Writing Biography

Virginia Woolf Malcolm X

What is biography?

In favor

Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified. -- José Ortega Y Gasset

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. -- Benjamin Disraeli

Biographers, like actors, have to think their way into other people’s minds and allow their own to be partially invaded by their subject’s. -- Roger Berthoud

Then you take it all -- the chronology, the letters, the interviews, your own knowledge, the newspaper cuttings, the history books, the diary, the thousand hours of contemplation, and you try to make a whole of it, not a chronicle but a drama, with a beginning and an end, the whole being given form and integrity because a man moves through it from birth to death, through all the beauty and terror of human life. -- Alan Paton, on completing a biography.

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip. -- Leon Edel

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. -- Virginia Woolf

[The biographer] must be as ruthless as a board meeting smelling out embezzlement, as suspicious as a secret agent riding the Simplon-Orient Express, as cold-eyed as a pawnbroker viewing a leaky concertina. -- Paul Murray Kendall

Against

[Biography is] voyeurism embellished with footnotes. -- Robert Skidelsky

Lincoln isn’t a man with ingrown toenails, he’s an idea. -- Mario Cuomo, on a biography of Lincoln.

It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: 'What is he thinking?' and he knows nothing. -- Andre Maurois

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium. -- Philip Guedalla

Let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been truly great; that it lies within human ability to overcome temptations and trials; that it is sublime to suffer and be strong. Petty biographers with inferior souls and jealous hearts would rob us of these happy privileges. Sensationalism is alright for yellow journalism, but in biography we wish to see our famous men and women as they were and feel the power of the strength and beauty of their lives. Down with the debunking biographers. -- Lyndon Johnson

The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. -- Vladimir Nabokov

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the genius of the personage, the greater the profit. --George Grosz

These books share the following qualities: they are good, and they are short. While brevity may well be the soul of wit, it is not a characteristic often associated with biography. We shall, therefore, conclude the quarter with a heftier work that may be used both as an example of the biographer's art and as a substitute for free weights when you travel. Because such sustained attention to a book that bores you may drive you mad, we shall choose the doorstopper by popular vote when the class first meets. Candidates include:

Writing Biography (MAPH 32300 / HUMA 22300): Winter 2001

What is biography?

In favor

Against

Course books