The Biographer's Blog

Moving to a Blog Near You

2012-01-31T10:01:00.000-08:00

Readers, I will be suspending this blog, and trying to set up anew with some other hosting service. The reason is Google's new privacy policy:

"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."

That is a whopper. I'm not comfortable publishing any work through a service that claims a "worldwide license to . . . reproduce, modify, create derivative works . . . publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute such content." The last sentence does modify it a bit, true, but I think Google's lawyers could find away around language they wrote. In any event, even such "promotional" rights as translation are rights traditionally reserved to authors, to be alienated by choice, not by Google fiat.

As I've been saying in regard to piracy, it's not about potential financial losses, but my free-speech rights—my right to control when and where my words are published.

For the record, let me state here clearly that I do NOT grant Google any of these rights in anything I've published on this or any other blog prior to the publication of this new policy.

I will close with a link to a much better argument about copyright than any I've made here, by the great Caleb Crain:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/caleb_crain_why_matt_yglesias_is_wrong_about_copyright.html

In Praise of Digitization (Really!)

2012-01-27T10:56:00.000-08:00

I have gone on record as an opponent of piracy. I know, many of you argue that piracy doesn't actually hurt authors. In terms of sales, you may even be right. But it's the principle: My speech is mine, to publish as I choose. If you want to publish for free, it's very easy for you to do so. I'll defend your right to do it, and defend your right to say any damn thing you want. Give me the same courtesy.

But I do love the free flow of speech afforded by the new digital world. After all, as a nonfiction author, I consume information as well as provide it. So let me say a few things in favor of e-everything.

Google has done me a huge favor by digitizing and making available books that are no longer copyright-protected. The New York Times deserves great praise for making its archive searchable (though its search engine stinks). Private companies have helped us all with digitized newspapers and documents, in various Proquest or Readex databases, for example. Since this is all public-domain material, I would like to see the National Archives, Library of Congress, and public libraries compete with these firms, whose databases are available only to deep-pocketed research libraries and universities. But these companies are providing great products, I must admit.

And I like the fact that people are carrying their love of books into age of the handheld device, and that buying e-books is so easy. I don't retreat from my support for public libraries and independent bookstores in the face of predatory Internet booksellers, but I don't pretend that the situation's all bad. People are buying and reading books—that's good.

I do hope the codex—the traditional printed and bound book—survives, that it will be economically feasible to keep printing them. I find them useful, especially when reading for research, when I have three fingers holding three different places simultaneously. I find them beautiful, and love scanning the spines of my library. Most of all, I find them to be lasting. Operating systems change. Code gets rewritten. I don't know how much software I've bought over the years that is completely inaccessible now. I don't want some engineer in two or five or twenty years making some "improvement" that seals the door on my library.

Parsing PIPA

2012-01-23T13:08:00.000-08:00

I've noticed that the attacks on PIPA (I'm going to disregard SOPA, an inferior bill) have not referenced the actual content of the bill; they reference exaggerate claims made by hysterics. So here, my readers, is the bill itself. Read it and judge for yourself:

http://leahy.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/BillText-PROTECTIPAct.pdf

First, let me say that, were I given the power to write an anti-piracy law, I would focus on stopping the flow of money to piracy sites, not on taking down the sites entirely. But let's address the complaints about PIPA.

1) Complaint: It was written by congresspeople who don't understand the Internet.
Really? Senators and Representatives actually delegate the writing of bills to their staffs. Do you really think their staff members don't know anything about the Internet? In any event, point something out in this bill that reflects a lack of understanding of the Internet, and I will apologize for taking issue with this claim. I've given you the link: Find the section, quote it to me, and explain why it reflects a lack of understanding of the Internet.

2) Complaint: This bill was custom-written by the big movie industry so they can protect their profits.
In terms of wealth and power, the Internet industry has Hollywood beat. Would you rather own stock in Google or Paramount? Which is the bigger, more profitable, and more influential company? Why are one set of lobbyists and interests worse than the others? Do you really think there's no legitimate public interest in fighting piracy, just because piracy hurts Hollywood? In any event, this is simply a rumor. Even if it is true, point out the section of the bill that is objectionable because it was purportedly written by Hollywood. I gave you the link: Exactly which part is evil because of this supposed fact?

And, as I have said, this isn't just about the movie and music industry. They are the biggest players, in terms of money, but the interests of thousands of individual authors are in peril. Ignore us in your fight to protect piracy, and you are making Stalin's argument: To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. I, my friends, am the egg in this analogy.

3) Complaint: This bill would destroy innovation, and allow YouTube and Facebook to be taken down.
The bill specifically says that it applies to foreign sites "dedicated to infringing activity." On both points, YouTube and Facebook and the vast majority of sites on the Internet are safe. Nor does the bill include anything endangering individuals who post links, or even upload material. The bill says it imposes no new criminal penalties for copyright infringement. Individual uploaders would be as safe as they ever were.

4) Complaint: This bill would silence speech, and allow un-Constitutional prior restraint of speech.
If PIPA does this, then no law against piracy would stand scrutiny. But it's not true. By being aimed at foreign sites dedicated to infinging activity, the bill targets sites that are stealing other people's speech—that are actually doing harm to freedom of speech—not sites that provide original speech of their own. This is why the "prior restraint" claim is hogwash. You can't be guilty of restraint of speech, when the target isn't making any speech—just selling someone else's. In fact, the bill requires a hearing before a judge before any action can be taken, and specifically allows the target to fight any take-down in court.

Imagine if this protection were allowed to burglars and thieves of physical property. Imagine a truck being backed up to a bookstore, and thieves broke into the store and began hauling out books and software boxes, and putting them in the truck. The police would have to say, "OK, keep stealing while we find a judge and have a hearing. If you're still here when we get approval to stop this operation, then you'll have to give up the books, but we won't be able to arrest you."

Of course, what happens in the real world is, if police happened on the scene, they would arrest the thieves without a prior hearing. If police discovered a chop-shop or fencing operation, they would shut it down immediately, impound the property, and arrest the perps running it; only then would it go to court. I'm often told that the Internet has changed things. Yes: with the Internet economy so large a part of the overall economy, intellectual property should be treated as fully the equivalent of physical property, deserving of the same protection. PIPA actually provides less protection for intellectual property in digital form than existing law does for intellectual property in physical form.

5) Complaint: This bill would give moral support to the censorship efforts of China and other dictatorships, which block access to sites they find politically objectionable.
This is the silliest of all arguments against PIPA. Read PIPA. There is nothing in the bill allowing the blocking of sites because of their content. The act is specifically and clearly aimed at sites that are "dedicated" to stealing copyrighted material. The aim is to support the publication of material, by protecting copyright. Again, to use an analogy, this is like saying we can't criticize China for censoring the publication of certain books, because we have laws against the theft of physical books. Ridiculous.

Kim Dotcom. Credit: 3News in New Zealand

I'll say it again: Piracy destroys freedom of speech. The pirate takes away my right to control the publication of my work. The pirate, by distributing my work for free, damages my ability to profit from it, and profit allows me to create new work. Piracy tends to silence me. And who profits? Felons like Kim Dotcom.

I'm a little tired of the argument that has been spoon-fed to the public by the Internet giants: "Yes, piracy is a problem, but I offer no solutions, and in the meantime let me keep pirating."

Piracy Destroys Free Speech

2012-01-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

There's a big fuss going on in Internet circles about SOPA and PIPA, two bills now being debated in Congress that would allow the Justice Department to shut down websites involved in the piracy of intellectual property—movies, music, books.

To be specific, the Internet industry hates these bills.

The Internet industry is huge, but it makes it sound like they are the little guys, fighting rapacious capitalists. According to ABC News, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing said, "If you want an Internet where human rights, free speech, and the rule of law are not subordinated to the entertainment industry's profits, I hope you'll join us."

As you might guess, I have a different view.

Let's be clear: I am not endorsing SOPA or PIPA. The bills are still being amended, and we don't really know what they will ultimately do. Personally, I think Congress should focus on stopping the flow of money to pirates, rather than shutting down websites. But the details of the bills don't matter to the Internet giants. They don't think piracy is a problem. They are trying to dupe you into thinking that any attempt to stop piracy is hostile to freedom of speech.

And that has it exactly backwards.

First, drop the demagoguery about the movie and music industry. Yes, they have by far the biggest amount of money in play, and sure, many of them are big businesses. I'm not here to defend them, but to shift the focus. My point is that they aren't the only ones hurt by piracy. Piracy actually damages the little guy, the individual author, more than anyone. Big movie studios can absorb some piracy. An author can't.

The fact is, piracy destroys freedom of speech. By stealing my work, distributing it for free, you make it impossible for me to profit by writing. Yes, to profit: If you can create a completely new economic system, under which I will have all my worldly needs taken care of so I can write without worrying about money, great! Give it to me. In the meantime, I have to make money from writing to keep writing.

I spent close to seven years working full-time on The First Tycoon. Amateurism wouldn't allow that kind of effort. If I was an academic, I would have taken at least twice as long to finish it, and it would have been a very different book, since it would have had to serve my scholarly career; it would have been written first and foremost for academics. I like to think my book has some value as it is—as the product of professional writing, not academic or amateur.

I will be the first to say that copyright has been distorted in recent years—yes, thanks to the lobbying of the entertainment industry. It should be for a limited period, not life of the author plus, what is it now? Seventy years? Fifty? But the excessive extension of copyright doesn't negate the need for copyright itself. It is specifically listed as a responsibility of Congress in Article 1 of the Constitution. The purpose, the Constitution says, is "to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Internet millenarians—the Information Wants to be Free crowd—claim that making writing free is actually good for writers . . . somehow. I support the right of any author to publish his or her work for free. Go to it! But why should you impose your model on me? Why deny me the right to get paid for my work? Why are you allowed to strip away my "exclusive Right to [my] respective Writings and Discoveries"?

Look, there's never been any difficulty in giving away your work for free. In the Internet age, anyone can publish for the public with minimal cost. The problem is keeping it from being only free—to protect authors' rights to their work. It's a real dilemma. Unfortunately, it is in the business interests of Internet giants to promote piracy, and convince readers that it's a good thing. More traffic, less hassle. Google makes more money—but authors get crushed.

If you take away copyright protection, you silence me. You take away my freedom of speech. I write research-intensive projects that take years to complete. I try to create works of literary art that also add to our knowledge. I can only do that if my intellectual-property rights are protected, so I can make a living at it.

Freedom of speech does not include the theft of someone else's speech. What it means is that I have the right to speak as I wish, where I wish, when I wish. If I choose to charge a price for access to my work, that is part of my freedom of speech, and taking away that choice is denying me my liberty of expression.

SOPA and PIPA may well be the wrong way to protect copyright. I'm not speaking up for them specifically. What I am saying is something that has gotten lost in the furor: piracy destroys freedom of speech.

Old Material, New Writing

2012-01-06T17:31:00.000-08:00

Bloomberg now has a financial history blog, rather like the New York Times's Disunion blog on the history of the Civil War. Called Echoes, it's the brainchild of the very accomplished historian Stephen Mihm. I just wrote a piece for Echoes, on the early history of insider trading on Wall Street, focusing mainly on Daniel Drew (pictured here). You can find the piece here.

It's kind of funny, my flogging an article (well, blog entry) so soon after writing about the need to screw yourself into your chair to work on your new book. But this is actually in keeping with my previous theme. The piece wasn't a major new project, taking me away from my real work; rather, I put to use some research that didn't make it fully into my previous book.

Old material makes for efficient new writing, while you're working on something bigger. Don't throw out those computer files and boxes of photocopies; they can come in handy. But, for the biographer, the next book is always the point.

Going Dark

2012-01-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

Those who write books for a living—specifically, those who have written more than one book—know what it's like to go dark: that is, to enter the years between the publication of one book and the next. When a book comes out, there's a period of excitement, dread, and frenzied activity—promoting the book every way you can think of, hoping for and then fearing reviews, speaking to crowds of two or three people at bookstores, or (if you're lucky) a large, paying audience. Then the attention dwindles down, and you remember that you're already supposed to be working on the next book.

For some, there isn't much of a wait. Anthony Trollope (pictured here) wrote like a madman. In an era of handwriting, he published book after book, scribbling hundreds of words a day, according to a daily target he set for himself—while working full-time in the Post Office and running for Parliament. Of course, he was a novelist; he merely observed, and made stuff up. But we have our own Trollopesque writers today, working in nonfiction. H.W. Brands is a tenured professor of history at the University of Texas; he produces roughly a book a year. Some of them are very well regarded; others clearly show the unfortunate effects of being rushed.

There are legitimate reasons to move quickly to finish a book. Money matters, of course; nor is it good for your brand (for the author is the brand in publishing) to wait too long before releasing a new book. Sometimes a book must be timely, and therefore has to be crashed through the writer's, and publisher's, schedule.

But there's another reason why writers rush: that lonely feeling of not being heard, of not being talked about, after the preceding thrill of publishing a book. Going dark is tough. Of course, there are articles, reviews, blogs, and other outlets—more than ever these days—that can feed the ego. But I think we often reach the point when we should just shut up and work. The ego can be dangerous to the quality of work.

Writing, after all, is a discipline. It requires patience, care, and thoroughness. This is true for both nonfiction and fiction. We must be masters of our subjects, omniscient and omnipotent lords of our words—of every single word. Writing is inefficient, but there's no way to multiply productivity in any significant way without eventually damaging the quality of the writing.

Of course, some writing must be done on deadline; some books are meant to quickly inform or entertain, period, and the author's worrying overmuch about the the prose may be beside the point, even counterproductive. I am speaking of a particular kind of book, the kind that is intended to attain literary quality, that is meant to provide new knowledge and insights. To produce that kind of book, you have to learn to work in the dark.

Unless you're Anthony Trollope. Then knock yourself out.

The Blurb

2011-12-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

It's holiday time again, a time when visions of dradles and pop-guns dance in children's heads. Or at least when video games burn out their eyes. For the more literate set, books are the stuff of gifts given and gifts hoped for. Have I mentioned that The First Tycoon and Jesse James make lovely gifts? I usually advise that people buy three copies of Tycoon: one to read, one to use as a footrest, and one to take to sea, in case your clipper ship needs more ballast.

This year I'm represented in the marketplace less by my own work, than by the blurbs I have given to others. Blurbs—promotional quotes—are the subject of universal cynicism by all but the authors who beg and plead for them from other authors. They are so universal that it would make a book look sorry indeed if no one had anything nice to say about it in advance. The late, lamented Spy magazine used to run a column called "Log-rolling In Our Time," showing how authors blurbed each other's books. The Simpsons had a bit, set at a writers' conference called "Wordloaf," in which Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen agree to praise each other, but one of them breaks his promise, and praises himself. Pretty funny, come to think about it...

But allow me to say a brief word in defense of the much-maligned blurb. I, for one, blurb only a small fraction of the books that are sent to me. That's because I only blurb books I've read. And I only blurb books I like. More than that, I am careful in my praise, so that I only blurb the aspects of the book that I feel uncomplicated admiration for. I can't imagine that I'm the only one who has such rules. Since I've started blurbing, I've actually developed more respect for the blurbs I read on others' books.

Yes, of course, I am more generous in blurbing than in reviewing. Reviewing is a critical exercise; blurbing is a commercial one, sending readers a simple message: they'll find a book worth their investment of time and money. And I am moved by collegiality: I sympathize and empathize with writers forced to frantically drum up blurbs, driven by the reality of publishing to engage in the very thing they wanted to avoid by becoming writers in the first place: marketing. But does any of this mean my promotional quotes are worthless? Not at all.

It's the season of peace and love, right? So cut the authors and their blurbers some slack. And give a book for Christmas or Hannukah, fer cryin' out loud. Buy it at your local independent bookstore, if you can, but buy.

Negative Review = Libel?

2011-11-30T09:37:00.001-08:00

Niall Ferugson is one of the most successful historians in the world. His many books are bestsellers. He has an endowed professorship at Harvard University. He hobnobs with influential conservatives. He's even an international television star.

In other words, he's got nothing to worry about.

So it's disappointing to see him overreact to a harsh review from journalist Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books. He wrote to the editors, clearly hinting that he might sue for libel. You can read about it on the Los Angeles Times website, or the Guardian over in the UK. It's an overreaction, and it will only serve to make him look bad—as if runaway success on every front isn't enough for him.

Believe me, I sympathize with recipients of negative reviews, even when I dish them out myself. You work for years on a book (well, most of us do), and then some jerk reads it once and tells everyone what to think about it. But that's what you sign up for when you publish a book. It's easy to forget, once you establish yourself as an author, that you're damned lucky the world wants to hear what you think about anything. Everybody thinks they have a book (or ten) in them, and few of us get them published. You want people to listen to you? Then you have to deal with what people think about what you said. You can't control the discussion of your book, even when it seems mighty unfair to you. That's just how it is. We are all legal targets for critical sniping. I have never liked being criticized, but I'd say I deserve even more that I've gotten.

I should say that I have no stake in the fight. I've never met Ferguson. I reviewed one of his books, High Financier, for the Washington Post, and found it deserved great respect—a very serious book indeed, nicely written, if a bit awkwardly constructed to my taste. I did meet Mishra when we both had fellowships at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, but I never knew him well. He was away much of the time on freelance writing assignments. Whether I agree or disagree with the review doesn't influence my tut-tutting of Ferguson's lawsuit threat.

The irony is that, as I understand his book, the threat of libel rather runs against the very values that Ferguson argues have elevated the West over the rest of the world. Irony indeed.

The Biographer's Dilemma

2011-10-28T11:56:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted in a while because we have freshly made baby girl in the house—our own baby girl, fortunately, and not unexpected. While I've been in the soup of newborn parenthood, I ran across an excellent column by the excellent columnist Joe Nocera (see photo), in the not-always excellent New York Times. (Hey, we all pick on the Times; but it's still about as good a newspaper as there is.) He used a title that I should have picked for this blog: "The Biographer's Dilemma."

Mr. Nocera writes about business, and he does it with a keen, thoughtful, non-bloviating voice. In fact, you can often hear that voice on the Times's weekend business podcast, which should be required listening for anyone interested in breaking economic news.

I'll leave you to read it. It's a great commentary on biography in general, and Walter Isaacson's highly praised Steve Jobs. But here are the last two paragraphs, which should be taken to heart by readers and writers:

"There is another kind of distance biographies of the living lack—the distance of time. It can take decades to truly understand the context in which the subject's life and achievements played out. Often we need to see what happens after he is gone to realize his true impact on our world. Steve Jobs has been dead for three weeks. We're not even close to that understanding.

In “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson has recounted a life — a big, sprawling, amazing life. It is a serious accomplishment. What remains for future biographers is to make sense of that life."

Contesting the Critics: Right Reason, Wrong Way

2011-10-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

I have a friend and colleague who is in a situation I've been in many times. It goes like this:

1) Her book was reviewed, in a prominent publication. That's good.
2) The reviewer said her book was important and much-needed. That's good.
3) The reviewer expressed profound respect for her book. That's good.
4) The reviewer made a couple of criticisms that the author knows are factually incorrect. That's bad.

To an outside observer, that adds up to three very good things to one bad thing. The review raises awareness of the book in a media world that now leaves little space for books, and it definitely leaves the reader with the impression that it's well worth reading. So what if it veers off course a little, deep in the review?

If you're the author, it matters a lot. You spend years of your life on a book, only to have some part-time critic, who has spent a few hours with it, mischaracterize it (and possibly you). If the review says it's not fun to read, or too slow, or works too hard to be this or that, what can you say? That's a judgment call, and you had the bad luck to get a critic who didn't like you book. But, in this case, the critic made a factual error. It's infuriating, even though it's in a positive review.

This raises a general question for the writer: When do you respond to a critic? We have to recognize a few pitfalls: First, you're going to have a deeply personal (i.e. emotional) response to a review, a response that will not be shared by anyone else. Second, reviews are ephemeral, as books are not. The review will come and go, ultimately serving only one purpose: to tell people your book exists. Third, you've had your say with your book; you can't manage or control the critical reception and media discussion of it. While the book was in your computer or on your desk, you had mastery of every detail, every comma; but once it's published, it's out of your hands, and you have to make peace with that. Fourth, by responding to critics, you run the grave risk of creating a lasting impression in reader's minds: that you're a churlish, thin-skinned, defensive author. They don't care like you do about your critics. They will know your name, but won't even remember who your critics are. You tend, as a general rule, to diminish yourself by contesting the critics, and that will be the enduring effect.

Now, there are times to respond. I think the most appropriate moment is when you have a critic whose name really carries weight, especially one who is a leading authority in your field. In that case, if the criticisms are unfair or truly unfounded, you have to call the critic out. The only time I was right to contest a review was when a leading American historian, writing in a British publication, published a shockingly hostile and error-filled review; the review was clearly written out of anger at how my book criticized that historian's past work. (The review didn't mention that I had criticized the reviewer in the book.) It being the very beginning of my career, I couldn't afford to let my seriousness be challenged by the personal pique of such a highly regarded scholar. It was a rare case, though. I've been wrong to respond more times than I was right to do so.

Here's an example of how not to respond, on Joe McGuiniss's blog. Let me be clear: Mr. McGuinniss has a real reason to be upset. As he writes, he has been savaged by critics who haven't bothered to read his book. The reason I hold this up as a bad example is not the justice of his treatment by the critics, but because of the unfortunate practical effect such a response has on his image. Readers who've never heard of the people who criticized Mr. McGuinniss will mostly remember, after this exchange, that Mr. McGuinniss was emotional and thin-skinned. That's just not good.

Ultimately, you've got to take the emotion out of any response. Often you find that, with the emotion removed, it's not worth responding. Most of all, remember that readers are not weighing you against your critics on some kind of balance of justice. Rather, they are building a picture of you—just you. That's why responses so often backfire: you think you're in a battle, but readers see you alone, on stage. And yelling at some guy in the back of the audience tends to ruin the performance.

At the very least, sleep on it before you send your response.

The Class

2011-10-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned earlier, I'm teaching a class on writing a nonfiction book. And, as mentioned earlier, I've created a blog with a guide to each class, offering a list of readings and topics for each session. You can find it here:

http://writinganonfictionbook.blogspot.com

Introducing Caroline Kennedy

2011-09-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

This evening (Tuesday, September 27, 2011), I introduced Caroline Kennedy to the audience at her only West-Coast appearance regarding about her publication of her mother's interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, conducted only weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Since these remarks relate the publication of these interviews to biography, I post them here (as written).

__________________

The daughter of President and Jacqueline Kennedy, Carolinehas been in the public eye since birth. I hardly need say that tragedy hashaunted her family, yet she has risen above it, turning her career towardpublic service. A Harvard and Columbia-educated lawyer, she has been a leader as an advocate in education. She has most recently been active in the cause ofpublic education in New York, among the many other causes she has taken up.

Ofcourse, we are here tonight to hear her speak not of herself, but of hermother. Perhaps, then, I should say a few words to offer my perspective, as abiographer.

Back in ‘02, I was on a panel with the great biographerBrenda Maddox, she was asked a question that biographers consistently get: Didyou fall in love with your subject, or come to hate her? There’s a commonassumption that the biographer will inevitably take one of two extremepositions, either of celebration or prosecution. Ms. Maddox replied that shehad once written an essay on this very question, titled, “What’s Love Got to Dowith It?”

One of the highest goals of a life study is to grasp thesubject’s irreducible humanity. I believe it was Tolstoy who said that all menare both good and bad; his fictional characters seem so vividly real becausethey are not types, but recognizable and real—at times contradictory, unawareof themselves, impulsive and compulsive as well as deliberate and purposeful.The biographer, unlike the novelist, is limited to the evidence that floats tothe surface of a life. Yet the task must be the same as Tolstoy’s: To capture athree-dimensional human being in all of his or her complexity.

But can we reasonably expect that approach from a daughter?For Caroline Kennedy, I would guess that love has everything to do with it—andlove inclines toward celebration. Why not celebrate Jacqueline Kennedy—a womanwho did so much good in the world, who is so widely admired?

And yet, here we are: By publishing these conversationsbetween Jacqueline Kennedy and the great historian Arthur Schlesinger, CarolineKennedy has given us her mother unredacted.We hear her mother’s authentic voice, speaking wisdom, shrewd insight,aggravation, and attitudes that will, at times, seem decidedly backward intoday’s world. Caroline’s love is great enough to encompass her mother’s entirehumanity—to publicly encompass it,before the eyes of all of us. She writes in her introduction that she overcameher urge to edit, concluding that she could trust us, her audience, to see these conversations in context, to accepther mother’s complexity. She recognizes that revealing her mother, unfiltered, onlyenhances our admiration for Jacqueline Kennedy, for it was not a superwoman wholived through such great and tragic events, but a person, as vulnerable as anyof us, yet capable of surviving, growing, and triumphing.

Of course, the ultimate purpose of these conversations wasto reveal the career of President Kennedy from the inside. It’s a tricky thing,I think, for a daughter to handle her mother’s unmediated remarks on herfather’s life. Here were two people, more intimately intertwined with each otherthan with anyone else, one privately interpreting the other, never thinkingthat the world would hear her words. Here we see President Kennedy in all of his complexity—driven, ambitious,stricken by pain, shrewd, idealistic, member a large and ambitious family. Afterall that has been written about the President, after the hatred andglorification and just plain nonsense, Caroline Kennedy trusts us with hermother’s deeply personal view of him.

Ms. Kennedy, thank you for this brave, wise, and generousact. With this work, you’ve shown that revealing, rather than covering up, isthe true gift of love, and we are grateful.

Transparency

2011-09-17T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'm concluding a week-long research trip in Monroe, Michigan, which was essentially the hometown of George Armstrong Custer and his wife Libbie, the subjects of my next book. The archivists here are wonderful—knowledgeable, helpful, always cheerful. But I've encountered something that leads me to make another entry in my sporadic commentary on the art of writing biography, in order to explain the importance of transparency.

Custer attracts countless amateur researchers—enthusiasts who love his story, or perhaps who have a special hatred for the man. Whatever. I think the enthusiasm is great. I've benefitted from it, since they have often shared the fruits of their digging in newsletter articles and supplementary material provided to archives. But amateurism has a downside, too: on occasion, the non-scholarly researcher doesn't provide full information on where a source is located. Please note that I'm not slamming all enthusiasts. Far from it. I'm not an academic myself. But I do value the scholarly virtues of thoroughness and transparency.

As a writer, your authority ultimately rests upon your convincing the reader that your sources are authentic, and that you've read them correctly. The only way to do that is to provide full citations in your article or book. I couldn't care less about what stylebook you follow, or if you follow one at all, as long as you provide a clear map that will allow future researchers to find your sources for themselves. Do you have insights or caveats to share regarding those sources? Tell us in your endnotes. The more transparent your research the more solid is the foundation of your book's success. It's not good enough for you know you did a thorough job of research. The reader can't know that anything in your book is true unless the sources can be independently inspected and verified.

That leads me to a problem I've encountered many times in my Custer research: the unavailability of original material. He was famous well before he so famously died at the Little Bighorn, and collectors have been finding and filing away his private papers for a century and a half now. I've seen photos on the Internet of letters of his—only to learn that the owners of those papers refuse to allow anyone to see the originals. I simply can't cite them, under those circumstances. I've been burned by invented sources before. Keeping primary source documents secret only dilutes their market value, and makes our entire culture poorer.

The image is from http://www.freeinfosociety.com/article.php?id=363

Let Information Be Created

2011-09-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

I partially revoke what I wrote earlier: Rather than use this blog for my class on writing a nonfiction book, I will create a new, linked blog for it. You, my reader, will still be able to access it, but this blog will stay focused on issues related to biography in particular, and writing in general.

One of the biggest issues, of course, is the impact of the Internet. What are the implications, for writers, of digital technology—of the profoundly easier and cheaper reproduction and distribution of data? Should information be free? Or should we prosecute every illegal downloader? Or, perhaps, is it not so simple?

One of the frustrating things for me is the reductionism so prevalent in this debate. The fact is, there are important public interests on both sides that must be reconciled—and reconciliation is not easy.

Here's what I think, in brief: I like free information as much as the next guy. In many areas, I want content to be completely free and universally accessible. But I also want the creation of new content. The catch is to provide incentives for content creators—in my case, writers—while acknowledging and even embracing the power of digital technology.

I know writers who resist the digital revolution, who refuse to even publish e-books because they are so angry at piracy. On the other hand, from the Information-Wants-To-Be-Free crowd (I'll call them IWTBFs), I hear absolutely no acknowledgment of the need to encourage the creation of new works. And here's another, related point: Not all information is the same.

I believe in the mass availability of public data, of government records and information from public companies. In the good old days, the nineteenth century, Congress used to publish all the raw material from its committee investigations in the Congressional Serial Set. It would ask the presidential administration for, say, all diplomatic cables relating to Panama. Then, within a year, it would publish them. No need for Wikileaks, and no harm done. As for markets, they work best when as much information is available to as many people as possible. Steve Jobs disagrees with me, but having as many people know as much as possible about businesses allows investors to place money wisely, forcing all corporations to be more efficient and successful.

Of course, books are not just data. They are the deliberate products of solitary minds; they are works of creative research, synthesis, invention, and art. Each is the unique creation of a unique individual. That's why we give literary prizes even to nonfiction; it's a recognition that there is artistic value in research-driven books as much as in novels, plays, and poetry.

The question is, How do we reward the creators of such works, so we keep getting more? I've yet to hear of an explanation from the IWTBFs of how piracy answers the question.

Don't get me wrong: I love Google Books when I'm looking up some nineteenth-century tome. With public-domain works, I benefit from mass availability as much as, perhaps even more than, the next guy. And I agree that copyright law has been gravely distorted by the lobbying of deep-pocketed corporations, namely Mickey Mouse's master. It's absurd that a work should be copyrighted fifty years (or is it more?) beyond the life of the creator. That's an intellectual-property land grab, not a reasonable incentive for the creation of artistic works.

But the abuses of a large corporation don't negate the necessities facing me, the humble individual writer. Economists have examined the problems posed by piracy. Let's take one model, called the Tragedy of the Commons. If a village has a common pasture, for which no one individual is responsible, then everyone in the village has an incentive to graze as many heads of livestock as possible. Soon the commons is destroyed by overuse, because no one pays the cost of this public good. If digital piracy runs rampant—if no one pays the cost of my works—then I frankly cannot continue to write. It's a passion, yes, but I can't put in the time and effort required by my books if they don't pay. They pay poorly enough as it is.

Of course, villages historically avoided the Tragedy of the Commons through strong community values, a sense of shared interest in the preservation of a mutual trust. It may be that such values will be the best remedy for digital piracy. But how do we get there? Again, I fail to see how we create those values through self-righteous denunciations of copyright holders for being Luddites, or by wholesale copying and distribution of copyrighted works.

Copyright law needs reform, no doubt. I've argued that for a long time. But it exists for a reason; indeed, the reason is written into Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution itself: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

If anyone comes up with an alternative method of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, I'm all ears. Perhaps a government stipend for serious authors, rather than exclusive rights to their respective writings? But then would we trust the government to choose who qualifies? And how do we jibe that with international copyright law? A real alternative is hard to come by.

So here we are: Not with an all-or-nothing world, but with a need to find a reasonable compromise, the very thing that seems hardest to attain in our world today. I say, let's make the most out of digital technology. Let's embrace the way it makes content more available. But we must reconcile the new technology for distributing content with incentives for the creation of content. Let's not pretend that the purpose, and necessity, of copyright law is obsolete—or that it's no longer the law of the land.

New Class: Writing a Nonfiction Book

2011-08-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

Starting September 22, I will be teaching a four-session course on writing a nonfiction book. Classes will be held at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto: 490 2nd Street (corner of Bryant), San Francisco. The details can be found here. The full description is below.

As the course description makes clear, this class offers an overview. We'll be focusing both on the craft and art of writing, and the mechanics of getting published—book proposals, agents, publishers, even photo rights, if we get to it. If the course is well attended, I'll likely follow up with a Master Class in nonfiction long-form writing in the spring. It will be more of a workshop, in which we critique and discuss each class member's writing in depth.

So, loyal reader, what does this mean for you? I'll be using this blog to prepare members for the class. This doesn't mean you can use it for a free class, but you can get an idea what each session will cover, and see what the readings I assign. The readings will be from both books on writing (E.M. Forsters's Aspects of the Novel and David Lodge's The Art of Fiction, for example—both very useful for nonfiction writers too), and from successful and unsuccessful examples of nonfiction narratives.

It may not be what you want from this blog, but it's better than nothing. I just moved to a new apartment, so I haven't written at all for this blog for a month. The apartment is in sight of my old home, but the packing and unpacking is no less time-consuming. At least I'll be back online again.

Here's that course description:

Writing a Nonfiction Book, from Inspiration to Publication

Instructor: T. J. Stiles

Contact: tjstiles@earthlink.net

Number of sessions: 4 Meeting time: Thursday evenings, 6:30-9; September 22 – October 13

Course fee: $295.00 Spots reserved with $100 deposit. Class size limited to 15 Students

Description: In four sessions, a Pulitzer-winning author and veteran of ten years in the publishing industry will discuss the challenges of writing and publishing a long-form nonfiction narrative. In each session, we’ll explore a different aspect of the process—from initial idea to polishing a manuscript to the mechanics of getting published—discussing successful and unsuccessful examples, essays by noted critics, and questions raised by class members concerning their own projects.

We’ll examine how to
• define your project for yourself and a potential publisher
• structure the book
• integrate research into a narrative without stopping it cold
• understand how vivid you can be without slipping into fiction
• refine your style and perfect your storytelling
• draft a book proposal and work with agents and publishers

Students are welcome to ask for feedback on specific pieces of writing or publishing issues (such as framing a book proposal)—though you need not have an ongoing project to take the course

Instructor Bio: T.J. Stiles won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction for his most recent book, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf, 2009). His previous book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship. He has reviewed books for the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle, and served as a consultant for and appeared in two films in the PBS series The American Experience. He worked for ten years in publishing in New York, at Oxford University Press and Ballantine Books. He is currently a Guggenheim fellow.

Remembrance of Really Important Stuff

2011-07-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading David Lodge's classic The Art of Fiction, and it reminds me that I have absolutely nothing to add to the great body of work on how to write. Some of that great body is actually great writing itself, so why bother?

Well, I keep at it mainly to remind myself of what to do as I work on my next book. Speaking of which, I wish to say a few words about memory. Here they are: Memory is important.

If this seems obvious, I refer you to the recent hyperbole that claims the Internet effectively functions as an extension of our memory, that we no longer need to actually keep any information in our heads, but merely need to know how to look it up. To me, this is not only idiotic, it is dangerous. It is rather like saying that the existence of pharmacies means we longer need to take care of our health—we can always go to the drugstore and get the appropriate medication.

OK, that's a terrible analogy, or at least an imprecise one. The point is there has always been a difference between reference works and actual knowledge. For a nonfiction writer, the distinction is essential. There's simply no substitute for keeping lots of information in your head.

If I really must explain why, let me simply say that research is not simply a process of transferring data from a source to your word-processing files (or manuscripts, as we once called them). Rather, you must understand a fact's significance as you research, which is only possible if you remember previous facts you have encountered. To understand your research, you must see connections between data, which requires you to keep a great deal of information in your head. Indeed, if you have a good memory, certain facts will leap up at you as significant, in light of what you already know—facts that eluded other writers, or were discounted by them.

When you write a biography, you are in the process of painting a richly detailed, realistic landscape. If all of your previous brushstrokes disappear from your vision every time you make a new one, the final picture will be utterly incoherent. But if you keep the whole in your mind as you work, it stands a chance of emerging as an organic, authentic, and recognizable whole when you're done.

So to hell with that "the Internet is my memory" crap: Know what you're talking about, and you might actually make some sense.

Entertainment vs. Accuracy

2011-07-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

A month has passed without a new post! My apologies. It has been . . . busy.

On my return, I found a comment waiting, asking for my opinion on balancing accuracy and entertainment. How far can a biographer (or nonfiction writer in general) go in making a scene vivid, or heightening the drama?

As is so often the case, this is, ultimately, a matter of each writer's judgment. There is no easy formula. And, is so often the case, that judgment should by guided by a sense of truth and authenticity. Research—thoughtful, creative, but pertinent research—provides the material for vividness and drama that is still accurate.

The worst thing you could do is to invent, even if it seems highly plausible. Just because a subject is often described as behaving a certain way—for example, arching her eyebrows and snorting in derision—does not mean you have license to describe that character as behaving that way in a specific instance, when no direct evidence suggests any such thing. Specific details must come from direct evidence, or you're slipping into fiction.

Somewhere between bad and OK is the openly stated guess, indicated by "surely," "likely," and "must have." An example might be, "Washington surely found British intransigence to be infuriating." This is honest, since you're being clear that you don't really know Washington's mental state, but it's unsatisfying at best and distracting at worst. Ask yourself: Does the reader really need to be told what Washington likely or surely felt? Don't the contextual facts suggest his likely reaction more strongly than your commentary?

Usually such guesses should be spoken when they run counter to the obvious. If there's a reason why Washington might not be infuriated with intransigence, that's interesting—tell the reader why. Otherwise, it's best to let the facts speak for themselves if you truly don't know the character's reaction. Having spoken so wisely on this issue, I have to admit that I've overused these words myself. It's easy to overuse them, because often one use is too many.

So what does work? First, for vividness, do as much research as possible. Bear in mind odd details that you run across; pull them in to highlight your narrative. In discussing Vanderbilt's family and sexual life in the 1850s, I faced the fact that I had precious little evidence. To introduce both the subject and set the stage for discussing the lack of evidence, I began with two contemporary news stories—one a commentary, complaining about how the ladies flashed too much ankle when crossing a muddy street, and another about the prosecution of a large importer of French pornography. The juxtaposition of an obsession with concealment and the consumption of explicit material accomplished three goals: It immersed the reader in the culture of the moment; it allowed me to state openly that I didn't know much about my subject's sexual life; and it allowed me to hint that there was a lot going on, somewhere out of view.

Often this goal of making scenes vivid, when direct evidence is scanty, is simply a matter of reading widely about the times. What were people wearing? What were the cultural sensations of the day? Who were the celebrities? What did the newspapers say about the weather on this day or that? Was there a political conflict that was dividing people? Next, could any of these facts play an organic role in the scenes you're writing—not an artificial one? Research is vital, but you can't just dump it on the page.

In trying to evoke the emotional impact of the death of Jesse James's father, I had no letters or diaries to speak directly to what the survivors felt. So I focused on the estate sale held by the county to settle the late father's debts. The bare list of possessions that were tallied and auctioned off reveals how the family's intimate world was cut open like a can and emptied out before outsiders, who walked off with pieces of that world.

Drama and narrative tension can only come from research that puts you in touch with the intersecting forces, personalities, and agendas that created conflict. Who were your main character and his or her antagonists? What did they want? Why did they want it? How did they set about getting it? What were the implications of each conflict, both for your subject and society at large?

I'm thinking of the second chapter of The First Tycoon, in which Cornelius Vanderbilt helped his employer, Thomas Gibbons, fight the Livingston steamboat monopoly. In rewriting, I had to throw out lots of tedious legal details, which seemed important in the first draft simply because I found them. Instead, I had to flesh out the character of Gibbons, his goals, his plans, his motivations; same with his foes, as well as Vanderbilt himself. I had to look broadly at the times, and identify what larger themes were expressed in this particular legal and business battle.

It was a conflict, I argue, that reflected the last stages of a slow-moving rejection of the hierarchical society of colonial America, and an embrace of individualism and competition. My research not only gave me vivid details about how Gibbons looked or how his rivals handled his challenges to duels—it allowed me to depict this conflict as a high-stakes struggle for the future of America.

In this example, I had to read secondary sources—what historians had written in arguing with each other about the early American republic—to make sense of the primary. But there's no substitute for immersing yourself in the primary sources, so you can evoke an authentic and complete sense of another world.

Time to be Humble (i.e. when you're published)

2011-05-31T15:26:00.000-07:00

Having complained about the failings of other writers, let me confess to some of my own faults. Even in finished, polished, edited writing, I find myself repeating the same words and phrases, often in jarring proximity. I create strained metaphors, and overextend them (not a good idea with something that was strained in the first place).

And I often pronounce with godlike certainty, only to find later that I was simply wrong. Example: I wrote in The First Tycoon that Commodore Vanderbilt's youngest son, George Washington Vanderbilt, never saw a battlefield in the Civil War. Wrong: Though contemporary newspapers and the (purportedly) definitive guide to the careers of West Point graduates told me he never served anywhere near combat, I recently discovered otherwise. In conducting research on George Armstrong Custer in the National Archives, I casually glanced at the primary sources there on G.W. Vanderbilt's military record. The file included some correspondence noting that the aforementioned definitive guide was wrong, and evidence that he transferred to the staff of a general who took part in the Corinth campaign. I doubt young Vanderbilt took a shot at anyone, but he definitely went to the front. I was wrong.

A nonfiction writer can have what seem to be absolutely solid sources, and still make a mistake. It might be because you didn't take that one extra step (as in this example), or because there's a source out there that you haven't heard of, but is waiting to be discovered. In either case, you have to present your findings with humility, and be ready to admit when facts contradict you. And be afraid, because fear of blowing it will motivate you to work harder.

Same with style. You can labor hard, rewrite intensely, and submit your work to multiple readers—and still find something painful in your prose. Often you introduce the blunder in the rewriting process, which means that you just didn't reread enough. One more time—two—three—might have brought that blooper up to your weary eye.

And yet, you have to write with confidence. If you're sure about something, don't equivocate. If you are not sure, don't pretend otherwise—present the uncertainty honestly. Ironically, if you accept that you just won't get everything right, and are willing to frankly admit errors or unknowns, then your work will seem more surehanded. And surehanded is good; weak writing is, well, weak.

One more thing: No matter how good you are, there's almost certainly someone who does it better than you. Yes, winning a major literary award is a dream come true, a real thrill—and it yet instantly makes you aware of how many excellent books did not get the prize, but would have if, say, the jury was different by just one person. And an award gives your career momentum, but it doesn't change you. After all the statues and plaques are handed out and they start to pick juries for next year's prizes, you're back to where you were: just as capable of blundering as ever.

Maybe more so.

In Defense of Elegance

2011-05-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

I hope it sounds rather odd to stand up in defense of elegance—not because elegance is unworthy of defense, of course, but because it should be a near-universal value in writing. And yet, it is rare.

It disturbs me how often, when I read a serious book, I must kick my way through piles of clichés and dead expressions. I reviewed one book that eventually earned the Pulitzer Prize, and for very good reason: It was deeply researched, keenly astute in psychological perception, and vivid in its depiction of not only the main character's life but the secondary characters who surrounded him. Yet it was spattered with such phrases as "cool his heels" and "stacked the deck against him." There is no excuse.

My complaint is not with metaphor itself. It can make writing more evocative, probably because there's something in the human brain that leads us to reason by analogy. (Listen to almost any Supreme Court hearing, for example, in which the justices constantly discuss legal points through analogies.) But metaphors are nothing more than the mules that pull the wagon. Overwork them, and they die, at which point they do nothing to draw forward the real meaning. Worse than that, they get in the way.

When you find yourself resorting to clichés, it's better to drop metaphor entirely, and get at the meaning as directly as possible, simply and precisely—that is, elegantly. George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is cited by virtually everyone on the question of word selection, and I'm one of them. Orwell notes that, if we write in pre-existing phrases, the phrases do our thinking for us. Good writing must be like a window pane, he tells us, a transparent revelation of thought. This can only be achieved by carefully choosing each word.

Academic writing has its own particular set of clichés, which we call jargon—more generously, professional terminology. Its purpose, I believe, is not to convey meaning, but to demonstrate that the writer belongs to a group, which we might call Serious Scholars. Jargon is a rather lazy method of distinguishing scholarly writing from the popular; it's also a means of signaling that the writer is aware of the latest trends in a particular discipline. Such writing may be necessary to advance one's career within the world of academia, but I argue that there is no meaning that can be expressed only through jargon. There is always a more elegant way to say the same thing. Those more elegant choices convince the reader that the writer actually knows what she or he is saying. Jargon raises doubt.

Academics sometimes overreact to their own constricted writing style by indulging in colloquial expressions, including lame puns and jokes. (Many scholarly titles are now of this type.) Colloquial writing is hardly wrong, in and of itself; but it must be true to the work, emerging naturally from the subject and genre. A novel, a personal essay, a letter, an e-mail message—in these places, casual speech sounds right. But it sounds painfully false in a piece of scholarship.

Elegance is not only a matter of clear, evocative style. It also comes from honesty and authenticity.

Details and Depth

2011-05-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has published my review of Jennet Conant's A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS. You can read that review here (and you'll want to, if you're going to read this post).

The short version is this: It's a light, fun read, a bit misleadingly titled (most of the book is not, in fact, about the Childs), not a scholarly or analytical study—not a "serious" book, as the New York Review of Books crowd might say. I make some criticisms of the book for getting a few things wrong, and possibly mischaracterizing the single most important character, but in the end I think it's unfair to put too much emphasis on these failings. It's not that heavy of a book.

But I do have one serious complaint: The author infuses scenes with abundant, minute detail, without always providing sources for these details. See the review for an example. Am I accusing her of making it up? No—I can't know that at all; I just know that I couldn't find the details in the source provided in the endnotes. She might have drawn on sources not clearly indicated in the endnotes. Even at its worst, is it an egregious act? On one hand, it's not. She clearly did not invent events, settings, or characters, or mess with the chronology; she just described these actual moments far more vividly than the cited sources do.

On the other hand, unsourced detail is a serious problem for any nonfiction writing, serious or not. It undercuts the author's authority, and invites incredulity. And, ironically, it smashes the book flat.

In Aspects of the Novel, one of my favorite books about writing, E.M. Forster notes that "history" (which we can equate with "nonfiction") is limited to the surface—to what can be seen and reported. Fiction, on the other hand, can go beneath the surface; to that extent, fiction is truer than history, he writes, because we all know there is more beneath the surface. Fiction can know a person perfectly, in a way that nonfiction cannot.

Quite true, and yet: We also know that surface indications can strongly suggest what lies beneath. This is the secret of great acting, in which an actor's outward appearance suggests inner emotions and struggles and decisions, even when the raw text of the play provides precious little in the way of explicit wording. Nonfiction cannot allow us to know a person perfectly, but it can speak to the depths; it can contemplate the submerged truth lying behind indicators on the surface, to point to what lies beneath, even if it can't go there.

The details at issue—an expression, a head movement, a moment of conversation—are just such indicators, precious to a nonfiction writer when discovered in research. Our authority, as writers, to speak to the depths of human experience rests upon our authority as honest researchers, presenting fairly the evidence we found in the sources, and fully noting all such source material. Once the reader suspects that telling details were not in the sources, the author's authority is destroyed, and with it any true sense that the reader has glimpsed the interior worlds of the characters.

Nonfiction is always anchored to evidence. A nonfiction author can look and point beyond the evidence, but cannot cut loose and roam freely. And the extent and nature of the evidence must be presented fully in the notes, so we know how long the anchor chain can fairly be.

Proper sourcing is not just a formal exercise; it's part of what gives nonfiction a literary soul.

Good Friday Double: #2: Personal Interest vs. the Marketplace

2011-04-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Here it is, as promised: My second Good Friday post. This one relates to the question of selecting a topic for a book.

I was recently on a panel for adults about nonfiction at 826 Valencia, the writing center for kids in San Francisco, established by Dave Eggers. One of the issues that came up was how to select a topic for a book.

One of the other panelists noted that you must find a subject that you can live with for years, that you shouldn't try to write about what you think will be commercially successful. I agree, but with a few nuances.

First, what can sometimes seem like commercialization might actually be a way of taking your initial topic, and going bigger—escalating the scale of your project, in an ambitious and exciting way. This happened with my book Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. I initially thought of writing about Adelbert Ames, a Union "boy general" in the Civil War (he was made a brigadier general when still in his 20s) who was stationed in Mississippi during Reconstruction, championed the cause of racial equality, and left the army to pursue a political career. He was an admirable man in an age noted for violence, crookedness, and racism.

But no one had heard of him. When I discovered that he had been the target of the failed bank robbery by the James-Younger gang in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1876, I realized that I could write about the same period, and the same issues, on a larger scale, as well as for a larger audience. Jesse James is iconic; he lives in American culture and memory, as Ames does not. Therefore, in writing about James rather than Ames I would be taking on a much more ambitious project, with larger repercussions.

Did that decision make it more commercial? Well, yes. But it was more commercial because Jesse James is a more resonant subject, one who plays a vastly larger role in America's self-identity.

But I also believe that you must be true to yourself in picking a subject. You can't escape yourself; many writers end up writing about the same subjects or themes in book after book. In most writers, there are elemental issues and questions that provide the forward thrust. The issues of race, justice, violence, and the making of modern America defined both James and Ames's lives, so switching from one to the other was still entirely in keeping with my core interests. It never occurred to me that I was selling out.

So my advice is not to pursue commercial subjects for their own sake, but to think about how you can go bigger—how you can make your project even more ambitious. If you can do that, there almost certainly will be a commercial benefit; but if you are inauthentic in picking a subject, and simply force yourself to write about something that will sell, then the work will suffer. It won't be a book that you'll be proud of.

Good Friday Double: #1: Greg Mortenson

2011-04-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

Having been a bad blogger for some time now (having spent almost 6 weeks traveling), I present to you two writing-related entries.

First, Greg Mortenson. For those of you who threw out your televisions ages ago and don't pay attention to news on the Internet, the author of the runaway bestseller Three Cups of Tea was the subject of a 60 Minutes investigation about two things: the misuse of funds belonging to his charity, and the truth of his book.

I can't speak to the first. My reactions to the second are mixed. I would like to make three points about this frenzy:

First, beware of frenzies, especially the feeding kind. Since I myself have raised questions about the honesty of other books, I think it's entirely appropriate to challenge what appear to be glaring inaccuracies, fictionalization, and outright lies. But there are good reasons why it's a cliché to warn against a rush to judgment—said rushing is unfair to the accused and sometimes ill-considered. Let's hear Mr. Mortenson out, and wait calmly for the facts to emerge.

Second, the press has once again made an error by denouncing book publishers for not fact-checking books. The legal and business relationship between book publishers and books is different from that of newspaper or magazine publishers and the stories in those newspapers or magazines. The author, not the publisher, is responsible for the accuracy of the content; the publisher helps fund, prepare, package, and distribute the final result, but is in no way the author. This is in contrast to newspapers and magazines.

I will add that the business would collapse if book publishers had to hire fact checkers. Individual books are simply too long, and there are too many books coming out of most houses each year, for it to be a practical option. Of course, some publisher may decide that fact-checing would be a market advantage and try it out, but since that hasn't happened yet, we can assume it's a bad bet, economically speaking.

Third, since nonfiction authors are solely responsible for the accuracy of their books, they are REALLY responsible for the accuracy of their books. Honesty, transparency, and accuracy matter immensely, and the author is under a heavy burden to provide all three.

But they are in a descending order. Speaking to the last, first, we must accept the fact that every book will have some errors; accuracy is never perfect. But errors can be found and corrected if the writing is transparent—that is, if the author notes all the sources, and clearly states to the reader when a passage is based on uncertain information, or is entirely supposition or fictionalization. The reader generally gives a writer a fair amount of leeway when the author admits a lack of perfect knowledge. And that proper transparency is itself a product of honesty—of writing with integrity, of being truthful with oneself as well as the reader. There is a difference between good-faith mistakes and wholesale invention.

I will blog more about the issue of accuracy and integrity in a forthcoming post, related to a book review I wrote that will be published soon by the Washington Post. Remember the name E.M. Forster. He'll come up in that blog post.

The Secret Message

2011-04-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

Today is the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. On this day, my great-great grandfather Jonathan Dillon was holding Lincoln's watch, fixing it, and he left a secret message inside of it.

Here's the story I wrote about it two years ago:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/the-secret-message/7360/

My Gratitude

2011-04-10T09:43:00.000-07:00

It was announced this week that I've been honored with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Popularly known simply as "the Guggenheim," it's an award intended for artists, writers, scientists, and scholars who have a record of accomplishment, with the promise of doing still more.

I applied for the Guggenheim, so the news didn't rain down on my head with that entirely unexpected quality of the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize, but rather came at the end of a long wait. I never assumed that I would be selected, and I am deeply honored and humbled that I was. I'm acutely aware that my receiving a fellowship means that someone else who is entirely deserving did not receive one this year. Had the selection committee and the trustees of the Foundation passed me over, there would have been no outraged editorials in newspapers or picket lines outside the John Simon Guggenheim offices. Rather, someone else instead of me would be happy and honored. Furthermore, the fellowship goes to a broad array of artists, writers, and scholars; balancing the distribution of the limited funds is an enormously difficult task. I am exceptionally fortunate that I was selected this year.

For anyone doing something like what I do, I think it's important to bear this in mind. We do not gain recognition unless we work at as high a level as we can, unless we labor and struggle and devote ourselves to our projects. Ambition and sacrifice are essential components for success. But at the end of the process, when a book is complete, I'm aware that it could have been better, that equally good or better books are being published all the time. No matter how hard you work, you are owed nothing. You have no right to anything. And when recognition like the Guggenheim does come, it is only because of the support, feedback, and assistance of friends and colleagues, from those who wrote letters of reference, to archivists who suggested I look here, to historians who urged me to read that. And especially my wife, Jessica Stiles, who is a genius. Writing, seemingly a solitary art, in fact requires the help of countless people, especially in the case of biography. My heartfelt thanks to all.

I urge those who could benefit from a fellowship to keep working and keep applying. This was not my first application.

So, no matter what previous recognition I've received, it's a matter of very good fortune to be picked for this fellowship, and I'm truly grateful to the Foundation. It's a marvelous thing that the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation exists, and does what it does.

In the Archives

2011-04-09T19:23:00.000-07:00

Did you know the Archivist of the United States has a blog?

Yes, he does. His name is David Ferriero (rhymes with "stereo"). I met him when I had a fellowship at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where he was (I'm going to mess up his title, so forgive me) executive director. Of course, this was before he was named Archivist of the United States. His appointment to run the National Archives is a fortunate thing for people like me, who make heavy use of the Archives. He's that rare person assigned to a post by a president simply because he was the right individual for the job, a professional rather than a political hack.

During my (still ongoing) research trip to Washington, D.C., I had a chance to have lunch with him and discuss what he's trying to do with the Archives. It's exciting. I know that sounds nerdy, but it is exciting. It's a big organization, with 44 facilities, I believe, around the country. He's shaking things up, but he's also trying to build lines of communication within the agency, to give voice to staff at all levels. His blog is just one sign of how he's attuned to the digital age, in terms of record keeping, preservation, and access, and in the ways it can be used internally.

One of his concerns is to make better use of "citizen archivists." He notes, quite correctly, that when researchers dig through the vast holdings of the National Archives, the findings often fail to make their way back to the Archives staff. I completely agree with this. Much of my work on Cornelius Vanderbilt for The First Tycoon was conducted in the Manuscript Department of the New York Public Library. I wrote up a report of the material I found there, for use by future researchers. (I also included a bibliographical essay at the end of the book for the same reason.)

Here's to AOTUS: He's far from the only talented and dedicated employee at the National Archives, but all those staffers who care and work hard need someone at the top who is serious about the mission, and about making the place work better.

The Three R's...including Rhistory (the "r" is silent)

2011-04-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted in a month. It's largely because I've been away for weeks, and have been overloaded when I've been home. Lectures, research, and some vacation time with family—all necessary, but not conducive to blogging.

One question I've been asked to discuss is the devaluing of history in education, as we emphasize fundamentals. Yes, it concerns me a great deal—that is, it both worries me, and affects my profession, even though I don't teach.

The best way to teach reading is to give kids something worth reading. I see history as a two-for-one deal: Children learn essential knowledge of the past, and they must develop reading skills to do it. More than that, the proper teaching of history also imparts critical thinking, judgment in assessing conflicting sources, and (of course) an understanding of who we are and where we came from.

Take, for example, the Bill of Rights. I like to point out that the Bill of Rights was applied only to federal law, not state law, until ratification of the 14th Amendment, which was an attempt to grapple with the consequences of emancipation.* John Bingham, the key drafter of the 14th Amendment, used the opportunity not only to extend civil rights to former slaves, but to extend the Bill of Right's protections over civil liberties against state law as well. That mattered a great deal, because until that time the federal government passed very few laws that affected individual liberty, though states did so quite often.

In other words, the freedom that we think of as an American birthright only became a functional reality because of the struggle over race and slavery, a struggle pushed by African Americans themselves. In a way, black people, in gaining their freedom, helped free white people as well. Or, to put it another way, in grappling with our greatest flaw as a nation, we cemented our greatest strength as a nation.

I find this kind of contemplation of the past to be enormously exciting. Here are tremendous stories of communities, churches, armies, legislatures, and most of all individuals; here we find great writing, important speeches, compelling arguments, and core civic values. If studying history doesn't develop reading and writing skills, what does?

One of the great champions of teaching history was the late Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. He pushed through the Teaching American History (TAH) program, which extends grants to educate high-school teachers in American history. I've taken part in more than one of these projects, and I think it's a marvelous program, one that encourages thoughtful consideration of the past, rather than some orthodoxy or another. Unfortunately, TAH has been targeted for elimination in the ongoing federal budget crisis. That's a shame. It would punish our children, and diminish our appreciation for our remarkable history and identity.

Let's hope it survives.
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* To be precise, it was not applied against state governments until the twentieth century, long after the 14th Amendment was ratified, but this "incorporation" against the states was based on the first section of the 14th Amendment, as its primary framer intended.

This is how I did it

2011-02-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

Two recent comments have motivated me to get back to blogging. Thank you, my small but somewhat interested audience, for keeping me from doing work that might actually provide income or advance my career.

I'm going to violate a rule that was given to me by Richard Locke, when I taught a master class in nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University. Don't use your own work as an example, he said. If I remember his words correctly, he pointed out that it's self-congratulatory, and makes it seem as if the students solve problems simply by imitating the instructor—do it just so, and you're set.

Good advice. However, I have ten minutes until I have to run downstairs and get dinner ready, so I'm going with a convenient example—my example. Let's review the problem, and one solution.

The problem is ambition. I mean this in a technical sense. Many biographies are not "ambitious," but are deliberately limited to fairly narrow confines, and still turn out to be excellent works. Sometimes they'll even find big audiences, if their subjects are well known. But I find myself drawn to writing biographies of the "Big Book" variety. I try to connect my subjects to the times, to say something about the inner person and his or her world, to draw out the larger significance of often private events.

Sometimes the choice of subject does this for you. Writing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt? It's a bigger challenge to limit the scope of your book than to broaden it. In my case, I've written biographies of two iconic figures, but I tried to show how they were significant in different ways than those for which they are remembered. Jesse James stands in memory as a folk hero of the downtrodden against banks and railroads; Cornelius Vanderbilt looms as a grasping (or heroically creative, depending on your politics) businessman. But I argued that Jesse James's impact was tied to the Civil War and its legacy in the border states; and I focused on Vanderbilt's role not only in business, but in shaping American culture and remaking political debates over the economy.

When this works (and your arguments have to have the force of true conviction for it to work), it adds weight to a book, in the best sense. It turns the story of "one damn thing after another," as history is sometimes called, into a purposeful narrative, which is more fun to read.

But the contextual approach requires that you provide blocks of information that threaten to drag the storytelling to a halt. My suggestion is that, as you begin these sections of exposition, you prepare the reader. Make clear that you are not just relating stuff you found, but that you are laying out the stakes. Something big is about to happen, you say; here's why a lot was riding on what comes next in the story. Then discipline yourself in providing that information, so that you don't get carried away with your research, but focus on what the reader truly needs to know.

Here's an example from The First Tycoon. It's the opening of Chapter Two, preparing the reader for a block of background information (which begins on the bottom of the right-hand page). In this passage, I focus on the meeting of two people—my subject, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and his first and only employer, Thomas Gibbons. They would do great things together, I write; they would help shake American society and culture out of the eighteenth century. That naturally begs the question of what eighteenth-century society and culture was. In answering it, I again try to stress the individuals in the story, so that it does not seem like an encyclopedia entry, but what screenwriters call "back story."

If you can't read this image, hmmm... buy the book.

Image from T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), used by permission of the author. No reproduction without permission.

A Little Help?

2011-01-31T21:41:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-21T12:16:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-12T15:54:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-03T11:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Read to Write

2010-12-30T11:11:00.000-08:00

Given that my posts have become more infrequent, I'm going to pick up the pace through a classic method: reading recommendations.

The old axiom is quite true: If you're going to write, you have to read. Since I've often commented that serious biography straddles literature and scholarship, that means I have to read both fiction and nonfiction, works of art and works of deep research. Beyond the sheer pleasure of the reading experience, of being transported to another life or time, there are specific strategies and lessons that can be learned from each book.

My first recommendation: Colum McCann's National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin. The thread that holds the multi-voiced narrative together is the tightrope that Philippe Petit walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. Yet the high-wire act merely supplies the frame for the tale, the skeleton; the flesh and blood is in the myriad characters whose lives criss-cross and finally come together in a heartbreakingly beautiful conclusion.

Why do I recommend this book? First, it's a stunning work of art. That's enough. More specifically, the prose is gorgeously lyrical. Not that I urge nonfiction writers to try to write this way; few writers of any stripe can. In fact, I'd warn against it. But it's a reminder to pay attention to the sound and impact of each word, to the power of the sentence.

Second, McCann's novel demonstrates that the heart of a historical moment is not in the broad structure of society or politics, important as that can be, but in the texture of life, the personal experience. He makes 1974 more real than any academic study ever could. No, the biographer should not fictionalize, but he or she should be alive to these matters in conducting research, to serve up the subtle flavors of the time.

Finally, McCann's portrait is panoramic in a social sense, from a hooker's walk under an overpass in the Bronx to an Upper East Side penthouse. I love this kind of sweeping view, taking in the range of human experience. Few can do it as well as McCann does, whether we write fiction or nonfiction, but it's a virtue worth striving for.

A Passion for Dispassion

2010-12-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

My blogging is getting more and more infrequent. I blame society. Specifically, the holidays. So let me make up for lost posts with an end-of-year tribute to the virtues of dispassion.

It might seem a little odd to those who know me that I would praise the coolness of a writer's eye. I think it's safe to say I have a passionate temperament. I have strong opinions about a lot of things, from politics to food. Indeed, my passions drive my work—that is, they lead me to ask certain questions. The answers are another matter; they must be arrived at impartially, with a sense of skepticism for one's own preconceptions.

I've written before about how the biographer plays a double role, looking inward at the subject and outward at the context, the history. Dispassionate inquiry is essential in both. With Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example, I began with certain notions of his personality and family life, as well as of his business operations and public impact. But I tried to be honest, fair, and even-handed, to revolve the evidence in my mind until I had a three-dimensional understanding of the person and his times. What I found surprised me.

I count it as a mark of success that I've been criticized by Amazon customer reviewers for being both too critical and too admiring, for being too liberal and also too conservative. The truth is that I see irreducible complexity, both in the man and the changes he embodied. In any individual, there are going to be contradictions that the writer should not stamp flat, as I've mentioned before. And to allow the contradictions to stand on the page as they stood in life, we must not be caught up in our own emotions. We must give life, but we should be wary of turning into prosecutors or defenders.

Oh Wise One

2010-12-12T16:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted, thanks largely to illness over Thanksgiving and the couple of weeks that followed. So I thought I would catch up, with a brief comment in keeping with the season.

There is something about literature that lifts it from mere entertainment to the more profound level of art. It is difficult to achieve. It's simply impossible to teach. And it's nearly impossible to define. I speak of wisdom.

I mean more, of course, than intelligence, even shrewd perception, and certainly more than self-help advice. I'm referring to deep insight into the human condition. When I read truly great writers (I'd list Tolstoy, Wharton, Melville, and Conrad as a few), I discover not only rich, fully fleshed-out characters, but a special vision that takes me deeper into the essence of it all. Of course, the names I've just listed are all novelists, but I'd add many nonfiction writers as well, such as George Orwell, Gary Wills, Joan Didion, even Robert Caro, a fellow (but far more accomplished) biographer.

I don't know if it's possible to deliberately instill wisdom in writing, but I do believe that I—that all of us writers—can try to think about the universal human experience in the course of our work. When I wrote of Cornelius Vanderbilt as a father, I tried to connect it to the Fatherhood with a capital F. When I wrote of Jesse James becoming a violent criminal, I reflected as best I could on the fraught relationship between circumstances and individual choice in the warping of his nature.

I must caution myself as well as my fellow writers: It takes ambition to reach for wisdom, but the attempt must be made with modesty. There is a difference between self-important pronouncements and reflective consideration, between declaring judgments and pondering the depths. At its best, perhaps, wise writing does not offer answers, but points to where readers might pursue and discover their own insight into the human condition. Unfortunately, the pursuit rarely ends with "Ho ho ho." But, at its best, literature can bring us all a little closer to being Wise Men.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

2010-11-28T10:24:00.000-08:00

Today I would like to discuss a particular complaint about something that doesn't seem to bother everyone: dead phrases and clichés. (Is that redundant? Well, I want to net the whole stinking lot of fish in one go.)

It disheartens me every time I read one of them in a book I am otherwise enjoying. In my review of Ron Chernow's generally excellent Washington: A Life, I found myself tripping over them disturbingly often, and it detracted from the pleasure I was experiencing as a reader.

Why? Because it demonstrates that the writer is not thinking about each word—not choosing them for freshness, vividness, and effect. As George Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language," one of the finest essays on writing ever written, if you simply slap in stock phrases, those phrases will do your thinking for you. To paraphrase Jesus, leave the dead behind.

Of course, not all metaphors and similes are clichés or dead phrases. If you can conjure a fresh image, then that is simply wonderful. It's good writing. But it still has to work. If it doesn't evoke what you're trying to evoke, then all you've done is demonstrate how damned clever you think you are. In which case, it would have been better to use an unevocative cliché.

And it's important to remember that this is only a subset of style, and of narrative craft. Chernow, for example, does so many things so well that in the end I forgave him for his stylistic lapses. He crafted characters brilliantly, paced his book wonderfully, and provided true insight into his subject, George Washington.

In my own writing, though, I want to get it all right—to be a storyteller and a stylist and a historian. No, I do not think I have attained perfection. I am sadly aware of shortcomings, and prepared to be hit in the future with new knowledge of my limitations. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I don't know as much as I think I do, and I don't do things as well as I think I can.

But I hope to move in the direction of perfection. That means every word must be chosen specifically, every metaphor deployed with care. It isn't easy. But, in the stock phrase of my late high-school wrestling coach, "If it was easy, everyone would be doing it."

Setting the Record Straight (without sounding like a broken record)

2010-11-19T11:25:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not posting for some time—I was under the weather there for a while. Today I'm going to address something that is a part of every biography, yet can easily be mishandled: Setting the record straight.

I mentioned briefly in a previous post that I reviewed H.W. Brands's American Colossus for the San Francisco Chronicle. (You can read it here). As you can tell, I had problems with the book. For our purposes here, in this blog about writing biography, the one that matters is that he got everything about Cornelius Vanderbilt wrong.

It sounds a little churlish to complain that someone didn't consult MY book (though I'm not the only one complaining—see John Steele Gordon's review in the New York Times.) But I went to great lengths to set the record straight. Cornelius Vanderbilt is someone who left behind no manuscript collection; his letters are scattered around in other people's papers. For generations, historians have been working with apocryphal sources, which include quotes that were simply invented. Brands didn't bother to check the old nonsense against my more careful version, and it shows. I've done all I can do, by writing a book and then reviewing his. Unfortunately, the nonsense he dredges back up is now in circulation again, as other reviewers quote his inaccurate quotes from Vanderbilt.

But how should we approach record-straightening within a biography? This is a tough one, because it is often necessary, yet it can diminish your work, and turn it into tedious debunking. What I tried to do was ask interesting questions about what the mythical, inaccurate stories tell us about how Vanderbilt has been perceived. I also tried to do more than simply provide the correct version—I tried to show how the truth exemplified something deeper about the man.

For example, Brands repeats the nonsense that Vanderbilt had a "scornful antipathy" to trains until he was a very old man, and couldn't deny their importance any longer. The truth is that he was continuously, and deeply, involved in the railroad industry from its very formation. The rumor that he hated trains was spread by young brokers on Wall Street during the Civil War. The truth demonstrates how much older Vanderbilt was than his business contemporaries at that time; in an era of short life spans, he outlived nearly everyone he had worked with in youth and middle age. Those wartime brokers simply hadn't been around for the earlier phases of Vanderbilt's career. The truth also shows how quick he was to understand the importance of new developments on the economic scene. More than that, Vanderbilt almost never took things personally. He had been nearly killed in 1833 in a terrible train accident, but that didn't stop him from investing in—and riding—trains almost immediately afterward. By 1847 he took the presidency of his first railroad, the Stonington.

It's easy to mishandle the process of setting the record straight. Some readers don't care about how my version differs from the old tales—they just want the true story, period. But emphasizing how you're challenging received wisdom can underscore the significance of your contribution, and, handled correctly, make your new version even more interesting.

Character, character

2010-11-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

In my recent review of Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life, I didn't give full enough credit to the many things Chernow does well. One of them is the creation of character.

Character is enormously important. Characters are, of course, people. An author largely succeeds or fails by the believability of his characters—the degree to which they seem to be full, real, human. This is as important in nonfiction as in fiction. But, of course, the nonfiction writer must work with evidence.

In using evidence to sketch a character, it's important to pay attention to details that speak to defining characteristics. Getting dressed every day is not a telling detail; insisting upon dressing in formal wear for every occasion, on the other hand, would be an interesting fact. But not every detail is obviously pertinent; we must immerse ourselves in the evidence to develop an intuitive feel for who someone is, then identify what details illuminate that essence.

When it comes to action, we should focus upon how it flows from who the characters are. This is successful writing, when even surprising developments seem perfectly believable, because they reflect the sense that the reader has been developing of a character's, er, character. And that's something Chernow does extremely well. We all could learn from his example.

Now an E-Book: My First Biography

2010-11-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

You can now buy my first biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, as an e-book. Amazon has it for sale here. Barnes & Noble has it for sale here.

Why now? After all, the book is eight years old. Because I urged my publisher to release an electronic edition, and the company agreed. I mention this because some may have formed the impression that I am some kind of Luddite, thanks to my posts about e-book pricing. No, I am not opposed to e-books. If anything, the rapid rise of e-books shows that interest in books remains alive and well, despite our click-click short-attention-span digital culture. That's good. I like people reading, no matter what format.

Do I still have qualms about digital pricing? Oh, yes. I can't stand blather on Amazon customer reviews about how "it stands to reason" that packaging, warehousing, and shipping comprise the bulk of a book's cost. That's simply uninformed nonsense. If that's so, why does Microsoft charge $150 for its Office product, when its cost of packaging, etc., is radically less than that of a heavy $35 hardcover? More important, why do you pay $150? Why pay $55 or more for a video game? Both software and books are intellectual property—what gives them value is not the delivery system, but the fact that they embody creations of the human mind. You don't imagine that you're mainly buying CDs when you buy software, nor should you imagine that you're mainly buying paper when you buy books. I've never heard of anyone who was enjoying a good book looking up and saying, "Gosh, honey, this book is printed on such nice paper! You should see this—the ink is fantastic!" No, you quote the passages that you like.

The value is in the content. And the content is the same no matter what the format, e-book or physical book.

Of course, I recognize that, under current conditions, digitization will tend to depress the price of books. Currently, the main force is downward. Yes, there are some savings with digital books, though nowhere near as much as people think. But most of the downward pressure is exerted by competition among retail outlets, particularly Amazon, which is willing to absorb losses in return for market share. Be warned: This downward pressure is building up resistance, which will spring back upward before too long. For one thing, Amazon cannot continue to absorb losses forever. But even if it succeeds in setting all e-book prices at $9.99, the spring back up will inevitably occur. That, or certain books will disappear from the marketplace.

A research-intensive book of the kind I write requires an upfront investment from the publisher in the form of an advance. Then comes a major investment of time and money on the part of the author, followed by lots of product improvement by the publisher—editing, copy-editing, design, etc.—as well as marketing. Unless a radically larger number of units sell at Amazon's magical $9.99 price point than have been selling in physical form, that $9.99 price will lead to a loss for the publisher, and ultimately the author. Already there is intense downward pressure on advances, and it will only grow worse as revenue from books falls. The inevitable result will be that serious, research-intensive nonfiction will be abandoned to academics (who are not rewarded professionally for writing well), or else book prices will go up. It's the fierce law of the market.

I couldn't have written The First Tycoon in my spare time. Nor could I have undertaken it if the list price on all copies sold was $9.99. It wouldn't have been possible. Self-publishing? I'm sorry, but that doesn't fly with my kind of work. For multi-year, research-intensive books, the self-publishing business plan goes like this: "First, be rich. Then, live off your wealth while you write."

But my point is this: Books are not interchangeable. The effort and process of writing them, let alone the experience of reading them, is radically different from book to book. None of that has anything to do with whether the book appears on paper or in digital form. There is no earthly reason why a one-size-fits-all price should apply to e-books. Yes, I want books to be cheaper, too, but readers should accept varied prices, and not be fooled into thinking $9.99 is a natural price for all e-books.

Dirty, Dirty Politics

2010-10-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, October 30, 2010, the San Francisco Chronicle will publish a review I wrote of H.W. Brands's history of the United States in the late nineteenth century. You can find it here. This follows a review I wrote of Ron Chernow's big new bio of George Washington, published the week before by the Washington Post. You can read it here.

On reading the comments posted on the Post's website, I'm struck by how the readers' reactions reflect our modern politics, rather than the eighteenth century. I'm betting that many readers will react similarly to my review of Brands's book. There's an irony to this: My most important point, in both reviews, is to say that we must understand historical figures in the context of their times, not ours.

And yet, when political passions run high, as they do now, it is inevitable that many readers will not follow this advice. Politics tends to dirty up the historical waters—not because politics itself is bad or dirty, but because it is so filled with emotion, with passion. It's difficult to step outside of the urgency of now to coolly understand the very different world of yesterday. I guess that's why I get paid the, er, small bucks.

But my job, as a biographer, is to try to bring readers along with me when I try to move inside the contemporary mindset of the past. Not everyone will be willing to follow; many will insist on seeing the past in terms of the arguments of the present. But we can't really understand the present unless we see how it emerged from the past. Things do change, and we'll never really see where we are unless we know where we came from to get here.

Getting all Zeitgeisty

2010-10-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, October 24, the Washington Post published my review of Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life. You may read that review here.

I'd like to add three things to my otherwise self-evident commentary. First, I should have clarified something in the review. I quote historian Joyce Appleby's reference to "the Republicans," without specifying that this refers to the Jeffersonian Republicans—also known as the Democratic-Republicans—rather than the modern GOP. I think this may have confused some readers.

Second, I liked this book. (I'm even getting my father a copy as a gift.) I think that's pretty obvious, but unfortunately that's not what everyone will take away from the review. In many significant ways, Chernow produced an exemplary biography. But my job as a reviewer is not simply to convey my sense of the book's quality, of the degree of pleasure in reading it (though that's essential). I also must say something interesting about it. In doing that, I pointed to the limits on the book's excellence, an act that tends to draw the eye away from the excellence itself. I don't know of any way of countering that effect, except to say, as I did in this review, that a reader might agree with my criticisms, yet still thoroughly enjoy the book.

Third, the main thrust of my criticism is that a biographer must be a historian as well as a life-writer. To understand a person fully—to be able to judge the accuracy of conflicting evidence—a biographer needs to be fully immersed in the times, and the historiography (that is, what historians have written in their arguments with each other). This necessarily involves reading a lot of tedious monographs, the scholarly studies that comprise the academic field of history. It's not fun. It's possible to write a decent historical book without a background in the historiography—but it's harder. And it's nearly impossible to write a great book without it.

I've written about this before, so I needn't go on, but there is an unfortunate hostility between "popular" historians and biographers on one side, and academic historians on the other. Writers of narrative and biography often denounce scholarly writing as boring and irrelevant to the public. Academic historians sometimes deride widely read books as shallow and uninformed. These charges carry some truth, but we shouldn't get carried away in either direction. History needs in-depth studies, with their analyses and arguments. It also needs synthetic narratives, which restore the human, individual element, the life, to history. A biographer needs a literary sensibility and a deep understanding of the historical context, which means an understanding of the ways the context has been debated.

Is there such a thing as zeitgeist? Kinda, I guess. But, real or not, a good biographer must pursue it, to try to grasp what it meant to live in a time and place.

Verily Verity

2010-10-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

The art of narrative nonfiction has occupied my thoughts even more than usual lately. I was recently on a panel with three distinguished writers, as a part of San Francisco's literary festival, Litquake. The other writers included Frances Dinkelspiel, Tamim Ansary, and Richard Rhodes. I'm a big admirer of Rhodes in particular, who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his epic The Making of the Atomic Bomb. (He deserved to win both again for his heartrending memoir, A Hole in the World.)

One of the issues that came up, as I knew it would, is Rhodes's contention that we shouldn't call nonfiction nonfiction. We don't call sculpture "nonpainting," he notes. His solution is elegant: we should call it "verity," the anglicization of the latin word for truth.

I agree, though I doubt it will catch on. It's interesting to note, though, that our fascinating discussion strayed dangerously close at times to claiming that there is no difference between fiction and nonfi- ... er, verity. There is an electrified wire between them, in fact. I've argued this question with Colum McCann, who often writes novels about actual people, and doesn't see much of a distinction. My point is that you can cross the boundary quite easily, but only in one direction. (I'm hardly the first or only person to say this.) A fiction writer can make use of fact without hesitation, but a writer of verity cannot invent anything. Indeed, getting at truth—at verity—is what we do, the reason in many ways for our entire field of writing.

But in our panel discussion, Rhodes quite correctly pointed out that we make countless choices that reflect the same artistic sensibility as that of the novelist. What we include and what we leave out; what questions we ask and how we answer; our insights and the connections we draw. We give life to characters, sound the emotional depths, identify motivations and consequences. It all must be solidly founded on evidence, but evidence can be looked at, and judged, in so many different ways.

It's not fiction, but it is art. If the writer wants it to be, that is.

Breath Sentence

2010-10-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

Six years ago, when I still lived in New York, I got into an argument with a friend of mine over nonfiction. He was a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, a fiction writer also published by Knopf (at the risk of sounding self-serving, this spoke to his literary chops). He insisted that nonfiction is not literature, because nonfiction writers don't care about "the beauty of the sentence."

I disagreed then, and I disagree now. And yet, I must admit, there are plenty of nonfiction writers who seem determined to prove him right. It frustrates me to read biographies, historical narratives, discussions of current events, and other nonfiction works, and stumble over clichés, dead phrases, lifeless metaphors, and ugly sentences.

George Orwell famously wrote, in "Politics and the English Language," that you must think about each word you use; if you simply write in stock phrases, then your phrases will do your thinking for you. I think this is the single most useful piece of advice he ever gave to writers. You might write in a style that would never have occurred to Orwell, yet excel in beauty and clarity by following this axiom.

There are nonfiction writers who write sentences as complex as a seven-course meal, and that are just as satisfying. There are writers who craft sentences as stark and simple as drops of distilled water, yet readers dry out their eyeballs from staring at their beauty. Whatever a writer's style, the important thing is that the sentences breathe life. Let the dead bury the dead—just keep them out of your paragraphs.

Presentism and Prejudice

2010-09-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

Last week, I spoke to large audiences in St. Louis, MO, and Wilmington, NC. They were terrific audiences in wonderful communities. I hope they'll have me back some day. But the trip exposed me to something I run into now and then: I received two loaded questions, from people with strong beliefs about history and its connection to the present. I must stress that these questions were only two out of many that I answered, but they got me thinking about the dilemmas of presentism and prejudice in historical writing—and in the reading audience.

One question regarded Cornelius Vanderbilt, the other Jesse James. The first brought up the Obama administration's economic policies; I got the impression that the questioner did not approve of government intervention in the economy. The second was from someone who seemed to feel strongly that Reconstruction policies after the Civil War were wrong.

I don't mean to judge these questioners, or pretend to really know what they think. Rather, they reminded me that, generally speaking, there are some who see both Vanderbilt and James in ideological terms. I have often encountered people who either believe that Vanderbilt is a hero who demonstrates the greatness of the unregulated marketplace, or a villain who represents the evils that capitalists inflict upon their workers and society. In terms of Jesse James, I have met with outright anger from people who believe that I am wrong to discuss slavery as a major factor in his life and in the Civil War. In the latter case, the connection to the present is murkier (no one wants to bring slavery back), but it relates to feelings about race, civil rights laws, affirmative action, and the general sense among some Southerners that their section was treated badly after the Civil War.

For a biographer, the challenge of such prejudices is twofold. First, I think it's important to strip yourself of your own prejudices, to avoid presentism as much as humanly possible. You must be willing at every step to challenge your own assumptions, which are naturally rooted in the present day. In Vanderbilt's case, I had to think afresh about the corporation and the role of government; the way Americans saw such things before the Civil War, in particular, was radically different from the way we do in the present. I tried very hard to discuss the contemporary debate over Vanderbilt, over opportunity and equality, not one we might have today. Understanding the historical origins of our modern argument is very useful for the present, but we must not turn a historical figure into an ideological pawn.

Second, in dealing with the public, you have to be honest but careful. For those who resist the idea of slavery as a key to understanding Jesse James's life and the Civil War, I must patiently lay out the facts—how secessionists themselves named the preservation of slavery as the reason for forming the Confederacy, how James's family counted much of its own wealth in human beings, how slaves outnumbered whites on his mother's farm before the Civil War, how local Missouri secessionists developed a fiercely militant view of slavery as necessary to preserving white liberty.

But it's important to stress that this is a historical exploration, not a moral or ideological judgment. I try to defuse the anger, if I encounter it, so the listener can hear what I'm saying. For example, some Southerners today feel that to discuss the historical centrality of slavery is to condemn their ancestors as morally inferior or evil. Far from it. So I tend to add—quite honestly—that most Northerners opposed slavery because they didn't want to live near black people or compete with slave labor. They were not racial egalitarians. In Missouri, many slaveowners sided with the Union because they thought it was a better way to keep their slaves; Lincoln had promised not to interfere with slavery where it existed, and if Missouri seceded it would lose the benefit of the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing slaves to slip across a nearby international border.

In other words, the history of the Civil War is not a morality play (even though slavery was unquestionably evil, and its destruction was a very good thing). And, when speaking to people who feel strongly about Vanderbilt as hero or villain, I stress—again, honestly—that I am not preaching about the present day, that I am trying to understand this person, and how he shaped the American economy and political debate. Frankly, it's a good thing that I wasn't trying to preach some present-minded message: I wrote The First Tycoon before the financial crisis of September 2008, and my book would likely have sounded badly out of date as soon as it was published.

It's tricky, being honest with yourself. And it's tricky, engaging readers (or listeners) who have set viewpoints, while still remaining honest. I myself have political views, which are informed by my research. But I try my best to keep it a one-way road; I don't want my views of the present to be imprinted on the past, as I describe it to my readers. I take it as a sign of success that there is at least one customer review on Amazon that condemns my book for being too admiring of Vanderbilt, and another that condemns my book for being too hostile to Vanderbilt. That probably means I got the balance just about right.

So Busy

2010-09-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while, because I'm a bit overwhelmed. I will be on the road for about two weeks this month alone, speaking in St. Louis; Wilmington, North Carolina; Nashville; and my own San Francisco. Plus I have a review to write. Plus I've got some other stuff to do. (Must remember to pick up dry cleaning on Friday.)

So, let me say the following, in the few moments I have for blogging:

To the authors of books I've reviewed recently:

I thought they were excellent books. My criticisms were not meant to hurt as much as they probably did. (I say that simply out of my own experience as an author—you remember every criticism, and tend to forget the praise.)

To the biographers, historians, and writers who actually pay attention to what I have to say:

I have one piece of advice that outweighs anything else I've ever said, because it's always true for everyone. In the words of my excellent editor, "There are no shortcuts." Keep that in mind, and you'll be OK.

To people who think I'm a luddite who hates e-books:

Why can't we all get along? I love you e-book readers—I love all readers. You think I'd rather you weren't reading books? Just, please, don't make a religion out of an arbitrary e-book price set by a certain online bookselling monopoly. That behemoth doesn't love you. I do.

To Brian Sala:

You used to be cool, man. What happened to you?

That is all.

A Well-Integrated Life

2010-08-31T08:24:00.000-07:00

For today's rumination, I am going to crack my whip, yet again, over Niall Ferguson for his book High Financier.

This is not fair on my part, I must admit. I've been criticizing him fairly often, even though he wrote a pretty decent book. And it's not because I disagree with him on current politics, either. Though there are many points in politics and economic policy in which I part ways with him, I don't hold that against him as a historian. Because he's a damn good one.

No, I'm picking on Ferguson for one simple reason: I recently read and reviewed his book for the Washington Post. Ferguson is a far better writer than the average academic historian, out there digging the trenches of the scholarly monograph. But he still displays, in High Financier, some academic traits. One of them, which I take to task in the review, is the isolation of various aspects of his subject's life into different chapters.

For an academic, this is a useful method. That's because the academic's concern is to analyze the material at hand—in this case, the various public roles filled by Siegmund Warburg. But I believe that a biography with literary virtues must fully process those different elements, and reintegrate them into a coherent, chronological whole. As biographers, we are trying to do justice to a life, to capture how it was lived. We want to understand and then show how someone balanced the various aspects of his or her life, faced multiple stresses, how the personal and the public were intertwined in the organic experience of living.

There is no centrifuge in our own lives, after all (as much as we would like on occasion to have one, so we can just work, or just be with our families, without the demands of one pressing on the other). Nor should we pretend that our subjects had one.

Room for Growth

2010-08-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

In writing about the childhood of a person who achieved great things as an adult, the writer faces a particular challenge: hindsight.

This is a difficult problem. After all, readers would not pick up biographies of random children; it is the ultimate role that a figure plays that make him or her the proper subject for a life study. We want to know the roots of later life, to see how the more famous (or notorious) aspects of a life germinated in youth.

All too often, however, the biographer falls into a kind of crude determinism. The path appears clear from the beginning; everything seems destined; the talents of a full-grown adult appear clearly in the youth. In reality, of course, a life plays out in an unplanned chain of accident and intention, of unexpected opportunities and unwanted challenges.

As with everything, capturing that sense of contingency is a delicate matter. Overdone, it drowns the reader in detail, erasing a sense of forward momentum that we wish for in a narrative. Underdone, it makes the child seem less like a child than a small adult—or an actor standing in the wings, waiting for the cue to enter the stage and play a well-rehearsed role. Dramatic irony is often useful. A reader of a biography likely knows something of the subject's ultimate role; keeping it in mind, the biographer can surprise and create narrative tension by showing how the subject nearly went in this or that direction. If the subject rises to great accomplishment, then early failures and disappointments should not be downplayed; they should be told fully, to add to the dramatic impact of the ultimate achievement.

It's hard to capture immaturity, childishness, undeveloped sensibilities. Sometimes a biography doesn't reach so far back, and these are irrelevant. But the worst thing is to pretend that they didn't exist—that the subject was mature and accomplished from the start. There's no better way to flatline your narrative arc.

Peering Past the Barrier

2010-08-16T10:19:00.000-07:00

In my interview with Bigthink.com (which you can view here), I speak in one segment about "the barrier." Unfortunately, it might be a little confusing in the interview, since it was edited badly: The question I was responding to appears after my answer.

So allow me to elaborate. I was asked if biography was like "resurrecting the dead." No, I said, it isn't; we constantly confront "the barrier." This is a rephrasing of something E.M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel. He explained that nonfiction (what he called "history") can only deal with evidence, which appears on the surface of a life. Fiction, he wrote, can go deeper, and in that sense is truer, because we all know there is a great deal beneath the surface.

Very true—yet it is a vital necessity that the biographer to strive to understand what is beyond the barrier. This is a delicate matter. We cannot simply make things up. I do not like fictionalizations, even when italicized or clearly labeled. Rather, looking beneath the surface requires a combination of a rich understanding of the historical context, and an imaginative, intuitive reading of the sometimes scanty evidence.

For example, early in Jesse James, I discuss the aftermath of James's father's death. I have no direct sources speaking to the emotional state of young Jesse or, for that matter, any of his family. But in the probate court records I found a great deal of evidence about the probate auction, in which the family's possessions were auctioned off in the winter cold to pay the father's debts. I made writerly choices in how I presented this scene; my selection of what to mention, the juxtapositions of evidence I made, evoke my sense of the emotional impact.

I did my best to be true to the evidence, but the evidence bumped up against the barrier. Clearly there was something more here; clearly I could not just invent emotions for my subjects. But I believe it was right, even necessary, to draw out of the bare facts the internal impact. But, again, it is a matter of evoking, rather than inventing—a delicate matter.

Sometimes the very lack of evidence is the story. When it comes to Vanderbilt, for example, there was a notorious conflict between the old man and his children over a governess in 1846. At the trial over his will, the children hinted that they thought he had an inappropriate relationship with her. Unfortunately, the actual evidence tells us very little about whether he really did; certainly nothing conclusive. So I allowed my attention to be drawn to another bit of evidence: how Vanderbilt responded to the governess's departure from the family. Whether he was sleeping with her or not, her leaving upset him; he wanted her back. Yet he could not bring himself to approach her directly. This did not tell me what kind of relationship they had, but it did speak to his difficulty in coping with emotionally painful situations. I gained an insight into his character that I had not expected at the outset, when I was determined to settle the question of whether the governess was his mistress or not.

A biographer must be alive to unexpected insights, to the full emotional meaning of the evidence. Just don't carry it too far.

One Life, One Story

2010-08-08T16:48:00.000-07:00

When I was writing The First Tycoon, I asked a number of other writers and scholars to read all or parts of the manuscript. One eminent biographer suggested that I move all the contextual discussions to interstitial sections, perhaps set in italics, that would lie between the chapters. I vehemently disagreed, saying that it would be a signal to the reader that this material wasn't necessary, that it could be safely skipped over. It was integral to the story, I said; the reader had to grasp this material, or the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt would not be understood. She admitted that perhaps I was right—though, of course, the question of what really does matter to the story is always in play. Too much tends to creep in too often.

I thought of this conversation when I was reviewing Niall Ferguson's biography of Siegmund Warburg for the Washington Post. I felt that Ferguson was being too much the historian, and not enough the writer, when he "splintered" the different aspects of Warburg's life into different chapters, essentially covering the same period of time again and again. While often quite useful for a historical study, I firmly believe that this approach does not make for good writing. It does violence to the organic unity of a life.

Here lies one of the trickiest tasks for a biographer: He must evoke the visceral sense of how a life was lived, how various roles and tasks had to be handled simultaneously, how the pressure of a personal dilemma, for example, was interwoven with professional conflicts.

More than that, the biographer must search for themes, for the underlying unity of a given period of time. This is truly an art. The biographer must provide the illumination shed by her own distinctive mind on a tangle of historical events. Who the subject was as a person, and what these conflicts or developments say about her, must be thought through, illustrated with well-chosen quotes or anecdotes, and supported through the narrative.

In my most recent book, I often tried to set the thematic tone at the outset of each chapter, and demonstrate how that theme emerged through all aspects of Vanderbilt's life. Sometimes I decided upon where to cut the cord of time—where to begin and end chapters—based on the themes I saw clustered together in the various elements of my subject's existence.

Like anything, this can be done badly. Perhaps I did it badly at times. It can be heavy handed, and seem inauthentic to the factual, irreducible flow of events. But, if done well, it is a path toward explaining a life, even as it unfolds it as a single, organically cohesive narrative. One life, one story: it's a handy guide to writing a biography.

The Three Faces of the Biographer

2010-08-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

I find my mind turning to the different roles played by a biographer, thanks to a review in today's New York Times Book Review by my fellow Pulitzer-winner Liaquat Ahamed. As it happens, Ahamed reviews the same book I recently reviewed for the Washington Post: Niall Ferguson's High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. Our views of the book are quite similar, I think, though we devoted our limited space to rather different discussions. Ahamed's review is here, and mine is here.

To my mind, the reader would be interested in a review of this book because of its famous author. Therefore, I began by contrasting this biography with the sort of sweeping histories that Ferguson is best known for writing. Ahamed chooses to open with a reflection on the importance of banking in generating our current crisis, and then contrasts Warburg's approach with that of our current financial bunch. We both think Ferguson is a fine historian, but Ahamed faults him for excessive claims for Warburg's significance, while I criticized him for not providing an organically unified and compelling narrative. There's no real disagreement here; in the few hundred words allowed for a review, a critic simply has to make choices.

In sorting out such strengths and weaknesses, I think it helps to clarify just what roles we expect a biographer to play. I addressed this in 2005, in a long review of David Nasaw's definitive Andrew Carnegie, published in Salon. You can read it here. Nasaw, I wrote, researched his book superbly, bringing to light episodes never revealed before. "Researcher, however, is only one of three roles played by a good biographer," I wrote. "Just as important are the parts of historian and writer—the first to explain the times, the second to craft a purposeful narrative. To put it another way, the researcher provides depth, the historian breadth, the writer life."

Of course, a writer may define her purpose narrowly, and not strive for literary excellence. But the truly finest biographers play each of these roles to the fullest. As a researcher, a biographer must plumb not only the doings of the main character, but the lives of those who surrounded that figure, as well as the setting in which the subject's life unfolds. As historians, a biographer must not only understand the context and pass along the information to the reader, but he must also ask fresh questions about the times, and be willing to venture new historical interpretations in order to truly grasp the full significance of his subject. As writer, a biographer must not only integrate the context and facts and events of a life into a continuous narrative, but he must also create expectations, modulate the pacing, explore what this particular life says about the human condition, and write as beautifully as possible.

The danger, of course, is always that one of these roles will overwhelm the others. This is particularly true of the researcher. The massive amount of work that research demands—and the excitement of new discoveries—often create an intense desire to cram it all in a book. As jam-packed as my own The First Tycoon is, it is far shorter than the original manuscript, which included thousands of details about Gibbons v. Ogden, for example, and the lives of such fascinating secondary characters as Parker H. French (the one-handed bandit and confidence man who assisted William Walker in conquering Nicaragua) or Joseph N. Scott (the Accessory Transit Agent in Nicaragua who first went to work for Vanderbilt as a 17-year-old deck hand, learned engineering from the Commodore, and then shifted the history of a half-dozen nations with his sheer obstinancy).

The other roles, however, can sometimes overwhelm a book. When the evidence is lacking, many biographers succumb to extended suppositions of what might have happened, or what someone might have been thinking and feeling. When the historical context becomes particularly fascinating, the main subject can disappear for far too long as the writer examines the times. (I was accused of this by some in my previous biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.) Sometimes this imbalance is almost unavoidable. If there are no sources on a certain period in subject's life, that doesn't mean this timespan was insignificant. If the context strongly shaped the subject's career, or explains her significance, then a full historical discussion is warranted.

The basic rule in this balancing act is to remember the reader. In each role, the biographer must assure the reader that she being carried forward with conviction and skill, that every element is contributing to the momentum of the narrative. No matter what, a life story cannot become, as history is sometimes called, "one damn thing after another."

Is Nonfiction Literature?

2010-07-25T23:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the miracle of Google Alerts (and my own vanity in setting up alerts for "T.J. Stiles" and "The First Tycoon"), I ran across an interesting blog entry by a fiction writer who uses my book to ask a fundamental question: Is nonfiction actually literature?

The blog entry is here, with follow-ups here and here. The blogger writes,

Somehow the fact that a given story has already come and gone just takes a bit of the edge off for me. The fact is that I live in the world post-Vanderbilt: a better understanding of his influence on the world won't drastically impact how I live in it.

Fiction, on the other hand, still has the ability to change my world. The slightest bump in the arc of a story, the most unexpected development in a character, can shift my entire worldview. The possibility gives me that little bit more urgency.

Just imagine how awkward my position is when I address such a comment! What this blogger is discussing, and very thoughtfully I might add, is a profound yet highly subjective engagement with writing. Simply put, there is no telling him he's wrong. He speaks of a very recognizable effect of literature upon the reader—yet not all literature speaks to all readers with the same impact.

Of course, the highly debatable aspect of this comment is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in producing this effect. I cannot tell this reader that he must feel this profound result from reading my book, but I can argue that there is plenty of nonfiction that produces it in plenty of people. For this reason, the great writer Richard Rhodes argues that nonfiction deserves a title more dignified than the mere negation of fiction; it should be called verity, he argues. I wholeheartedly agree, but I'm too chicken to try to change the world on this point.

Even this blogger, in his follow-ups, concedes that there is nonfiction that has this effect on him. So his point actually ends up reduced to the mundane observation that not every book hits every reader the same way, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. (I never feel guilty about throwing down a book that doesn't enthrall me, even if it's highly praised or a classic. Since I will never have time to read all the books reckoned as great literature, I just move on to another.)

I must say, though, that I was conscious of what makes a book "literature" when I was writing The First Tycoon. I aspired to excellence; I hoped to achieve some level of profundity. This meant not merely research, not merely asking deep historical questions, but doing my best to engage in fine writing, to explore the human condition, to illuminate the irreducible contradictions of personality, to engage the unanswerable question of the place and role of the individual in the great current of history. I tried to unearth a lost mentality—to show that what we take for granted in our view of reality is, in fact, the result of millions upon millions of people thinking and rethinking and reshaping their existence over the centuries.

I cannot tell anyone that he or she must be moved by my work. But I truly believe that we nonfiction writers can and do write works of literature, and that the world is a better place when we strive for the profound as well as the enlightening.

Interview on Writing Biography

2010-07-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

The website Big Think has posted a 30-minute interview with a slightly jet-lagged me. You can view the full thing below, or go here for excerpts from the full interview.

What's notable about this interview, for the purpose of this particular blog, is that it touches upon many of the themes I have discussed before, and will discuss again:

• Telling good stories and asking big questions

• The necessity and near impossibility of looking beneath the surface of a life

• Research and its uses

• Understanding someone's character

• The fraught question of the uses of biography—the practical messages, as it were

Nothing new, but covers a lot of my favorite ground when it comes to writing.

Stiles Media Mayhem

2010-07-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

It won't be long before there will be new National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners, but I'm still doing OK when it comes to press attention. And some of it has to do with the subject of this blog, the art of writing biography.

First, Lewis Lapham interviewed with me for his show on Bloomberg Radio, "The World in Time." You can listen to it here.

And, on Sunday, July 11, the Washington Post publishes a review I wrote of Niall Ferguson's new biography of Siegmund Warburg, High Financier. It's already available online, here.

It's worth contrasting this review with my previous review, of Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand, which I wrote for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. You can read it here. That's because I find fault—or at least express less than total satisfaction—for nearly opposite reasons. Philbrick's book was a great read, a truly vivid account of a dramatic moment. But if Philbrick was solid on the writing front and backed it up with good research, he didn't do much with the history—by which I mean the fresh analysis, the deep thinking, that creates knowledge or changes how we think about the world. It was the work of a talented storyteller. That's no small thing. I respect this book, and would recommend it. But this is what it is; it is no more than that.

Ferguson, on the other hand, proves himself a very fine historian but lagged in his writing. Not that it was bad. Rather, I would say that he made choices that reflected a scholarly approach, rather than a writerly approach. For example, he broke up his subject's life into its constituent elements, essentially taking us through his career again and again, each time addressing a different field of activity. It was a bit like Groundhog Day, but without the same sense of impending resolution. This is precisely the sort of method one expects in a monograph, not a book touted as a potential bestseller. And that's a bit curious, because Ferguson has produced a string of bestsellers, so you would imagine he knows how to move a reader briskly through the pages, but here he does not. Again, I respect this book, and would recommend it. I wouldn't call it fun reading, though it was enlightening.

For the serious but literary biographer, there is a delicate balancing act between analysis and narrative, between interpretation and storytelling. It's not easy, and I can't claim to be perfect at it myself. (The many discarded drafts of my manuscripts offer evidence that it ain't easy for me.) But I believe the most successful biography strives for this balance, not sacrificing one side for the other, but finding ways in which each can strengthen the other.

Oh, I almost forgot: The interview with Lapham gives a pretty good capsule description of my attempt to do just this with the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It's twenty minutes, and we cover a lot of territory—rather more efficiently than I did in my book.

Virtue v. Necessity

2010-07-07T19:15:00.000-07:00

With my two biographical subjects to date, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jesse James, I confronted figures who left behind no collections of papers. True, Vanderbilt left a far greater paper trail than James (who was a fugitive, after all), but in both cases I lacked many personal papers that gave insight into each man's thoughts and feelings.

As the old saying goes, I made a virtue out of necessity. I tried to situate these men in richly drawn historical contexts, in order to understand them better—inside as well as out. I not only attempted to paint their physical worlds, their tactile experiences, but also to ask fresh questions about their times. I thought about the meaning of the events and developments that defined their lives, and provide fresh interpretations where warranted. In addition, I fleshed out the lives of secondary characters, as I researched the people and issues that surrounded my subjects.

This contextual approach can be satisfying on both the levels of both reading and scholarship. One one hand, I tried to transport my readers into a very different time and place, to make it seem real, populated by individuals with conflicting agendas and personal quirks. On the other hand, I feel that I got a better grip in the true significance of these men.

There's a danger to this contextual approach, of course: That the writer will get so taken with a historical topic that the book ceases to be a biography at all. Some took issue with Jesse James for precisely that reason. I don't blame them, though I still wouldn't write that book any differently, at least not in that respect. But I recognize that not all readers will follow me into the context, in the way I've described here.

With my next subject, I find myself in a very different situation, with virtually opposite perils. I am writing a book about George Armstrong Custer, who wrote many, many letters that were very, very long. They have been well collected in a number of archives.

In reviewing other biographies, I have sometimes taken them to task for getting lost in their sources. With a superabundance of manuscripts, a kind of writerly intoxication can set in. There's no longer the sense of pressing necessity, when it comes to establishing the context or filling secondary characters with life. Strange as it is to say, a biography must be more than the main subject, the main subject, the main subject. It must change perspective, step back to look at the world, follow the lives of those who intersected with the person at the heart of the book.

After criticizing others for this failing, I only hope I can get it right.

Talking Writing, Tonight

2010-06-30T12:50:00.001-07:00

Find yourself in Marin tonight? I'll be discussing The First Tycoon, biography, and writing narrative nonfiction with writer Jane Ganahl, at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley at 7:30 PM.

Here's the link:

http://www.throckmortontheater.com/event.php?eventid=1243

Can You Teach Writing?

2010-06-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I discussed Eric Arnesen's essay from a few years ago, "Historians and the Public: Premature Obituaries, Abiding Laments." There's one thing it brings up that I wanted to tackle, but forgot to dive after until this moment.

I was recently given Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs as a gift. It was a good gift, because Chabon is a good essayist. One of the things he discusses is the creative writing program. (Chabon himself received an MFA.) Often, he notes, he is asked, "Can you really teach writing?"

As it so happens, this is just the question asked by many historians, when faced with criticism of their prose. As Arnesen notes in his essay, many express doubts that writing can really be taught. Chabon's essay tells us that this is a common assumption. But yes, Chabon counters, you can teach writing.

It astounds me that there is a seemingly universal belief that writing is an innate talent that cannot be developed through devoted study and practice. With Chabon, I must say: What crap.

Obviously some have more of a knack for it than others. Some could study writing forever, and still be so-so; some can study not at all, and be pretty good at it. But this is true of absolutely everything. No matter what the inherent ability of the student, it is a universal truth that there is no skill, art, discipline, or endeavor of any kind engaged in by human beings that does not improve with diligent effort, guided by knowledgeable instructors.

Chabon graduated from a creative writing program. I never matriculated in one. Yet I believe that even my experience bears out the truth that writing can be taught. I have studied writing very hard over the years. I've read intently, with the goal of learning to be a better writer. I have been corrected, taught, guided, and I bear those lessons in mind at all times. I think every day about what good writing is, and how I can make my writing better.

As I mentioned in my previous post, not all writing has to be literary. The discipline of history needs the scholarly monograph. No, I do not criticize the graduate students and assistant professors out there, writing dense tomes that only scholars will read. We need your investigations, analyses, and arguments, people. But for you historians and other scholars who wish to write narrative (good for you, by the way, because history and other fields need narrative works, too): Don't make excuses for bad writing. The claim that "writing can't be taught" serves as a lazy excuse for not trying to write well—for not believing that literary values are universal values.

They are. So pay attention, learn something, and write gooder. Er, and I'll keep trying to do better, too.

Is History Mired in the Past?

2010-06-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

On June 13, CSpan's BookTV televised my on-stage conversation at the Chicago Printer's Row Lit Fest. You can view it here. My interlocutor was historian Eric Arnesen, of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Though Professor Arnesen left most of the air time to me, he's a very interesting fellow. In 2007, he wrote a fascinating article titled, "Historians and the Public: Premature Obituaries, Abiding Laments." The topic of the piece was an essay by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, lamenting the passing of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.—America's "last great public historian," Tanenhaus wrote.

Tanenhaus bemoaned the absence of historians who write history with the intention of speaking to present problems. "We live in what is often called a golden age of history and biography," he wrote; but even such great and widely read works as James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution lack "reach," Tanenhaus complained. "These are books that, for all their merits, seem not only about the past but also, to some extent, mired in it. They are archival."

For historians, this was like—well, insert your favorite uproar-igniting metaphor here. (Red flag to a bull? Match in a gas tank? Moderate incumbent Republican at a Tea Party rally?) As Arnesen aptly shows, academic historians of all stripes responded to Tanenhaus's complaints with anger. A lot of anger. Really angry anger, of the hopping-mad variety. Plus they were angry.

There are two aspects to the resulting frenzy that I'd like to discuss. First, as Arnesen's discussion shows, much of the response revolved around academic historians' recurring complaint that they are not reaching a wide audience. Though it's true, I think much of the grumbling is misplaced. History is an academic discipline. It has become professionalized, with a high degree of specialization, and a set of professional concerns that practitioners discuss among themselves in pursuit of more exacting standards. The almost-unreadable scholarly monograph is, in fact, the basic building block of historical knowledge. Narrow but deep studies of various topics have advanced history tremendously in the last century. No assumption goes unchallenged in today's historical world, which is a good thing even if you really don't care to read the discussions.

But don't take my word for it: Gordon Wood makes an eloquent defense of academic historical writing here.

In fact, what's remarkable about history is that it's one field that continues to produce excellent writers who turn out truly literary works, even as they meet the highest scholarly standards. I think one reason is that history, as the study of humanity over time, is ultimately tethered to narrative, no matter who far it may wander. As E. M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, the story ultimately comes down to a chronological progression of events; even experimental fiction cannot escape it completely. Not all historical writing is narrative, but narrative writing will always be a part of history.

The worst thing that academic historians do is to try too hard to be popular. I loathe the frequent resort to cutesy, punning titles in academic works. Often academics think that reaching a wide audience means they must dumb down their books, to write in a cloying way. The age-old rule is true: write what you yourself would like to read. I can't believe that's happening with books that scream, "Look at me write for a popular audience!"

My solution: History should teach narrative writing—not as the be-all and end-all of the profession, but because there are many historians who also wish to be good and widely read writers. Meanwhile, scholarly and not very readable monographs will continue to be published, because we need them.

On the other hand, I would like more non-academic writers of popular history to study history from an academic perspective. I enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand, for example; it's a crisply written book filled with beautiful details. But when Philbrick writes that Custer's rank as general was a mere brevet rank, I feel deflated, knowing that the writer does not fully grasp the institution he's writing about—the army. (Custer actually was a general, but in the volunteer force that existed only for the duration of the Civil War and was organizationally separate from the standing Regular Army. His brevet, or honorary, rank as general was specifically in the Regular Army. The distinction sounds picayune, but it speaks to the way Americans thought about the role and size of the permanent military establishment. A mass army was thought valid only as a temporary organization for a limited national emergency.) This doesn't ruin the book for me, but it marks its limitations.

I aspire to meet scholarly standards and create historical knowledge. I also aspire to write works with literary qualities, that both entertain and enrich. Not all popular writers of history attempt to engage the world of historical scholarship, and not all academic historians wish to engage a popular audience; but I bet there are plenty who want to do both, as I do. Generally speaking, each class of historian could use more education in, and more respect for, the approach of the other.

I mentioned a second issue that I wanted to discuss, with regard to Tanenhaus's now three-year-old essay. That's the notion that history is "mired" in history, and that being "archival" is a fault. I'm sorry—that's just weird. It elevates the notion of writing very specifically about present-day problems to the foremost purpose of history, which does violence to the study of the past. It's OK to write about subjects that speak to present-day concerns, or to write about the making of the problems we have today, but to present history as some kind of template for or easy analogy with the present is bad scholarship and bad writing.

Let me use my most recent book as an example. Many of the issues that dominated Cornelius Vanderbilt's life are ones that we struggle with today. He was a creator of the modern stock market, the modern corporation, the giant corporation. He was the focal point for a new debate over the need for government regulation of the economy. I believe that understanding his life richly informs the present. But I think that if I had written up a set of lessons to be taken from his life, it would have diminished the book. It would have taken a complex, multi-faceted life, one rich with contradiction and ambiguity, and boiled it down to take-away nuggets. I can think of nothing that would have more effectively shrunk the impact of my writing. Similarly, if I had kept the present too much in my mind when analyzing his life, I would have missed the truth. Before the Civil War, the ways Americans thought about corporations, government, freedom, equality—even the meanings of common words—were radically different. If I had made a deliberate attempt to make that period speak to today, I would have warped the reality of that time. Because I did my best to avoid present-mindedness, I actually discovered more about the present—such as the historical roots of popular suspicion of government, among people who materially benefit most from government action.

Don't get me wrong—Sam Tanenhaus is a smart guy, and the essay is provocative and thoughtful. But I do think that attacking history for being "mired in the past" is dumb. It asks history to cease being history, which would eliminate its very utility for understanding the present.

Chicago's Printer's Row Lit Fest

2010-06-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

I'm on my way home after appearing at Chicago's wonderful Printer's Row Lit Fest. My event was a conversation with Eric Arnesen, a historian very interested in the discipline in general, and the writing of history.

The video is already available on BookTV's website:

Here.

In preparing for this event, I read an interesting article by Arnesen on academic history and general audiences. It had provoked some thinking, which I'll share in my next post. But first: I have to get home, and finish writing a review.

Classic Repost: Why Does It Matter?

2010-06-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

I'm having an insane week, having just returned from two weeks on the East Coast, and a few days before I go to Chicago for the Printers Row Book Fest (which I'm really looking forward to attending). Oh, and did I mention that I have three events this week?

So here's a classic repost—the blogger's equivalent of a clip show on TV:

———————————————

A biographer—or any nonfiction writer—may be drawn to a subject because it has a good story. Dramatic events, colorful characters, exotic settings: these and more make for fun reading (and writing), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. As E.M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, the most basic element of writing is the story: "and then, and then, and then. . . ." I believe that keeping your reader interested in discovering what happens next is a fundamental element of a pleasurable narrative.

But storytelling alone is not enough, at least not for a book that is meant to be more than a throw-away diversion. There's a question that the biographer must constantly ask, and continually answer: Why does this matter?

In The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, I tried to combine storytelling and a search for significance on the opening page. The events I describe there are depicted in the illustration in this post [not shown in this repost], which shows Dr. Jared Linsly, Vanderbilt's personal physician, testifying in December 1877 on the opening day of the trial over the Commodore's will. Vanderbilt left the bulk if his estimated $100 million to his oldest son, William Henry, and the other children were not pleased. One sued to break the will. The trial was a media sensation (revealing the Commodore's prominence in American culture), and led to a fascinating but fragmented and not-always-accurate exploration of his life and character.

So, I pat myself on the back. In fact, a set-piece like the will trial makes the story-significance balancing act seem easy, but it's not. For example, when I wrote about Vanderbilt's role in the business and legal battle that led to Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court's landmark first commerce-clause case, I struggled for a long time. I got bogged down in petty details (which I thought were important—merely because they hadn't been written about before—but they really weren't). I got caught up in the standard story-line about this episode, which can be summed up as "All hail the downfall of a government-sanctioned monopoly."

I only emerged from this mire when I paid attention what what the participants were saying and thinking, and began to connect it to the broad stream of historians' thinking about the period. Instead of recording every injunction and service of papers in this complicated legal mess, I had to turn to the larger social, cultural, and even political implications. The destruction of a monopoly was indeed one important result of this story, but it also represented a profound shift in American society. Once I made that breakthrough, I saw everything that followed in Vanderbilt's life in a different light.

For all I know, my analysis may not be well received by critics and other historians. What I do know, though, is that it was not an easy process getting there. I had to fail with my first draft of those early chapters before I really worked through what I was seeing in the mountain of evidence I had compiled. But if those (revised) chapters do succeed, then it is because I was able to intertwine the discussion of the larger significance with well-paced storytelling. If I did that properly, then the dramatic events are all the more compelling, because we can see what was at stake.

Well, that's the sort of thing that I like in a book. And it's good advice to write what you like to read.

Art, Scholarship, and Prizes

2010-06-02T18:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting regularly, because I've been on the road for a mixture of business and pleasure. It feels mostly like business, because I've got deadlines hanging over my head. But my travels have had me thinking about the art of writing biography, the purported point of this blog.

My family and I headed back to New York (what I think of as my adult home town, where I spent twenty formative years) specifically for the Pulitzer Prize ceremony at Columbia University. Here you can see me with President Lee Bollinger, holding my Pulitzer certificate (and, apparently, attempting my best imitation of President Bollinger's smile).

Winning the Pulitzer is a remarkably disorienting thing. So is winning the National Book Award. Winning both makes me feel like a character in Being John Malkovich, as if I've suddenly found myself inside a famous person's head. I have actually been referred to as a celebrity, though I frankly don't believe it.

Part of the problem is that it places me in this peculiar position of explaining why it really is humbling, without diminishing the prizes themselves, or the seriousness and effort of the judges.

As I've written before, we have to admit that there's something inherently arbitrary about picking just one book in biography (in the case of the Pulitzer), let alone all nonfiction (in the case of the National Book Award). A different set of qualified judges might well have chosen another book. The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and National Book Critics Circle Prize went to different books—in fact, mine didn't even make their shortlists of finalists—and there were no riots in the streets by outraged readers and critics. As I've written, this is no surprise: the books that were selected as finalists and winners in those cases were all highly deserving of recognition.

So I'm very fortunate. And yet, I'm not the beneficiary of mere random chance. I know that might make me sound like a jerk, so allow me to explain.

Both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award exist to recognize writing that is both literary and meets exacting scholarly standards. They celebrate the idea that truly great writing can not only co-exist with accuracy, precision, and deep research, but that they can enhance one another. Knowledge and argument have the greatest impact when couched in fine writing; compelling narrative, smart pacing, richly drawn characters, and fully realized settings have the greatest power when they emerge from deep study.

This is my ideal. In the years that I devoted to The First Tycoon, I worked as hard as I could to write at the level that might make it a candidate for such prizes. Why? I didn't write in order to win a prize. That's frankly ridiculous, because (as I've said) there are always so many deserving candidates that the odds are tiny; it would be like devoting your life to a profession in order to earn money to buy one lottery ticket every four to seven years. Rather, I wrote in pursuit of the prizes' values: writing that informs, entertains, and enriches. It's deeply gratifying to win, not simply because it helps my career or garners me attention, but because distinguished juries have identified my work with that tradition. And that—well, that is a dream come true.

As I mentioned in my National Book Award acceptance remarks, one of the virtues of singling out just one book as a winner is that it starts arguments; there will always be dissenters who champion other books. That's exactly why these prizes are so great: they remind us of our values, when it comes to writing, and remind us that there are a lot of excellent books being published every year, in the face of interminable claims that publishing is dead and no one reads anymore. I really do thank the finalists, and the deserving books that didn't make these particular shortlists, because they share those values, because they write in the same tradition.

I've been talking a lot recently about these virtues, about the marriage of literary and scholarly qualities in the best biographies. As I've ruminated on the topic, it has dawned on me just how daunting it is to win major prizes. Expectations have been raised; meanwhile, good writing continues to be hard, hard work. Each book is a unique effort, and it shows when you take shortcuts. But the old chestnut is true: If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Or, as my editor says, books are life. And here's to life.

Happy Birthday, Commodore

2010-05-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-08T13:06:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Auletta on e-books

2010-04-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

As my regular readers know (Brian, Mom, good morning to you both), I tend to discuss e-books a lot in this blog. This is both because e-books are an important issue in and of themselves, and also because they attract a disproportionate amount of attention in the media.

Case in point: The recent article in The New Yorker by Ken Auletta.

First, let me give Auletta a lot of credit. This is actually one of the best discussions of e-books and publishing I've ever seen. My criticisms, then, will sound a little disproportionate, because a lot of agreeing on my part doesn't make for a decent blog posting; only the criticisms are worth mentioning at length. It's not fair, really, since Auletta makes many of the points I have in this blog.

So first a little agreeing. What I like about Auletta's piece is that he mentions a lot of the things that I've been harping on. These are things like the relatively low percentage of printing and distribution in a book's total cost; the absolutely essential nature of publishers, not only with editing and nurturing authors, but also advances. (My main criticism with that is that he didn't stress it enough.) Also, he noted that e-books are three to five percent of the book market; that's small, but it's actually higher than I had heard before. It may well be that the industry-wide number is higher because of the sort of rapid-consumption books, such as romances, that are popular on e-readers.

One of the most important points he makes is that the digital tycoons don't read books, don't believe books will survive, and have no clue how publishing works. His accounts of what Steve Jobs of Apple and Jeff Bezos of Amazon have said or believe is shocking, though completely credible. Jobs claims publishing is doomed, because only 60% of the public read a book last year (he actually said 40% didn't read a book, but I think it's more revealing to reverse the number). Bezos wants to destroy publishing, period. Neither of them understand anything about mid- and lower-list authors, and how they become top-of-the-list authors, thanks to publishers and independent bookstores.

This is important stuff, and deserves priority in my discussion. Now a little criticism. First, Auletta ducks the question of whether e-books really are going to take over the book world. The advance of e-books is limited not only by the utility of the traditional codex (in an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air," Auletta himself said he prefers to read hardcovers), but also by the expense of e-readers. Sure, someday e-readers may become cheap enough for all, but not yet. Not by a long shot. The not-95% of the market that e-books occupy is still a very small fraction of the total, even with their rapid growth.

Second, he could have disassembled the effort by Amazon, in particular, to cut out publishers. This sounds great (Hey authors! You get the profits that publishers used to get!), but it's not. Auletta did mention some of the value that publishers bring to books, including subsidizing unprofitable books, but he failed to make an obvious comparison. We've had self-published books for generations. With very, very, very few exceptions, we've never heard of them. Why? Because they stink. Publishers not only identify writers who can actually write, they screen out the junk that's not worth reading. Traditional bookstores know this; that's why they don't stock absolutely everything published by anyone. Add in the fact that publishers edit and design and market and generally improve books, and the fact that they provide advances that actually allow books that are worth something to be written, and you see that cutting out the publisher is a dumb idea all around.

So what is Amazon trying to do? To skim off the authors who already have name recognition. This, too, is an attempt to hurt publishers. As Auletta notes, a small percentage of successful authors subsidize the others, who are publishing worthy books that have small audiences, or who are early in their careers and are still trying to break out. If those profitable authors get skimmed off by Amazon, all the rest of us authors sink, and don't get published.

Again, don't get me wrong: I think a digital retailer is not only inevitable, it's good in many respects. Amazon is a force to be respected, and in some respects to be welcomed. As Auletta writes, it brings backlist books to the general public. But we have to recognize when it takes actions that hurt all authors.

There are two other points I wish to examine.

First, Auletta notes that 40% of books get returned. True; a huge number, no doubt. But he failed to note that this is not evenly spread across all books published. Some books sell out; others get almost their entire print runs returned. Let's examine this a little further: A publisher releases a first novel. The print run is small. The publisher targets independent bookstores, hoping to build an audience. The retailers take one or two copies each. In the end, this book is not successful. Many bookstores return all the copies they ordered. Next to it on the shelf is a bestseller, or a backlist book with a steady audience. These do not get returned. In other words, the returns figure that Auletta cites is actually another way in which successful books (and publishers) subsidize the up-and-coming authors, who need time to gain recognition and a healthy audience.

Publishing does have problems, some of which Auletta notes; but, as he also notes, it accepts a certain amount of inefficiency because it's necessary for the future of the business. What happens when all of today's well-known authors retire? You'd better have brought up a new generation of authors, which takes time and money, and a lot of returns along the way.

The other thing I'd like to examine is the comparison that one of Auletta's sources made. The comparison was that publishers were being like railroads, which made the mistake of thinking they were in the train business, not the transportation business. Huh? I actually know something about this. The problem with the railroad industry was that the structural forces of the industry impelled them toward cutting their prices below a profitable level. If a line had a roundabout route, and so was less attractive, it lost business. But since it was such a capital-intensive enterprise, it had to continue to pay a large amount to maintain track, rolling stock, and the like, even if it ran no trains. So it was in that railroad's interest to offer cut-rate prices to attract business, so it could get some kind of income, even if it was not enough to pay expenses. Then that would push stronger competitors to match the price cuts, and start to take losses as well. The result was constant downward pressure on prices.

That's the real comparison, and it's scary.

Now in Paperback

2010-04-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

You'll have to excuse my failure to pontificate—er, blog—recently. I just had two action-packed days in Northfield, Minnesota, mostly at my alma mater, Carleton College. I'll be posting more about my talk there—a discussion of biography's relationship to history and literature.

Tomorrow (Sunday, April 25) I'll be taking part in the Authors Salon in San Jose, California, organized by the Peninsula Volunteers.

Meanwhile, the paperback edition of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt has been released by Vintage. I'll be going on the road to talk about it in May (stay tuned for the schedule), but I must say that the publisher has done a really excellent job. A beautiful edition.

Pulitzer Pushes Paperback

2010-04-15T11:44:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the Pulitzer Prize (established by nineteenth-century newspaper tycoon Joseph Pulitzer, shown here), the paperback of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt will be published early—on April 20, in fact. As of this writing, that's only five days away.

For those of you who want to acquire a copy of the gorgeous hardcover, time is running out. It will be unobtainable before long. (Excuse me for calling my own book "gorgeous," but I had nothing to do with the design and production quality. Well done, Knopf.)

For those of you holding onto your money, waiting for the paperback, your long wait is about to end, almost exactly one year after hardcover publication.

Where should you buy? I encourage you to seek out your local independent bookseller. Reserve a copy! Why not Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Borders, you ask? I am not against any of these retailers. I think the world of books needs them all. But if I'm not anti-Amazon or anti-chain, I am definitely pro-independent. The independent neighborhood bookseller is where readers can interact with well-informed staff, get intelligent recommendations, and discover new and unknown writers. Independents are where writers actually meet readers in face-to-face appearances.

I say this not so much for my sake, since the prizes I've been honored with guarantee that readers can find my books, wherever they shop. Rather, I'm speaking for the legions of writers who deserve an audience, and are waiting to break out. And when they do break out, it's usually through independent bookstores—an essential part of the culture of the written word.

So if you order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Borders, you won't get a complaint from me. Buying books is good, no matter where. But if you support your local independent bookstore, then consider this a pat on the back. Well done.

Oh, and thanks again to Mr. Pulitzer. Your forethought, sir, has had a big effect on my life.

A Curious Post-Pulitzer Development

2010-04-13T23:47:00.000-07:00

Since the announcement on April 12 that I had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First Tycoon, I've been besieged with e-mails. In the old days, it would have been phone calls, though e-mails are a little easier to deal with. Still, I've been very busy.

So I didn't notice until now that a curious thing happened over at Amazon. In the short space of time since I won the Pulitzer, the online retailer bumped up the Kindle edition of my book from $9.99 to $22.28.

Why they raised the price, I don't know. I have no influence over the list price, set by the publisher, and Amazon alone decides what retail price it will charge. I do know that Amazon actually takes a loss to price the Kindle editions of many books at $9.99. Perhaps Amazon has decided to recoup some of its losses before the paperback of The First Tycoon becomes available on May 11 with a $19.95 list price. But, honestly, I have no idea what Amazon is thinking.

The point is, for Kindle readers, that I have no role in pricing. It's true that I am concerned that e-book loss leaders will result in the price of books being driven down to the point where I can't make a living as a writer, but that's a long-term concern. In the short term, for those wondering why the Kindle edition has suddenly jumped up, all I can do is to direct you to Amazon.

[I would like to note that a new pricing model for e-books, namely the "agency model," is working its way through the industry, though the last I heard Random House had not adopted the agency model.]

The Pulitzer Prize

2010-04-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

On Monday, April 12, my book The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography.

I am incredibly honored, and grateful. For my fuller comments on the subject, you can go to my main author website, here.

Thanks to everyone who has bought, read, recommended, sold, or worked on this book. I am in your debt, everyone.

This is what your brain looks like when writing...

2010-04-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a while because I've been at work on a couple of projects. One of them is a lecture I'm going to deliver at Carleton College. It's about the relationship between biography and history. I'll be pulling some material out from that talk for my next blog post. So stay tuned.

Books are not pop tunes

2010-04-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

If nuance was obvious, it wouldn't be nuance. Readers of this blog know that I have much to say about e-books. If you are careful readers, though, you know that my views cannot be characterized as simply pro or con (despite what Motoko Rich of the New York Times once wrote).

For those who think that I am against digital books, I would like to announce that my first biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, will soon be published as an e-book. Guess who suggested it? That's right: I did.

It seemed like a shame to me that a relatively recent book is unavailable in digital format, even though it remains in print, has yet to be overtaken by another James biography (though it inevitably will happen some day), and is still on bookstore shelves. I suggested an e-book to my editor, and he thought it was a great idea. Yes, I know that Amazon will probably sell the bulk of them. I'm not anti-Amazon, either. I just think Amazon should play by the same rules as other booksellers, and not be allowed to drive bookstores out of business.

But I also think that the codex—the traditional bound book—is a remarkable piece of technology, old as it is, and will not be driven into obsolescence by digitization. It frustrates me to see the press write about e-books as if they will become the dominant form of book publishing in a matter of days, rather than decades, if ever.

See, for example, Motoko Rich's recent article on how e-books will affect the traditional art (and advertising) of book covers. It's not a bad piece—Ms. Rich is no fool, after all—but she fails to mention the critical fact that e-books currently represent an unwhopping 2% of book sales. Put another way, that's all but 98% of the market.

I think commentators make a false analogy between book publishing and newspaper and music publishing. Both the news and music have been thrown into chaos by digitization. But let's think about this for a minute. Both pop music and newspaper stories are consumed in small bites. They are short-form, where books are long-form. Newspapers are obsolete within twenty-four hours of their creation—less, actually, with instant access online to breaking news. Music is consumed in two to five minute bursts; listeners like to mix songs from different artists into homemade playlists, often over and over again, on their MP3 players.

Books are not so ephemeral as newspapers. Many books are read and then put on the shelf, to be pulled down and reread (or read by someone else) later. They last. Well, the best ones last... Nor are they the equivalent of music CDs. Music CDs can be broken down into their constituent songs and mixed with others; they also need a separate apparatus to be consumed, whether it is a CD player or computer. Books cannot be broken down to be consumed in small bites. They are their own apparatus; they require no investment in a device—a device that will inevitably lose its battery power, break down, and go obsolete.

I've blogged before about the usefulness of the codex, so I won't repeat those comments here. But the contrast between books on one hand and music and news on the other is a powerful one, one that is ignored by virtually all reporting. There is a narrative widely accepted among journalists of the arts, that digitization is an inexorable force that rapidly displaces whatever came before. In fact, the story is far more complicated than that. Mind you, I'm not saying e-books are bad, and should be held off as long as possible. I'm saying the codex is good, and should still be respected.

But that's a lot of nuance, so don't expect anyone to pay attention.

Let's set the record straight

2010-03-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

I'm always a little uneasy whenever anyone thinks my opinionating actually leads to a valid point. Paul Carr, whom I both praised and criticized in my last post, admits in a new post that I'm on to something: there is probably nothing in publishing that merits the term "cash cow."

So, to rebalance the universe, let me add that he strikes me as a smart guy, and I didn't emphasize enough the usefulness of his discussion of the agency model of book pricing. Very interesting stuff, in the same blog entry I criticized.

Log-rolling, or fair-is-fair? I mean it to be the latter.

Insight and Oversight regarding Amazon & e-books

2010-03-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

Over at techcrunch.com, blogger Paul Carr has some smart things and some not-so-smart things to say about e-books and Amazon.com. As readers of this blog know, both are a special concern of mine.

First, the smart thing from Carr: In this post, he criticizes Amazon for allowing customers to post 1-star reviews of books simply because a Kindle edition isn't available yet, or because it's priced at more than $9.99. These "reviews" make a book look lousy at first glance, but on closer inspection it turns out that "reviewers" pointedly refuse to even read the book in question. The latest high-profile victim of this campaign is Michael Lewis, for his new book The Big Short.

As Carr correctly points out, authors have no control over e-book pricing or the appearance of digital editions. Yet authors are the ones who suffer most from this sort of campaign. Even worse, these 1-star reviews violate Amazon's own stated policy that reviews cannot be about price or format. I myself suffered from this when my most recent book came out. Until Amazon decided to price the Kindle edition of my book at $9.99, a slew of 1-star reviews appeared on the hardcover page, all complaining about the Kindle price. Amazon refused to take these malicious non-reviews down, even after it lowered the Kindle price to $9.99!

The point: Amazon doesn't care about authors, or even about books. It wants its customers complaining about the prices or availability of Kindle editions, because it is trying to dominate the e-book market, and it wants leverage with publishers. In fact, it takes a loss currently on its $9.99 price—a price set by Amazon, not the publisher—because it is trying to monopolize the market.

Mr. Carr nails this issue on the head. Unfortunately, I must differ with him on another issue: whether it is a good idea to delay the release of e-book editions until after the hardcover publication. He addresses it, and e-book pricing, here. Mr. Carr focuses on publishers' desire to preserve the "cash cow," the hardcover, and complains of the inconvenience to those who have invested in expensive e-readers. He also makes much of the fact that e-book sales are growing rapidly.

Let's set the record straight: Publishers (and authors) make much more money from hardcovers, it's true. That is one reason why they have always delayed the release of cheaper paperbacks. But to refer to anything in publishing as a "cash cow" is to suggest a level of profitability that simply does not exist in this narrow-margin industry. "Life line" would be a better cliché. Did publishers cut that life line when the paperback was invented? No. Why should they now for the e-book?

The fact is, e-books are just another format. The millenarian talk about e-books destroying the traditional book is just nonsense—the expensive e-reader being one reason, the ephemeral nature of e-books being another. So to sacrifice all other formats to serve e-books is just idiotic. It's suicidal. Indeed, e-books may be growing rapidly, but mainly because they start from such a low base. Random House, the largest English-language publishing corporation, just reported that e-books represent just 2% of sales. That's one plus one percent. Two percent.

And where are those buyers coming from? Are e-books expanding the number of book buyers out there? No, they are cannibalizing hardcover sales. So the total number of books sold is not going up. Publishers cannot justify cutting the price dramatically, beyond the roughly 12-15% that represents printing and distribution costs for physical books, unless e-books are radically increasing the number sold (and, again, they're not). I'm sorry that Kindle owners invested so much in their machines, but that doesn't give them a divine right to a Kindle edition at the same time as a hardcover, any more than anyone has a right to a paperback on the day of hardcover publication.

But there's another critical factor that Mr. Carr overlooks: The survival of bookstores.

E-books are sold almost exclusively online. To give e-books, then, a decisive advantage over physical books (publishing them simultaneously and at a lower price than hardcovers) is to undercut bookstores. But why should any wholesaler deliberately destroy a critical distribution chain? And let's not kid ourselves: Bookstores are not simply a disposable part of the publishing ecosystem—a Dodo bird that no one will miss. Bookstores, especially independent bookstores, are where new authors get discovered, where obscure books break out, where authors and readers connect through personal appearances.

Online bookselling funnels customers toward a few bestselling and well-publicized books. And, since all online booksellers compete against all other online booksellers, only a tiny handful dominate the market: mainly Amazon, to a lesser extent Barnes & Noble, and then perhaps Powell's. With Apple jumping in, maybe it will come down to Amazon and Apple. Having a monopoly or a duopoly in bookselling is good for no one, neither customer nor publisher nor author alike.

Again, let me state clearly that I welcome the rise of e-books. Greater convenience in book buying and book reading is a great thing, and whatever continues to give life to books can only be good—in principle. But the ways in which e-book are being used to distort the marketplace, encouraging monopoly and hurting authors, must be recognized. Authors and, ultimately, readers cannot afford to let e-books, with their 2% of the market, destroy the entire ecosystem of the written word.

Politics, politics...

2010-03-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

Having come out for the health-insurance reform bill last week, I naturally take full credit for it passing.

Seriously, I am pleased. It's far from perfect, but it will be a huge help for the self-employed—including writers such as myself. But it makes me think of another issue facing us in our work: politics.

As if we needed a reminder of how partisan views of history can be, we now have the recent decision by the Texas state textbook commission to rewrite history (removing Thomas Jefferson from the list of Founders to be studied, for example, because he was insufficiently Christian). I have ventured into hotly disputed terrain—slavery, the rise of American capitalism—and have faced some blatantly political criticism as a result. With Jesse James, some readers were upset that I stressed the importance of slavery in James's life, and discussed in detail the atrocities he committed. With regard to The First Tycoon, Steve Fraser criticized me through the use of statistics and incidents that postdated the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt, to argue that my book should have been a study of workplace safety in the railroad industry.

If only I were kidding. Fortunately, these sorts of criticisms have been rare, for the very reason that they are not fair-minded, but driven by an ideological agenda. For the writer, such attacks are not really the problem. The problem is in the self-consciousness that can creep into one's writing, knowing that such assaults will surely follow publication. Even worse, a writer might follow her own ideological agenda, perhaps even unconsciously.

It is one thing to say, "Be honest. Be fair." It is much harder to actually be honest and fair, because it isn't necessarily obvious. Take Jesse James. I cannot hide my moral revulsion at his crimes—cold-blooded murders and possible dismemberments, carried out in the name of defending slavery. And yet, it was my duty as a biographer to understand how society could become so polarized that such atrocities could take place at all, let alone be celebrated. With Vanderbilt, I had to constantly think about the many repercussions, and contexts, of his business career. How did his private interests conflict with public interests? How was he judged at the time? How did morals among businessmen differ from the public morals of larger society? How did moral standards change during his lifetime? What were the concrete benefits and concrete costs of his actions?

As former President Bush might say, this is hard work. It requires thoughtful reflection, a determination to rise above one's own politics. In fact, truly honest and impartial historical writing demands that we shed the mistaken notion that the moral conflicts of the past can be framed according to the standards or politics of today. To take just one example, laissez faire is a conservative ideology in our own time, but it was considered radical in the 1830s.

It may be impossible to get it right, but we must always try. We have to strive to see the world of the past as it was, yet still with an understanding of that period's repercussions for our own time.

A Writer's Priority: Health-Insurance Reform

2010-03-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

Long ago, before the 2008 election, I started blogging by discussing current events. I soon realized that the world was full of well-informed people blogging about current events—my expertise was in writing, specifically biography-writing. But there is one issue of the moment that bears directly on the writing life.

Health-insurance reform.

I have friends and relatives who believe that the current health-insurance reform package being pushed by President Obama is unwise, impractical, or downright tyrannical. I have a different view. Allow me to address the issue strictly from the perspective of my material interests, as a writer.

The current system is tilted heavily against risk-taking. Reporting by the New York Times verifies what common sense and anecdotal evidence tells us: that people decline to leave their jobs in order to start businesses (or write full-time) because they cannot risk losing their health insurance. It can be terribly frightening, or downright impossible.

I have managed to do it, but it has been expensive, not to mention complicated. I have a privately-purchased insurance policy, rather than an employer-based group plan. To be honest, I feel pretty lucky: My insurance is not as expensive as it is for many, and I haven't had one fight with my insurer. (If you're wondering, it's Pacificare, available in California.) So I am not writing this to pick a fight with an insurer that I can honestly recommend, given our current system.

However, my situation is complicated. Let's say I or one of my family have a chronic ailment, such as asthma. Under current law, private insurers don't have to cover it. I would be locked into the plan I have, no matter how much they raise the premium (and previous increases have been, well, enormous). I would like to apply for residential fellowships elsewhere in the country, and abroad. It appears that I would have to keep paying the monthly premium, even if I'm outside of the coverage area, because I can't afford to lose my existing insurance upon my return. I am anchored in place. If I do go away for a few months, I'll face a situation in which I might have to buy a second policy for my temporary location, and that new policy might not even cover a pre-existing condition.

The fact is, for entrepreneurs and writers—in fact, for independent contractors, small business people, and anyone else who is willing to take risks and create wealth—our current health-insurance system is broken. It is weighted against us. It is weighted against taking risks. It is anti-free-market, anti-capitalist, anti-growth. It keeps us locked in our geographical locations. It prevents us from fulfilling our potential.

The current reform proposals aren't perfect, but nothing in this world is. Writers need it. I need it. Please pass health-insurance reform.

It's Good to Have Smart Friends

2010-03-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

I am on my way home from my week in New York, where I spent every spare minute in the manuscripts room of the New York Public Library (one of my favorite rooms in one of my favorite institutions), gave a talk, attended a talk, and had a great session speaking with the Biography Seminar at New York University.

This trip was a treat because it brought me into contact (or back into contact) with friends and colleagues who are highly respected writers. Writing is often considered a solitary life, as indeed it is much of the time. But, like many of my peers, I love to get together and talk shop. I often find that I not only learn something from other writers, but understand better what I think about writing, through the act of articulating my ideas and approach.

Last's night event is a case in point. This meeting of the Biography Seminar included some terrific biographers, including Patricia O'Toole, Neil Baldwin, and Deirdre Bair, to name just three. Ms. Bair repeated the quote from Virginia Woolf (if I'm not mistaken), that the biographer is the "artist under oath." To that, of course, I couldn't agree more. I contrast this with the view of another of my favorite writers and friends: Colum McCann, the great novelist, who says that there is no line between fiction and nonfiction. That is true—of fiction. When it comes to facts, to information, you can import as much nonfiction into fiction as you like, even make an entire novel largely factual—but you absolutely cannot import fiction into nonfiction.

Except! Yes, except: A biographer can import some of the method, or perhaps style, of fiction. In fact, this is an excellent idea much of the time. Allow me to explain. One of the worst things to do, when writing biography, is to turn it into what someone once called history: "one damn thing after another." You should shape the narrative, create a sense of momentum—of causal chains and, most of all, consequences. You do well to artfully define your characters, and show how their personalities and choices shape the flow of events. And you should do your best to make contextual information a part of the narrative, to convince the reader that she must know this information to make the most of the story.

On the other hand, not all factual information should go into a narrative, no matter how well-grounded or superbly researched. Let me give you an example. I submitted an early chapter of The First Tycoon to my fellow fellows at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Nathan Englander pointed out that some of the details of the scene that opened the chapter seemed out of place. He said, in essence, I don't doubt that your research proves that there were pigs running in the street, but they don't seem an organic part of the portrait you're painting at this point in the narrative. Later on, he criticized my reference to an enormous fireball in the sky. It doesn't matter if it's an absolutely factual event, he observed; by including it you're connecting your main character to the universe. Do you really want to do that?

Such exchanges made me realize that a richly drawn nonfiction scene shouldn't simply be a pile of confirmed details. It must be a thoughtfully crafted piece of writing, in which the details form an organic part of the world you are presenting to the reader, and an organic part of the flow of events. There's no science to it; it's a matter of art, instinct, and experience.

And it doesn't hurt to have smart friends tell you where you've gone wrong.

Maybe I'll Listen for a Change

2010-03-09T13:14:00.000-08:00

I'm in New York, wrapping up a week of research, public events, and catching up with colleagues (in scholarship, literature, and karate-do). In five minutes I will depart Columbia University, where I dropped in after meeting a friend nearby, to take the subway downtown to the Biography Seminar, a professional conclave that meets at New York University (around 100 yards from the spot where Commodore Vanderbilt lived and died, in fact.)

The Seminar consists of published biographers who meet to talk about the art and craft of biography, the ostensible purpose of this blog. I tend to think that I will get more out of this session than they will, if I can keep my yap shut for a few minutes and listen. So instead of moaning about e-book pricing and whatnot, I hope to have a few thoughts about biography-writing for my next posting—not my own thoughts, but what I've taken away from talking with these colleagues.

Lest I sound snarky...

2010-03-07T20:33:00.000-08:00

I'm on the road, conducting research and giving talks in New York and vicinity. On reading my response to Michael Kinsley's rip on publishing, I should say that yes, I do realize that I sound as snarky as he does.

Apologies.

Here's the deal: Anyone who writes for a living is facing huge challenges due to digitization. I just want an informed discussion. Journalists and authors face very different challenges.

Journalism is being hit by the Internet specifically. How? First, content is being given away for free. Second, not enough advertising can be sold in proportion to a given amount of journalism than is possible in print. The Internet browser just doesn't allow it; the reading experience is too different. Since advertising, not subscriptions, provided most income historically for newspapers and magazines, this loss of advertising per column inch is what is devastating the field.

Add on top of that the fact that the universal access offered by the Internet pits every newspaper against every other newspaper in the world. For national, world, and cultural news, American readers are foregoing their local papers to jump to a few high-prestige publications, such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

None of these challenges apply to authors. Instead, we authors face a very different problem: The misperception that e-books are produced differently, and far more cheaply, than physical books. A misperception is not the same thing as the blind market force of, say, instant access to any newspaper in the world, which creates universal competition. A misperception can be created by a deliberate, self-interested act by a major player in a market.

For example, let's say Blamagon.com is a huge online retailer that controls 80% of the online market. Blamagon.com starts selling an expensive electronic device for reading e-books, called the Spindle. But who would pay $489 for a mere mechanism to read books that themselves cost $30 each? How could Blamagon.com guarantee a continuing demand for this electronic reader, when there are other devices on the market? Tough questions. Hey, how about Blamagon.com cuts e-book prices so low—lower than Blamagon.com itself pays for e-books—that the expensive Spindle looks like a bargain. Let's say Blamagon.com decides to sell its most popular new books at $9.99, half or a third of the list price. (Blamagon.com gets 50% of the list price of books it retails.) It doesn't let on to the public that it is taking a loss. Suddenly Blamagon.com is dominating sales not only of e-books, but of e-book devices. It is creating a monopoly. And, by the way, it is teaching its customers to believe that e-books are way, way cheaper to make than physical books—far cheaper than the 10-15% that would be saved if printing and distribution were taken out of the picture. Now, with a well-trained and angry customer base, Blamagon.com has leverage over publishers, to force them to reduce their prices, to help sustain its monopoly.

Could happen.

If it did, and I'm not saying it ever would, then the reduced price of books would result in lower-quality editing and design. Worse than that, author advances would be slashed (and they ain't that high to begin with.) The output of high-quality, research-intensive, painstakingly written books by professional authors would fall off dramatically. Take it from me: If you do not pay them, they will not come.

Look, I believe that everyone wants authors to get their fair share. I don't believe the future is a bleak landscape of literary famine. But these are real concerns, and as an author it behooves me to speak up. I want to add one more voice to spell out how books come into being, and how that process is jeopardized by some of the plans proposed by various parties—parties that have their own particular interests.

My interest: to be able to make a living from writing books. To be paid well enough, and have my intellectual-property rights protected well enough, so that I have a reason to keep on producing more books.

What happened to Michael Kinsley's brain?(Revised and Expanded)

2010-03-02T08:08:00.001-08:00

When did Michael Kinsley become snarky and, well, stupid?

Over at The Atlantic, Kinsley has published a snide and simply wrong-headed attack on publishers. You can read it here. That's disappointing, because he's usually one of the smartest and clearest-thinking journalists working today. It goes to show that most journalists, even published authors, don't have a clear understanding of book publishing. They tend to see it as essentially the same business as newspaper and magazine publishing, and it's not at all.

Kinsley's wrong from his very first sentence. He writes, "The Internet tsunami that has swept through the newspaper and magazine industries . . . has at last arrived at book publishers." No, it hasn't. Book publishing is not being undermined by the distribution of content for free over the Internet; newspaper and magazine publishing are. Few readers ever read books online. The business of book publishing is entirely different than that of short-form, short-lived journalism. He's confusing digitization with the Internet.

He goes on to make a snarky list of what publishers spend money on (see my comments on that below), and then concludes:

"The book industry is one of the most custom-laden and set in its ways. It still can take over a year from the time an author submits a manuscript until the time the book comes out. Even if a manuscript is submitted electronically, it may very well be printed out, edited in pencil with sticky notes, and then keyed back in with new typographical errors."

Horrible, eh? Is there anything more backwards than printing something out?

The point of Kinsley's essay (which is not at all clear) seems to be that publishers must cut costs and make their methods more flexible and dynamic in a digital age. But this closing paragraph does not speak to that at all.

First, we have to ask: Does it actually matter if most books take a year to produce? Why is that a problem? What is the saving or gain by rushing one through? I've seen rushed books: They are full of errors, and often look like crap. Again, here we have a short-form journalist confusing the production of ephemeral, time-sensitive news stories and opinion pieces with the production of books. Let's take the National Book Award winners in fiction and nonfiction, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and my own The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. How would they have been improved by producing them in less time? One was a work of pure imaginative art, written in lyrical prose. The other was the product of intensive research, analysis, and storytelling, synthesized into a lengthy narrative, supported by thousands of endnotes, a half-dozen maps, and 79 illustrations. Why is it a concern that the publisher took a year to produce either one?

Second, what conceivable difference does it make if a manuscript is printed out for editing or not? Does Kinsley mean to say that printing slows things down, or makes publishing more expensive? Or does he want to throw out the words paper and pencil to conjure up a vague sort of unease: Those publishers sure are old fashioned! I think the latter, and it's not a valid criticism.

Third, we must ask: Why does it take as much as a year from delivery of manuscript to publication? Michael Kinsley offers no answers, except to darkly hint that the Post-It note plays a sinister role in the process. The real answer is that there is something fundamental to taking a book from manuscript to final form, something that is simply eternal, no matter what medium transmits it to the reader's eye: Reading.

Yes, the editor must read the manuscript. And edit, if the editor is worth anything. Then the writer must read it. Then the copy-editor has to read it, really, really carefully. Then the author reads it again. And let's not forget the page designer, the lawyer who conducts a legal review, the proofreader, the copywriter who creates jacket and catalog copy, and so on.

Now, I admire Kinsley's work immensely. But here I think I need to provide him with a short lesson, explaining what I'm talking about.

Newspaper stories: short.

Magazine stories: short to not-quite-so-short.

Books: Long. Sometimes very, very long.

I hope that helps. I don't know about anyone else, but no technological development is going to make me a faster reader. In fact, as an author I want everyone involved in the process (including me) to read slowly and carefully.

But reading (and rewriting, and correcting, and reviewing, and designing) is not the only thing that takes time. The book market needs lead time to see what's coming. Book reviewers, bookstore managers, even Amazon need to decide how many books to order. And please, no millennial talk about how physical books will disappear in a year or two. But what if they did? Even in a pure e-book world, we'd still need lead time for the groundwork involved in generating publicity—something publishers work on with great energy.

It's a common assumption that the Internet, by giving everyone and anyone a soapbox, is a democratizing force that allows individuals to skip around institutions. The author can generate her own publicity! In fact, the opposite is often true. Consumers are drowning in an information deluge. They figure out what books to buy based on radio interviews, newspaper and magazine reviews and profiles, and talking to bookstore clerks (well, at independent bookstores, at least). They don't go online and read every blog they can find. The fact is, publishing houses provide order to a chaotic marketplace, and provide a service that would be extremely expensive for the author to do properly for herself. A website ain't enough.

Look, I have beefs with publishers too. When I was a grunt in the industry, we mocked the fat cats at the top. You bet there's waste. You bet they make stupid decisions. But that doesn't translate into Kinsley's apparent conclusion, which I would summarize as: Digital technology means no one will ever have to work on a manuscript ever again before it is published. I'm sorry, that's just stupid. All you have to do is look at the thousands of books that are already being self-published every year. You've never heard of them, and it's not because of greedy publishers monopolizing our attention. It's because, with honorable exceptions, those self-published books stink.

As I have written again and again, publishers are essential. They add value. They do indeed provide countless services that most authors could never provide on their own—or would be bankrupted by paying for on their own. Books like mine, which require an upfront investment, wouldn't exist, because advances would disappear without publishers.

One more thing: Let's take a quick look at Kinsley's snarky list of what publishers spend money on, out of a $26 list price. It shows how little he knows about book publishing. Really: $2.00 for lunches? $1.50 for drinks at the Frankfurt Book Fair? $7.00 for the book party? Where does he get his ideas about publishers—Mad Men?

Publishing is a narrow-margin business, and they've been cutting corners for a long time. I honestly know of no author (and I know a lot of them) who had a book party paid for by the publisher. Lunching on the company is actually pretty uncommon, and limited to a handful at any house; working until 9:00 at night, on the other hand, is extremely common.

Yes, publishers spend their money unwisely at times, but much of the problem is not with "old fashioned" publishing types, but with pressure from shareholders who don't understand the business. Acquisition editors need to be free to lose money on a large percentage of their books. They only grow their profitable lists by bringing up new authors, investing in their careers, helping them break through. They will fail much of the time, because there is no science to explaining what will succeed and what will not. But corporate managers who don't understand that put pressure on editors to cut costs, which leads to downward pressure on things that matter—especially advances, which are the seed money of future profits, and of longterm relationships with successful authors.

This is the real problem with publishing. It's not phantoms like too many Post-It notes or too much time spent in editing. It's a process of downward pressure on costs that began long before e-books, when "custom-laden" publishers were bought up by media conglomerates that demanded returns that book publishers could never provide. And when costs are cut, there's one group that is guaranteed to suffer: authors. And the worst part is that it's not necessary. Digitization is being used as an excuse by retailers (who are attempting to carve out market share in the new field of e-books) to train readers to think that e-books produce themselves.

It's shameful that someone so smart as Michael Kinsley should be pouring more manure on the fire.

Pellegrino Update

2010-03-02T07:58:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm not ready to condemn Charles Pellegrino outright, but things that looked wrong before look a whole lot worse now.

The New York Times reports today that publisher Henry Holt & Co. is halting the printing and distribution of Pellegrino's book The Last Train from Hiroshima. The reason? There are still more troubling problems with his purported sources.

I've blogged about this before. I expressed respect for his immediate response to the revelation that one of his sources was a fake, though I also wrote that he should have been far more skeptical, and thorough, in the first place. The latest revelations, however, look like a pattern.

But is it? I simply don't know enough to say. When books go bad, they do so in one of two ways: In one, a single revelation of poor craftsmanship leads to further discoveries, exposing a pattern of wrongdoing or simply shoddy work. In this case, the book justifiably implodes. But sometimes a feeding frenzy starts. People who dislike a book because of what it argues, or who have a beef with the author, tear into it, creating an appearance of far greater problems than a book really has. I have no desire to take part in the second sort of book-destruction.

Mind you, I'm not defending Pellegrino. I'm simply not stomping on him while he's down. This is precisely the moment for dispassionate inspection of his work. The charges against it raise troubling questions—but the questions must be answered, and answered honestly.

Thank you, editors

2010-02-26T15:47:00.001-08:00

Over at the Huffington Post, editor Carole Baron (an editor at my publisher, Alfred A. Knopf) has written a defense of the role of the editor. You can read it here.

She's absolutely right, and I'm glad she's spoken out on this. I've written in a previous post about the importance of publishers, so I needn't say too much more here. But let me just say that I understand why she is so irritated. The press and blogosphere have poured out billions of bits of nonsense about how digitization will remove "the filter," and eliminate any mediation between author and reader. What a lot of hooey.

I don't think any of these millennialists, who promise us an approaching publisher-free utopia, have ever published a book—or read a self-published book. Publishers arose in the first place because they provide valuable services—because a "filter" is actually very important. After all, you always could go straight to a printing company and publish a book yourself; people have done it for centuries. The reason no one buys them is that they so often stink.

Publishers pick winners, and help make them winners. Sure, they make mistakes. Publishing is full of tales of famous books that were turned down by multiple houses, or the self-published book that took off on its own. But these are legends because they are so rare; they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Book proposals and manuscripts get turned down for good reasons, the vast majority of the time. And, as Carole Baron helpfully reminds us, editors make books better, as do so many people whose efforts are coordinated by editors, and who work for publishers.

Again, I've got no beef with e-books. I'm just worried that people who don't write for a living, and know nothing about how books come into being, are going to set new rules in the digital world for those of us who do.

Pellegrino Agonistes—not, unfortunately, Agnostic

2010-02-23T17:18:00.000-08:00

The New York Times broke a story recently about a nonfiction author, Charles Pellegrino, who appears to have been taken in by a dishonest source for his book on the atomic bombing of Japan, Last Train from Hiroshima. It leaves me with mixed feelings—though one of those feelings is sympathy for his plight. Allow me to try to disentangle this tale honestly and dispassionately, if possible.

As the Times relates, Pellegrino made some important revelations in his book that significantly alter the historical record. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Little Boy, was a "dud," he wrote, because it had been damaged in handling before it was dropped on Japan. He based this assertion on the recollections of Joseph Fuoco, who said he had been substituted as flight engineer on the bomber, the Enola Gay, at the last moment for the normal engineer, James R. Corliss.

There's only one problem: Fuoco (now deceased) was an impostor. Corliss did indeed fly on that mission, and Corliss's family has abundant documentation to prove it.

That kind of claim drives veterans nuts, and for good reason. Soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen go through hell in war, and when someone falsely takes credit for facing danger, it's a travesty—an insult to those who really did risk their lives.

But this is a blog about writing, not veterans, so let's focus on the impact of Fuoco's fakery: The claim that the Hiroshima bomb was a dud. This is a major rewriting of the historical record, and it deserved plenty of skepticism. It sure looks like it did not receive enough in the first place.

Allow me to stress that I am not jumping on Pellegrino as a miscreant. He deserves enormous credit for immediately accepting the evidence that he had been duped. He promptly announced that he would rewrite the relevant sections for future printings and the paperback. He notes—as he should—that only a few pages are concerned.

This is exactly the right thing to do, and he has won my respect. Let me note further that incorrect sources, or faulty interpretations of sources, afflict almost every nonfiction author who must conduct deep research. I've made a number of corrections (all fairly small, fortunately) to my books after they were first published; I also accept that a well-informed person can disagree with me about my conclusions. In general, I believe the author deserves plenty of leeway in interpreting evidence. When you spend years marinating yourself in the sources, your sense of what's sound becomes pretty sharp.

But I am still nagged by the feeling that Pellegrino should have done more digging on this "dud" question. For one thing, I don't believe anyone has ever made such a claim before. It's a real eyebrow raiser. For another thing, Little Boy was an incredibly destructive bomb, killing tens of thousands of people. If someone tells you that it was a dud, I think you've got to do some major digging to confirm it.

I contacted Richard Rhodes, author of the deservedly prize-winning history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Let me be absolutely clear: Rhodes had nothing to say about Pellegrino or his book. I am not citing him here to pit him against Pellegrino. My question was about the bomb itself—whether he had ever heard it described as a dud. Anyone who has read Making knows that Rhodes understands the physics of atomic weapons exceptionally well, and has contacts throughout the scientific community. The man knows his neutrons.

He explained that Little Boy was a very inefficient design. For maximum efficiency in an a-bomb (I hope I'm getting this right), the fissile material must be compressed, so all those spraying neutrons hit a lot more of the fissionable atoms. But the Little Boy bomb had two features that made it inefficient: First, it used uranium, a less reactive material than the plutonium used in the next atomic bomb. Second, it used a gun to fire one chunk of uranium at another. The impact led to an atomic explosion, but it released far less energy than if it had been designed like later bombs (with plutonium, triggered with explosive compression).

The conclusion I take from this very skimpy investigation is that Little Boy was an inefficient design, but it was not a "dud." It performed as expected.

Actually, my point is not to argue the facts of the case (whether it was a dud or not) as to make a point about investigation. My thirty seconds of inquiring served to greatly enhance my existing skepticism about the dud claim. Already I know that I would want a lot of hard evidence from multiple sources before I would publish that claim. I would also want to understand the physics of atomic weapons more thoroughly before venturing out on the proverbial limb.

Again, I wish to be fair to Pellegrino. His extensively researched book is not a scientific exploration of the bomb itself; as he and his publisher noted, the stuff now in doubt is limited to a few pages. And, if I had been the one researching this book, I would have felt another sensation at the dud claim, competing with my skepticism: excitement at having a potential scoop on one of the most important events in world history.

But that's the bind we place ourselves in. The bigger the change to the historical record we propose to make, the better for us as writers. But greater scrutiny and skepticism inevitably come back on us. Pellegrino did an awful lot of work on his book; in the scheme of things, he only needed to do a little more in one limited area—yet that gap has made all the difference, unfortunately.

I find this episode to be an interesting barometer of what interests the public. This claim about Little Boy, even if it were proved, would not change the record of destruction that the bomb wrought; yet its correction made the A section of the Times. By contrast, when a recent biography had made insupportable assertions that Cornelius Vanderbilt—one of the most important figures in American history—went crazy from syphilis, only one online review raised any questions. My thorough debunking of that claim (which a reasonable observer could conclude was a deliberate hoax) did not receive front-page treatment; it was merely discussed in a Times blog posting, albeit a good one.

That's fine by me, to be honest. My book was not a work of debunking, but a positively constructed biography, which fortunately is the way reviewers have treated it. But the contrast with the scorn heaped on poor Mr. Pellegrino should teach a lesson to historians and biographers: If you're dealing with World War II veterans, make sure you've got every detail exactly right, or there'll be hell to pay.

What do authors want?

2010-02-22T12:39:00.001-08:00

As digitization spreads throughout the culture, we authors must answer a basic question: What do we want? The answers are shaping the conflict over such issues as e-book pricing and the Google Books settlement.

The problem is that not all authors want the same thing. I think we can identify two basic desires: money and audience. Clearly, every author wants both to have both in large measure, and the two are often linked. After all, you can only get a lot of money by having a big audience. But the two are not the same. In fact, they sometimes conflict with each other. Since different authors value one over the other, the big issues facing the world of publishing remain in turmoil.

Authors break down into three categories: professionals (those who rely upon writing books for a substantial share of their income), academics (who write books as part of their career development), and amateurs (who write books because of their interests or passions, but not for income or professional advancement). Let's take it as a given that all three like money, and would like to get more of it from their writing. But money is secondary, at best, to the latter two categories.

Amateurs want as big an audience as possible, period. This may be because they are buffs or hobbyists, who wish to share their passion for a subject. It may be because they are hoping to rise to the professional category—say, as novelists—and want to attain recognition that will elevate them to the point where they can write for a living.

Given their tiny print runs and nonexistent advances, academics don't seem to care about money or audience, but that's not quite the case. Within the limited universe of a given discipline, an academic wishes to be read as widely as possible, in order to attain the recognition needed to attain a higher professional status. "Publish or perish," I believe, is the operative expression here.

Professionals usually care deeply about the quality of their work, about the knowledge they create, about subjects they take on, but they need to make money from their work. "Intellectual property" means a great deal to professionals, as it does not (quite) to amateurs and academics. To make money—to protect intellectual property—professionals are extremely concerned with the issue of control. Sure, no one wants to have his or her work pirated or plagiarized, but for professionals it is a matter of paying the mortgage and putting food in the fridge.

If you want the biggest audience possible, and don't care about money (i.e. control), then offering your work for little or nothing makes sense. Many amateurs and academics protest the Authors Guild's settlement with Google over its book-digitization project, because it maintains a degree of control over the dissemination of copyright-protected books through the Internet. They want as large an audience as possible.

For professional authors, some degree of control is absolutely necessary. If we do indeed make information free (as the famous slogan claims it wishes to be), then information production will collapse, because there will be no more money in it. The only new information, or literature, will be produced by academics, writing for a narrow, specialized audience, and amateurs with no professional standards.

Now, the Google Books settlement is a huge and complicated issue, and I don't mean to argue its details here by any means. But it is important for amateurs and academics to recognize that professional authors have different interests, and that our entire culture needs professional authors. Of course, professional authors need to recognize that amateurs and academics have different interests as well. But I must point out that it is a lot easier to make your work available for nothing, within a society that places controls on access to intellectual property, than it is to charge money for intellectual property in a society that removes all controls.

Put a cop on the corner, and the fruit-stand vendor can still give away bananas for free; remove the cop, and the vendor has a hard time stopping shoplifters.

Again, there is always room for fair debate on the details of the Google Books settlement, and the issue of e-book pricing (which I've discussed at length). And obviously professional authors wish to expand their audience as much as possible, and one way to do that is by making books available through new media such as the Internet and electronic devices. I am not arguing details, nor am I a Luddite. But what the Authors Guild is trying to do, fundamentally, is to remind the public that we write books for a living. Protecting our ability to earn money from our work is not just a narrow special-interest agenda—it is the only way to keep alive the culture of the written word.

Who's Disappointed with Virginia Woolf?

2010-02-20T22:34:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to reading Virginia Woolf's essay, "The Art of Biography." I'm disappointed.

It's one of her later works—published in 1939, two years before her death—yet it reads very much like it was written in the Edwardian era. The only biographers she deems worth considering are, of course, English. There's only a tiny handful of works she finds worth discussing. She has a narrow notion of who might be the proper subject for a biography (though she does acknowledge that biographies in the future might well be about figures other than royalty, generals, and prime ministers).

Still, this is not why I'm so disappointed.

For an essay by a great writer, it offers surprisingly little in the way of profound insights. I couldn't help comparing this essay with those of George Orwell, a contemporary. Orwell's essays, even after being read again and again, are stunningly fresh. They speak to the human condition with originality and power. Consider the opening of "Reflections on Gandhi":

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi's case, the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity—by the consciousness of himself as a naked, humbled old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power—and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?"

The courage of these questions, the raw clarity of insight into both the individual mind and the nature of politics, remain as acute today as they were when they were written, decades ago. By contrast, I found Woolf's reflections to be humdrum and obvious. She goes on at length about how the biographer must work in a realm of verifiable fact, and not invent "fact" as a fiction writer does. "The two kinds of fact will not mix; if they touch they destroy each other." As a wise man once said: Well, duh.

Still, this is not why I'm so disappointed.

The purpose of Woolf's essay is to ask if biography is art. Indeed, the title of the essay would more accurately have a question mark. She concludes, rather tediously in my opinion, that biography is not art because it does not last, not as the best fiction does. This is because, she writes, "The world created by that vision [of fiction] is rarer, intenser, and more wholly of a piece than the world that is largely made of authentic information supplied by other people." Bizarrely, to prove her point she claims that Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson will not last as long as Shakespeare. I say bizarrely because, first, Boswell has survived brilliantly, and, second, you can diminish anything by comparing it to Shakespeare.

Survivability is a lousy test for whether something is art. Let's just think for a moment about the countless works produced in the last year in categories we don't hesitate to call art: paintings, sculpture, novels, short stories. Few—conceivably none—will still be studied or viewed or read a century from now. Are they not art?

There are so many dimensions to biography that Woolf does not consider. Beauty of writing, the magic of the sentence, evocative power . . . an evocation of place, a delineation of character . . . pacing, plotting, suspense, reflection on the human condition. Woolf's idea of biography is, in essence, that famous description of history: "one damn thing after another." An artful biographer, on the other hand, shapes a narrative to give it power, paints a vivid and complete world based on creative research, and asks original questions about both the subject and the larger world.

That biography belongs to the world of scholarship is beyond question. But it also belongs to the world of literature. "Chained to the facts, doomed to obsolescence" is Woolf's conclusion, whereas biography is a product of creativity, originality, and insight, in which the pertinent facts, and their use, are not at all obvious.

She might have realized that, had she lived long enough to read "Reflections on Gandhi."

A Glimpse of Things To Come

2010-02-19T10:14:00.001-08:00

I've been away from the blogosphere for a week, because I've got a full schedule of talks and travel. On Wednesday, I spoke at the California State Library about Cornelius Vanderbilt and California history. The appearance was arranged by Brian Sala, one of the two readers of this blog, who works for the nonpartisan California Research Bureau.

I enjoyed the event, and it gave me a great deal to think about in terms of the importance of libraries, and of nonpartisan research—not only for policymaking, but for history and biography as well. I have strong political opinions, but I try to keep them out of my professional writing. I'm constantly asking myself if I really know something to be true, or if it's just my natural assumption because I lean in a particular direction to begin with.

I will blog on those subjects in the days ahead. And there's another topic that's on my mind these days, because I will be taking part in two upcoming events for professional biographers. I'll be on a panel at the first Biographers International Organization conference in Boston in May, and on March 9 I'll be speaking to the Biography Seminar at NYU. "Speaking" isn't quite right—"conversing" is more accurate, since it's a conclave of professionals, many of whom are quite distinguished.

These looming professional events have me thinking about the balance that biography strikes between art and scholarship—between literature and history in particular. Biography belongs to both categories, and yet is not entirely of either one. Historians can be downright suspicious of biography, especially since the rise of the New Social History in the 1960s, which overthrew the Great Man approach to historical scholarship. And such literary writers as Victoria Woolf have raised their critical eyebrows at biography. All this, despite the fact that historians, Woolf, and other writers and scholars have produced thousands of biographies themselves. With the exception of Woolf, they still do.

Lots to mull over. Stay tuned.

Will e-books change the way books are written?

2010-02-11T21:10:00.000-08:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again: My comments on digital publishing should never be taken as a rant against e-books. What I object to are exaggerated claims about how e-books will change absolutely everything, from shortening books to destroying traditional publishers.

Many of the more outlandish assumptions have their origin in the idea that e-books will simply sweep away the codex (the traditional bound book). As I've said before, I firmly believe that e-books will simply be one more format, just as trade and mass-market paperbacks currently exist alongside hardcovers. It's kind of ironic that digital enthusiasts don't see that: The whole point of digital media, I thought, was to break down the one-size-fits-all philosophy.

Let's look at the claim that e-books will change the way authors write. Perhaps surprisingly, I have some sympathy with this idea. For example, e-books can have links to websites outside the text, so that readers can go instantly to check on sources, or to find imagery, or to read further on a subject. A cookbook can be linked to articles about ingredients, or websites where they can be purchased. The opportunities for multi-media presentation will be particularly wonderful for certain categories, such as children's books. The day is not far distant when a children's e-book will fade the line between film and text—or make use of the 3-D technology that has made Avatar a cinema smash.

And yet, and yet. . . . As I said, one size does not fit all. Let's take the most extreme example: Does anything think that books of poetry will have links outside the text? If Robert Frost were alive today, and wrote "These woods are lovely, dark and deep," he would not link the word "woods" to a website about New England forestry. Poetry is an art form, pure and simple. Same with fiction. We read to be transported, not to be distracted by dozens of glaring EXIT signs.

Sure, an editor today might publish Robert Frost's collected works in an e-book, and include links outside the text to sources about Frost's life or the history of poetry, but the real value of a book comes from the fact that it is an act of creation. That's why new editions of classic, public-domain works so often include introductions and annotation—because these supplementary items are new and thus valuable. Without providing original content (i.e. without paying for original content), publishers of e-books will simply throw free stuff at the reader with all those links—and everyone knows you get what you pay for.

Even nonfiction is often a narrative form that takes the reader by the hand and conducts him into a room he has never seen before, away from the usual and ordinary hubbub. As with a novel, a work of nonfiction is often a self-contained book that tells an intricate story, driven by an unfolding plot, with characters that continue to develop—not a mere compilation of passageways to bits and pieces of information about various things.

In other words, I believe writing will remain pretty much the same game, whether the reader reads with the aid of an electrical current or not.

Yes, e-books will allow for some pretty cool and often very helpful things. I can imagine how travel guides or cookbooks or children's books will be transformed in a porous digital existence. But the narrative form will remain the narrative form. And that's a good thing.