Writing Lives Is the Devil!: Essays of a Biographer at Work - Hardcover

Christianson, Gale E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0208023828 ISBN 13: 9780208023827

Publisher: Archon Books, 1993

Synopsis

"How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of tailor's bills, love letters and old picture postcards?" asked the novelist Virginia Woolf, who once tried her hand at literary biography. "Yes," she concurred, "writing lives is the devil!"
It is also the most widely read form of historical nonfiction. Here, Gale E. Christianson, author of the standard biographies of Isaac Newton, Loren Eiseley, and the founders of modern astronomy, writes eloquently of the subject he knows so well in thirteen essays. Ranging in tone from humorous to melancholy, they trace the complex and fascinating process of creating a biography, from the point of selecting a subject to the book's publication and review.
Rather than offer a "how-to-guide," or "art of biography," Christianson delves anecdotally into what does not get into the finished biography. He makes the reader a partner to the creative struggle, to the gathering of the mounds of information, to the sifting and the winnowing, to the writing and the rewriting, to the small triumphs and the nagging doubts when commitment fails to imitate art, as seems inevitable - nothing more and nothing less than the personal reflections of a biographer at work.

About this title

About the Author:

Gale E. Christianson is Distinguished Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Indiana State University in Terre Haute.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The ins and outs of the biographer's craft, by a man who has penned several (Fox at the Wood's Edge, 1990. etc.--not reviewed). Biography, it seems, is an enterprise fraught with dangers, and in these 13 essays, Christianson (History/Indiana State) tackles them all. Most worrisome is the biographer's relation to his subject: Adversary? Advocate? Christianson argues that the biographer must identify with his subject--even if the subject happens to be Adolf Hitler. A connected issue is that of privacy: While Christianson notes that Barbara Tuchman and many others have staunchly defended the limits of investigation, he points out that ``the biographer is necessarily intrusive.'' These edgy topics and others are illustrated by the author's experiences while writing lives of Sir Isaac Newton and Loren Eiseley, both of whom were difficult subjects (Christianson describes Newton as ``an emotional eunuch,'' and says that Eiseley's autobiographical writings were fraught with extensive dissembling). As for the biographer's tools, the most important is research; the author wittily recounts the pitfalls of interviewing the living (like Eiseley's widow, who reminded Christianson of Dickens's Miss Havisham) and of resurrecting the dead (usually by threading one's way through labyrinthine archives, where a friendly librarian makes all the difference). Also discussed are writer's block, agents, book titles, fan mail, the future of the craft, and the sublime pleasures of handling a piece of the past (in England, Christianson momentarily holds--and ponders pilfering--a lock of Newton's hair). Top-heavy with Eiseley and Newton anecdotes, limiting the popular appeal--but a must-read for biographers everywhere. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Archon Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0208023828
• ISBN 13: 9780208023827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 229