, oversensitive, unable to cope with criticism. At worst, you can come across as unhinged—as de Botton does. The vindictiveness and hatred in his response makes me (as an uninformed observer) believe that Crain had it exactly right in his criticism. Crain's review depicted a book that was arrogant and snarky in too many places; that impression may be false, but de Botton's intemperate fury only gives weight to Crain's criticism. As I said, Crain is in no sense a butcher of a critic.

I repeat: responding to critics is generally ill-advised. You're lucky to be reviewed at all, and even negative reviews boost book sales. We expect informed opinions, not reporting, from book critics, which means we (readers as well as authors) will often disagree with them. Indeed, anyone who reads book reviews with any regularity knows that even the best books sometimes get undeservedly bad reviews. Many a Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winner has gotten scorched in the New York Times Book Review.

But, if you must respond, do not get emotional. (I've responded angrily to critics—privately, though, not publicly—and I looked like an ass, whether I was right or not.) Rather, calmly and rationally present your case. If there are measures by which you can factually disprove a criticism, lay them out. If there are examples you can give to counter the impression left by a critic, then give them dispassionately.

Obvious advice? Of course. But it's incredibly difficult to calm down before reacting to a bad review. Whatever you do, do not tell a critic you hate him and hope he will suffer. You may think it, but saying it will only hurt your cause.

Addendum to the Post Below

I would add one more thing to the post below:

The book under discussion (Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson) argues that things composed of ideas have a natural tendency to become free—that information "wants" to be free. But this notion can easily be disproved. There are a number of things that no one would ever propose be distributed for free, yet are composed of ideas, consist entirely of information, and are distributed electronically. They have no physical substance. The most important of these is money itself. Most money does not consist of paper bills; the vast majority of the dollars in circulation exist entirely as electronic records, sitting on servers somewhere. They are not physical, and represent nothing tangible, but rather are pure information, pure ideas. Many other things, such as shares of stock, are no longer transmitted by the physical distribution of share certificates, but rather are electronic records in brokerage accounts.

Do these kinds of information want to be free? I don't think so. So why should intellectual property, the product of individual vision, expertise, artistic ability, and years of work be free for all takers? The answer is that there is no reason why this should be so.

Of course, a writer can create intellectual property and choose to distribute it for free. That's what I'm doing with this blog. But the amount of effort that goes into it, sorry to say, is represented in the price. And the price reflects the market demand. In other words, no one reads my blog. This intellectual property is priced for free, because it's worth a lot less than the books I write, which cost actual money. But you knew that, because you're not reading this, are you?

My Information Wants Money, Thank You

Malcolm Gladwell has written an excellent review in the current New Yorker of the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson (who got into trouble for stealing much of his text from, of all places, Wikipedia). You can read Gladwell's review here.

Anderson makes the tired, baseless argument that "information wants to be free." Things made of ideas, he writes, are so cheap to produce as to be basically free. This is nonsense.

First, Gladwell makes the excellent point that "almost free" is a long way from "free" when you start dealing with large volumes. Bandwidth still costs money. But more to the point, in my case, is that the cost of production is not in copying and transmitting an e-book, or even printing a physical book. The cost is seven years of my life, in the case of The First Tycoon. Seven years spent conducting research no one else had ever conducted, that no one else was willing to conduct. Seven years crafting the enormous mound of information I had amassed into a narrative, identifying and fleshing out characters, pacing, foreshadowing, bringing to resolution the flow of events, examining the context, writing.

Why these seven years of my life should be free, because the book is read on a screen instead of a printed page, is beyond my comprehension. I did not simply produce a research report: I created intellectual property. If someone wants it, that means it has value.

My information does not want to be free. It wants money.

Some of my Best Friends are Historians

Since my last post, I've read further in the "round-table discussion" of biography and history in the American Historical Review. I think the relationship between biography and history—or, more precisely, the historical profession—deserves lengthier consideration.

First, a clarification: Blogging is a form that leads to snarkiness with alarming ease. So allow me to expand on what I wrote in my last post. I don't want to suggest that I think academic history or historians are bad. I have no interest in writing scholarly monographs, but I devour many such treatises in my research, and I'm grateful for the hard work that went into them. When I write a biography, I consider it my duty to engage the historiography on subjects vital to my subject, and to offer a fresh perspective on those issues—to make my biography a contribution to historical knowledge, as well as to the mass of biographical details about my subject.

So it is with some dismay that I read the comments of the editors of the American Historical Review about the journal's official attitude toward biography. Clearly, it considers biography to be not merely a different, but a lesser form of scholarship. It does not publish articles biographical in nature, and it does not review biographies.

I find this to be dismaying. With regard to reviews, technically the journal makes an exception for biographies that make a major historical contribution—but how would the editors know, if they refuse to even consider biographies? With Jesse James, I tried to provide a far-reaching argument about the social and political origins of the Civil War in Missouri, and how its conduct there affected the state for decades afterward. This was necessary for my explanation of Jesse James's outlook and popular appeal, but I see it as an intrinsic part of my job as a biographer. I was honored to receive a juried scholarly prize for Civil War scholarship for the book. Yet the American Historical Review did not bother to review it.

Trust me, I'm not angry or peevish about it. Rather than being upset that AHR didn't review it, I was surprised and pleased that a noted historian did review it for other scholarly journals, such as the Journal of American History and the Missouri Historical Review. The problem, rather, is that the oversight represents a deeper problem in the historical profession, one that is a byproduct of professionalization itself.

Professionalization begins as a good thing. It springs from an attempt to eliminate amateurishness, to create consistent standards, establish a systematic approach, and raise the quality of work performed in a field. But it often becomes a means by which a group attempts to close and control a market—to fend off outsiders. This process works in such a way that the participants are unaware that this is what they are doing. They see themselves as upholding scholarly standards, when what they are sometimes doing is fighting to maintain monopoly control of the market against interlopers—some of them worthy.

In the case of academic history, the market is historical publications, and the outsiders are non-academic writers. Biography represents a special challenge in this regard. It is a genre that breaks all the rules of academic history, since it focuses on individuals, transgresses across the field's standardized time periods, and tramples willy-nilly into various specialities. It is also popular with a general audience, which means it can be and is produced for reasons other than academic advancement, which means it can be and is produced without regard to academic preoccupations (such as jargon, or checking through the list of current academic concerns), which means it can be and is produced by writers outside of the field of academic history, who are paid for their efforts with money, not tenure.

The freedom with which biography is published outside of the academy leads to two results: First, a lot of bad biographies get published, as far as I'm concerned. For all of my kvetching about academic historians, I share many of their concerns, and have definite views on what makes a good and important biography. Many popular biographies are indeed bad history, and I regret it. But that fact does not justify the second result: that academic historians often scorn biography and biographers.

This scorn is particularly ironic, as David Nasaw points out in his introduction to the round-table discussion, because academic historians (such as Nasaw) are producing biographies at an increasing rate. Why do they do so? Because biography is a marvelous means of exploring history—and you needn't have the "great men make history" outlook to believe that. As I mentioned, biography crosses the chronological and thematic divides of the historical discipline, offering a richer, more organic portrait of the past, often providing the biographer with a longer-range and more nuanced understanding.

With The First Tycoon, I traced the evolution of the culture and politics of the economy—as well as the economy itself—across many decades, from the eighteenth-century culture of deference to the birth of the corporate economy. Even as I read widely, my biographical research took me deep, into sources that I had not seen in standard historical works. Now, critics both in and out of the academy will decide if my book represents a contribution to our historical knowledge; but writing it was truly an enlightening experience, one I would not have had as a standard historian.

When it comes down to it, I think a strong distinction between historians and biographers is silly and artificial. There's a reason why academics such as David Nasaw and Maury Klein produce fine biographies, and why such non-academic biographers such as Jean Strouse produce works that are also excellent history. I think biographers are fully aware that what they do is a part of the larger enterprise of history, as much as it is also a branch of literature; let's just hope the editors of the American Historical Review wake up to that, too.