A Little Help?

I'm not really sure why I keep this blog going. It's not specifically about Cornelius Vanderbilt, let alone Jesse James. (For more information on those gentlemen, you must go to my official author website, www.tjstiles.com.) This blog is about writing biography. When you write for writers, not readers, you can count on a pretty small audience. Yet I soldier on, if only to coalesce my thinking for my own reference later on.

This post might be of interest to those who have read my two biographies, however. I would like to stress the importance of getting a little help when preparing a manuscript; in so doing, I'd like to thank those who helped me, and who deserve credit for helping to make my books much better.

A lot of people work on any given book, of course, and I expressed my appreciation to them in my remarks upon receiving the 2009 National Book Award for nonfiction. But I'm referring here to scholars—those with particular expertise relating to the subject I'm writing about.

It boggles my mind how generous even leading academic historians have been with me. When I was writing Jesse James, some of the foremost historians of Missouri and the border states during the Civil War era reviewed my manuscript, and offered valuable feedback. Among others, I should note William E. Parrish, the dean of Missouri history, and Christopher Phillips, easily one of the most insightful historians of the border states as well as a biographer of Missouri Civil War figures. I also sent my huge, unedited manuscript on Cornelius Vanderbilt to a number of scholars, including Robert E. May of Purdue, the dean of filibuster history, Joyce Appleby, a truly profound historian who united cultural, political, and economic history, Maury Klein, one of the finest business historians of the last century, and Richard R. John, one of the foremost historians of communications. And this is by no means a complete list.

Why did I send my manuscript to these scholars (after asking first, that is)? After all, I am not an academic myself; I needn't garner favor in the faculty club. I did so for three reasons. First, I wanted to be sure that I wasn't making errors. We can excuse a mistake or two in a book, but we don't forgive a wholesale failure to understand some aspect of the subject. I didn't want to fall on my face in public, so I chose to do so in private, with some generous authorities.

Second, I wanted to get different perspectives from people who knew something about my subjects. Most of the feedback I received wasn't in the nature of fact-checking, but rather suggestions for further reading, hints that perhaps I should consider an alternative interpretation of a piece of evidence, even a warning that calling Vanderbilt's steamships "she" might not go over well with many women. My books were enormously enriched by all such comments.

Third, academic input was essential if I were to meet my goals for my books. In my writing I am trying to do three things simultaneously: to give the reader pleasure—even fun; to attain some of the artistry, wisdom, and nuance of literature; and also to create knowledge, in the most serious sense. I admit that I sometimes fail on each of these points. But pursuing all three is a worthy goal, isn't it? Frankly, I don't know how highly most historians rate my works; but I do know that any scholarly value my books do have was greatly enhanced by the comments from my benefactors, the historians mentioned above.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. You'll be surprised by how much you receive. But I hope you'll give a break to the historians who helped me. If you saw the size of the unedited manuscripts I sent them, you'd take pity on them.

Prepare to be Amazed

Is politics bad for political history?

The recent discussion of the tone of political rhetoric matters a great deal to this historical biographer. No, I am not going to pronounce on the recent tragedy in Tucson. No, I am not going to rate the level of political hostility now, compared to its historical highs and lows. Rather, I want to talk about the problem that political partisanship poses for historical writing.

It is a problem for the reader as well as the writer. When we have strongly partisan feelings, it deeply affects our openness to new information. Studies have demonstrated clearly that we reject information that runs against our political views, but eagerly accept even flimsy claims that reinforce our existence prejudices.

This is true regardless of whether you stand on the left, right, or in the center. It's probably because partisanship is about competition—about defeating rival forces. What helps us promote our cause jumps out at us; what makes the battle more difficult, or calls our cause into question, we tend to dismiss.

Readers, then, tend to react angrily to even non-partisan, scholarly works of history that contradict their partisan views. And writers sometimes ignore or distort evidence because of their political prejudices.

But I believe that biography, and history in general, must be a search for truth. To find the truth, you must prepare to be amazed. That is, both writers and readers should have an openness to information that challenges your pre-existing ideas. We shouldn't abandon judgment, of course; but our criteria should be politically neutral, going to the matter of credibility in particular.

This probably sounds reasonable, but it's very difficult to pull off. In writing The First Tycoon, I often found that my assumptions fell apart—often for the simple reason that things change. How could you apply the political viewpoints of today's world to the early nineteenth century, when the nation was largely agricultural; when there was no big business; when corporations were not only relatively few, but were viewed as vehicles for public works? Adam Smith, the original theoretician of free-market economics, also condemned corporations in The Wealth of Nations, because they served a very different function when he wrote in 1776. The arguments of 1830 were very different from those of today; and business competition carried different political meaning, and had very different political effects, than it does today.

To understand it all, I had to abandon my present-day partisanship, and see Cornelius Vanderbilt in his own context. I tried to be honest about all aspects of his career and personality. Rather than use him as a prop in arguing about the present, I focused on how Americans at the time argued about him, and how his rise helped change the political debate. I didn't want to promote him as a hero or villain; he was more complicated than that, and more interesting.

Note, however, I am not calling for an iconoclastic rejection of national heroes. But our admiration, and our sense of ourselves, should be strong enough to accept the contradictions of human nature. We shouldn't be so fragile as to insist upon perfection in figures of the past. I frankly celebrate George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and many other American heroes. Historical honesty has not lessened my admiration for them; the reverse, in fact. If they were perfect individuals living in flawless ages, then their accomplishments would have been easy, wouldn't they? Instead, they rose above their own flaws, and the pervasive problems of their day, to create this nation and make it a better place.

But celebration should not be the purpose of history. Searching for the truth is. And the truth is sometimes amazing.

Next Recommendation: Conrad, the Not-So Secret Sharer

One of my favorite English writers is a man who grew up speaking Polish: Joseph Conrad. And one of my favorite Conrad novels, one I reread when writing The First Tycoon, is Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. (The link will help you find it at your local independent bookstore.)

Conrad has received a lot of grief as an imperialist, Eurocentric writer who treated the peoples of the rest of the world as a lot of savages. I think this beef is largely wrong, often drastically wrong, even though no writer is above criticism. My advice is that everyone read him and then debate him—because he's really worth reading.

Conrad shares many of the characteristics of great writers. He thinks deeply about the human condition, and probes human nature under often extreme circumstances. He can inhabit radically different characters, making them fully alive on the page (many of those characters being non-Europeans). He creates rich, believable worlds. As he once wrote, his goal was, above all, to make you see. In our visual age, that capacity for cinematic imagination should be appreciated more than ever.

In Nostromo, Conrad tells a tale of high politics, family struggle, and intense drama, set in a fictional South American country. He brilliantly depicts radically different perspectives on fast-moving events—from the old Italian revolutionary to the Englishman who shakes up the country by opening a lucrative silver mine, from a brutal dictator to a San Francisco financier to the heroic stevedore whose name provides the title.

I came to see my book, though nonfiction, as following the pattern set by Nostromo, an epic tale of business, politics, war, and adventures at sea, populated by an enormous range of characters, each with his or her own agenda and impulses. I didn't try to mimic Conrad, of course, but I wanted to capture some of the qualities that make Nostromo such a treat for me. After all, they say that writers ultimately write their books for themselves. If they didn't, then writing would seem like working for a living.

War and Peace

Next reading recommendation: Another classic, plus a less well-known work.

We all know that Leo Tolstoy was a Great Writer, and that War and Peace is a Great Book. What I want to tell you is that he really really is a great writer and that it really really is a great book. By "great" I don't just mean important, in the intellectual-milestone meaning of the word. I mean "great" as in, when you finish this book you will go around telling your friends they have to read it.

What Tolstoy's classic such a treat to read is also what makes it essential reading for the historical biographer. First, his writing is beautiful, but in a perfectly natural way—you never roll your eyes and think that Tolstoy sure is a show-off. Second, he creates a world that is rich in detail and sweeping in scope, from Napoleon's camp to the peasant village, from St. Petersburg to the muddy fields of battle. It is all so vivid, so real, yet so panoramic that you will have dreams about it all, as if you were there.

But perhaps most important is that Tolstoy is interested in his characters, not the strategies and policies of emperors or the movements of armies. In this, he has much to teach us biographers. To my mind, biography is an insistence on the significance of the individual, even though it is a kind of off-shoot of history. We biographers want to get at the single human existence in the sea of society and the tidal flows of events. Not that I fully agree with Tolstoy's view of history; in this book, he goes so far as to deny any role for individual leaders in shaping history. The mass of humanity is what makes history, he writes; yet ironically this view leads him to focus on the individual experience, on lives lived amid the turmoil. It is this book's literary lesson, not its self-proclaimed sociological or historical one, that endures.

As I said, this book is a treat. But if you feel daunted by its size (and you shouldn't be), try his very brief Hadji Murad, so short it's nearly a novella. This historical tale has all the drama and panoramic qualities of War and Peace, compressed into barely 100 pages. I discovered this book rather recently, given my love of Tolstoy, but it was a delight to finally find it.

Nuclear-Powered Prose

Next book recommendation: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. You can find it at your local independent bookstore here. 


This book, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, deserves its status as a modern classic. Making should be read by every writer of nonfiction (or "verity," as Rhodes prefers to call it, since he finds the negation of fiction to be a poor way of defining a broad and vital literary form). It combines investigation, analysis, and explanation with literary virtues with such, well, virtuosity that I find it simultaneously inspiring and humbling. It's a rare book that portrays complex, fully realized characters, elucidates complex technical matters, and also is simply thrilling.


Rhodes shares his fascination with the details of science, the journey of discovery, even as he pays close attention to the reader's pleasure. I found his account of the chase after the neutron, for example, to be as fast-paced as the story of the deployment and use of the atomic bomb itself. The tale also left me feeling enriched. But Rhodes keeps his eye on the people in his story. The scientists emerge as fully formed human beings; I finished the book with the sense that I personally had spent time with real individuals.

Rhodes proves that a book can be a serious achievement in intellectual and literary terms, and also a treat to read.

Postscript:
To Anonymous: I'm grateful for your close reading of my blog, and comforted that you are irritated by imprecise and uneconomical writing. I wish more writers equipped themselves with same the hair trigger that you seem to have.  And I find your suggestion that I hire a copy editor (or "copy-editor," as you put-it) to be a whimsical hoot, implying that this blog generates income. Very funny! However, anonymous comments will not be approved. You're all welcome to comment on this blog—but you have to own up to it.