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Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography (The Writer's Craft)
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Product details
Series: The Writer's Craft
Paperback: 251 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (September 1, 1988)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0395486173
ISBN-13: 978-0395486177
Product Dimensions:
5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
55 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,512,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is one of the most fascinating and memorable books I have ever read. The book has been compiled from the lectures given in The New York Public Library on six Monday evenings in the winter of 1985 and edited by William Zinsser. The six speakers were all prominent biographers and while they talked about their calling, they also presented facts about their subjects.The foreword of the book by Zinsser is eye-opening for those of us who take good biographers for granted. In it Zinsser says a dependable biographer has to find the real reason his subject does anything, keeping in mind that reality is not only about the facts but the interrelationships of facts.The six biographers and their subjects are: David McCullough writing about Truman and Teddy Roosevelt; Robert B. Sewall writing about Emily Dickinson; Paul C. Nagel writing about the Adams women, mainly Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams the wife of John Quincy Adams and Abigail Adams, John Adams' wife and John Quincy's mother; Ronald Steel writing about Walter Lippmann, political columnist and Pulitzer winner; Jean Strouse writing about Alice James and financier J. Pierpont Morgan; Robert A. Caro writing about Lyndon Johnson.The lectures were about the art of biography writing, which is very tough and time-consuming and most of these biographers compared or contrasted their works with those of other biographers as well as making clear their views on their art and the difficulty and comprehensiveness their research took. For example, Robert A. Caro, in order to get the feel of Lyndon Johnson’s background went to live in his childhood town for three years, to make Johnson’s townsfolk trust him with their stories. Some of the authors believed in sticking to strict facts while others didn’t see any problem with educated conjecture. Most of the time, I believe, they did get beneath the surface of events and actions, and through it all, they tried to stay objective, but from what I understood from their words, their lives and feelings did become tied to the personalities of the people they were researching.While I was growing up, we were asked to read biographies to be charmed and inspired by the bigger-than-life personalities these books portrayed. At the end of this book, however, I came to the conclusion that a biography is not a chronicle and a biographer’s job is not to write a tribute or become reverential to his subject but to interpret the life of the person as to his character, actions, and will.In the same vein, as one of the biographers said, every age gets the biographies it deserves.
As others have stated, the book is a collection of edited technical speeches given by established authors about the books they have worked on or are presently working on.The process of writing fascinates me. I like to write but admit to being an amateur at best especially when compared to the authors in this book. I would have liked to see a bit more about how information was collected and edited. How the author prioritized their efforts. How the authors considered what to include and what to ignore and why. What problems the authors encountered during and after the writing and how did they solve those issues. Some of these issues were touched on but so quickly as to be only tantalizing. Still the book is worth the read. It is a quick read, short and to the point. I am planning on ordering some of the books mentioned and comparing the writing against the information given in the book to see how the two track. Should be an interesting undertaking.I emphasize, the book is a compilation of speeches each taking about an hour, so don't expect a deep examination of the subject.
On six "consecutive Monday evenings in the winter of 1986", six eminent biographers each gave a talk about the "art and craft of American biography". They speak about the difficulty of their task, how their subjects carefully covered their tracks to create a certain image for posterity, the need to deal with protective descendants or neighbors. Fascinating was the gradual shifting of the focus of the work and how there was always something akin to detective work to ferret out what happened. Some authors had the enthusiastic support of subjects or descendants - until the work began to scratch the carefully constructed facade. Sometimes, this sudden revelation is hurtful and it is shocking to read. Everything and everybody is looked at: yearbooks, photographs, letters, memorandum, newspapers. All six biographers spent years to craft their work - generally much longer than they initially thought and publisher's advances could support them. How they all proceeded was fascinating - a short interview followed each speech and offered yet another view of the art of the biographer. I loved it!
In the winter of 1985, 6 well-known biographers lectured, one per week, in the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library. Their intent was informally to educate members of the audience about biographies they had written; the idea came from the Book-of-the-Month-Club. Sounds really boring so far, right?It wasn't. I felt I was eavesdropping on these authors as they got together for a beer after work, and I was hearing "the good stuff." As the biographers spoke, my notions that I knew all about their subjects disintegrated. Subjects as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Lyndon Johnson were refreshing: it wasn't a textbook sort of read at all. One biographer was so fascinated with his subject that he and his wife moved halfway across the country, living near the subject for several years.I'm not a fan of dry, lifeless prose; I get fed up and put it down forever. I read this book in a few evenings, enjoying every minute.Judith Werner
I decided to read this book because,as a lover of history, the process of writing biographies always interested me. This book was exactly what I was. Looking for. I found some.chapters more interesting than others. Talking about Truman, the Adams family and BLK was something I paid more attention to than when talking about Emily Dickenson or the James family. But,even in those talks, I learned a lot about the mindset of a biographer.Utterly fascinating reading
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