Happy Birthday, Commodore

Thursday, May 27, 2010, is the 216th birthday of Commodore Vanderbilt. With a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize on my shelf, I really must wish him a happy birthday.

Not that he was an easy man to like. Vanderbilt fought his way from near the very bottom to the absolute top (in fact, you could say he invented a new top), and he was nothing if not fierce. He embodied profound conundrums for the American republic, as he both created enormous wealth for his fellow countrymen and pioneered a severely polarized society, amassing power never before seen in private hands.

Yet let's give him due credit: He was truly self-made, earned his pride in himself, and, if ruthless, was also honest, and promoted the interests of the stockholders of his corporations as did no other chief executive of his day (or perhaps ours). As a biographer, it's my duty to follow a balanced approach to my subject, rather than preach a message, using him as a mere vehicle for preconceived views. Vanderbilt has suffered far too much of the latter over the decades.

I have another reason to wish the Commodore well. I suspect that his ghost tried to stop to my biography early on. In October 2003, when I had been at work on The First Tycoon for a year already, I was a passenger on the Staten Island Ferry boat Andrew Barberi when it crashed. (Vanderbilt founded the original version of the modern-day ferry.)

I should stress that I am not making light of that event. Tragically, eleven people died, amid horror that I did not experience, since I was on the upper deck where no one was hurt.

They don't allow you to dedicate Pulitzer Prizes, the way you do books. So let me just say, on the 216th anniversary of the Commodore's birth, that I'm honoring the people who didn't make it across New York harbor on that windy day in 2003.

Pulitzer Day

Today is Pulitzer Day. Columbia University will be holding the ceremonies to honor this year's winners of the Pulitzer Prizes.

My wife asked if I was nervous. No, not nervous; I was at the National Book Award ceremony, when we didn't know the winners in advance. Now I'm mainly worried about how my son will hold up with his godmother, while we are inside, and I'm eager to meet the other writers. But that's not all.

It's a hell of a thing, winning a prize like this. As I've said before, I don't kid myself that I was the only choice; a lot of deserving writers, including the finalists, could easily have won. What I do feel is a sense of validation for my approach to writing. Like, I'm absolutely sure, every other winner and finalist past and present, I believe that scholarly and literary qualities can co-exist in a book, and actually strengthen each other. That marriage of literature and scholarship is the classic sense of letters, the category of Pulitzer that I've been honored with.

The Pulitzer prizes are important not just because they grant recognition to this book or help the career of that struggling author. They matter because they remind us of the importance of letters. For that reason, I've always found them to be exciting. This year, it's a little more than that.

I'm in daunting company now. Which means I'll have to work even harder.

The BIO Conference

I'm headed to Washington on the train as I write this, having been a panelist in Boston on Saturday at the first annual conference of BIO, the Biographers International Organization. If any members of the organization or attendees are reading this, I'd like to thank you for your participation. I enjoyed it, and I learned something myself. I was on a panel on self-editing, and the very act of expressing my thoughts on writing, hearing the other panelists, and responding to questions forces me to ponder how I approach my writing.

It's very useful—and a lot of fun to interact with other biographers, both the well-established and beginning.

Fair is Fair

In addition to writing biographies, I have a very small role as a critic. See, for example, my review in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune of Nathaniel Philbrick's new book, The Last Stand.

My experience as an author tempers my criticism. On one hand, it's true that I find it infuriating when a writer has not done his or her homework—when I see laziness or unexamined assumptions. On the other hand, I'm very well aware of how difficult it is to get reviewed at all. When someone does take your work seriously by reviewing it, you—the author—do not want to see it butchered. You spend years pouring your soul (and every waking hour) into a book, and it can seem like some jerk took an hour or two to cut all that work to ribbons.

So I want to be fair.

One of the most important questions, when it comes to being fair, regards the ambitions of the book in question. Not all books should be judged by the same standards, because not all books set out to do the same things.

One example is the scholarly monograph (a narrowly focused study of a specific topic, written for an audience of professional historians). I've heard non-academic writers dismiss scholarly writing because it isn't literary, or often even remotely fun to read. But the field of history is built on monographs; they are the bricks and mortar of historical knowledge. We who write narratives draw on the painstaking work of academic historians. The field needs professional standards, analysis, and theoretical discourse. Yes, it's true that the scholarly monograph is not a literary work—but that is not its purpose, nor its value.

By the same token, I often hear academics snort at narratives written for a general audience as lightweight or "popular." Sometimes this simply isn't true, but rather reflects the discomfort that professional scholars feel in the presence of non-academics who challenge their work. But even in cases where the complaint contains some truth, it's not necessarily fair.

Some historical-narrative writers simply do not aim to create new knowledge, as scholars do. The entire purpose of their books is to create a literary—or at least fluid and pleasurable—experience, telling a compelling story with interesting characters. Theirs are synthetic works, often based almost entirely on secondary sources. Of course, it's frequently true that such books fail to meet scholarly standards; their writers, if they lack a grounding in the historiography, often make mistakes, oversimplify, or simply misinterpret the evidence. Nonetheless, these "popular" books can serve a valuable purpose, weaving the elements produced by academics into a coherent whole.

In my biographies—at least to date—I have tried to combine scholarly and literary values. My hope is that I can not only synthesize what academic historians have done, but conduct fresh research and ask new questions about the historical context in which my subjects moved. I also wish to create a well-paced narrative populated by complex characters. I try to think deeply about what my material says to me about the human condition, and I try to write as gracefully as I can.

I hardly invented this approach. I see it working wonders in books that I greatly admire, by such writers as Richard Rhodes, Robert Caro, and James McPherson, among others. It can easily be overdone as well; when a writer tries too hard, he or she ends up visibly straining—or, even worse, coming across as pompous and self-important.

But my point is this: It is not right for me, as a critic, to apply the same standards to other works. Some criteria apply; some do not. Even a very serious biography that devotes little time to the historical context, for example, can succeed as a probing portrait and a well-written narrative. It depends on the book. Fair is fair.

Advertising doesn't work—unless it does

Today I did what I always do on Sunday morning: collect the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle off the front step, pour a cup of coffee, and pull out the book review sections first. (These are the only two newspapers left in the country with freestanding book review sections on Sunday.) I read the New York Times Book Review—known as the NYTBR among authors and publishing types—cover to cover. Then, for some reason, I opened it up again. There I saw it.

On the contents page, right-hand side, in full-color glory, was an advertisement for my book, The First Tycoon. I had received no warning that it would run, so I had the pleasure of discovering it for myself. It essentially announced two critical things about my book: First, that it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and second, that it is now available in paperback.

And it worked, at least momentarily. That's judging by the only real-time gauge that I have access to, the Amazon sales ranking. I've been taking a look at the page for my book more often after the Pulitzer was announced, and was very pleased then to see it drop below 1,000. There was some overlap, when the paperback was just out, but a lot of people were buying hardcovers, but that was starting to sort itself out as more people bought paperbacks. Then this ad came, and the book fell (rose, really) to the 200-range, in terms of bestselling books. I thought at first that maybe Mother's Day was the explanation, but this ad makes more sense of it.

But here's the kicker: Generally speaking, I don't believe advertising works for books. I've known a lot of authors who moan about their publishers' lack of advertising, but I think it's all misplaced. For the most part it's publicity, reviews, and word of mouth that sell books, not ads. Advertising works best for brands, but the only brands in publishing are the authors. Unless you have a well-established reputation as a hotselling or prestigious writer, ads don't help you. But if you do fall into these happy categories, then ads remind readers that you, the author they love, have a new book out. Ads are also a message—an expensive one—to the trade that your publisher is putting money behind your book. I say this as someone who once worked by day in publishing, writing advertising for books (an educational experience, since I was working on my own books and articles by night).

But every once in a while there's an exception to this rule. That exception is when a book has gotten into the news for some reason. In my case, it's the Pulitzer Prize (coming on top of the National Book Award). Many readers have now heard of my book, and with a little extra prompting—especially notice that it's available in cheaper paperback—they might actually buy it.

Speaking of publicity, this is the sort of thing that's usually a huge help: a recent interview with BBC World News America. And no, I wasn't actually perched above the Golden Gate Bridge. Though the location from which the background was shot is about a 60-second drive from our house. Here's that clip.