C. W. Goodyear ’16 is fascinated by James Garfield. As an author, he grew enamored with the idea of penning a biography of the former president, but he faced a problem: many Garfield biographies had been written already. Kenneth Ackerman had written one about Garfield’s election. Ira Rutkow had written one about his medical history. What would distinguish Goodyear’s biography of a man who died in 1881?
“I think [for] every person who’s worth having a book written about them, every writer approaches that life from a slightly different perspective, and [they] all cumulatively add up to the whole human being,” Goodyear said. “I’m not one of those people who subscribe to the idea that there is one authoritative biography of someone.”
He believes that objectivity is an ideal that is impossible to reach in a biography, and he attempts to show how identical traits in his subjects can be perceived in both a positive and negative light. Balancing the pros and cons, as well as what values are positive or negative, is up to the biographer’s interpretation.
“I think as long as somebody is making an honest effort to portray both the good and the bad of their subjects and to show how often those spring from the very same root cause, then at least you’ve made an effort,” Goodyear said.
Stacy Schiff, who has written five biographies—including a Pulitzer-winning biography of Véra Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov’s wife and translator—noted that biography presents something of an unconventional writing career.
“No one ever sits around in grade school and announces that they intend to become a biographer,” she said. She certainly did not––she chose to write a biography as her first book simply because it seemed less intimidating than a novel. Writing her first biography sparked a lifelong love of the genre.
“Biography offers the opportunity to live, legally and fitfully, for as many as five or ten years, as someone else,” she said.
While biographies take many forms, they are generally expected to, at minimum, offer a faithful account of a subject’s life. Different interpretations of this responsibility have led to controversies in the field.
One controversy in the genre took place when Edmund Morris, who won a Pulitzer for his biography of Teddy Roosevelt, published a biography of Ronald Reagan in which he made himself a fictional character in the president’s life. In Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Morris characterizes himself as Reagan’s childhood friend who follows him into the White House. It remains debatable whether the book can be considered a biography at all, considering its invented characters, interviews, and conversations—even fake footnotes. Although there are arguments that the book’s fictional aspects helped drive a stronger narrative, many writers, including Joan Didion, have criticized the book for putting narrative above facts.
Goodyear, on the other hand, admires Morris’s subversion of the genre’s norms.
“You have different ways of pulling off a biography,” he said. “I think you have got to give credit to somebody for trying to push the boundaries and find new ways to innovate,” while acknowledging that “there surely are ceilings on how many different ways you can tell the story of a life.”
Without a settled definition of a biography, authors are free to stretch the genre as far as they desire.
Regardless of whether the biographer is writing a fictionalized biography or a non-fiction biography, the job starts with extensive research.
Schiff begins with her subject’s correspondence, which she returns to once she has fleshed out her subject’s life and better knows how to read those documents. While all kinds of challenges present themselves as she sifts through sources, she says, “the point is to crawl insofar as the documentation allows, into the sensibility of your subject, to transplant that sensibility to the page, and to speculate as little but as intelligently as possible about the rest.”
“Did Cleopatra really think she was a goddess? I have no idea,” she said. “But I can tell you a great deal about how she comported and advertised herself to her subjects, and about how they saw her. Then I have to concede defeat, which I don’t mind saying on the page. I think that can be reassuring to the reader.”
Goodyear, on the other hand, said he starts with what others have written about his subject, immersing himself in the world’s current understanding of them. Then, he dives deeper into the primary sources.
One struggle for biographers during this investigation period is deciding which sources to trust. Often, even the subject’s own writing isn’t completely reliable. Maurice Samuels, who is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University and wrote a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, said he took Dreyfus’s letters “with a grain of salt.”
“He was clearly writing even the personal letters knowing that they would be read by the authorities,” Samuels said. “He was always presenting a certain vision of himself, but to me, that itself was interesting.”
Schiff’s historical research, too, requires awareness of sources’ biases. For example, Cicero is not a reliable source when it comes to Cleopatra since “he hated Egypt, he hated despots, [and] he resented women who had better libraries than he did.”
Each biographer has their own process of deciding which sources to trust, resulting in different sets of facts when narrating the same person’s life. When two sources offer conflicting stories, choosing which source to prioritize can drastically change the direction of the story. When Schiff faced two contradictory accounts of Cleopatra’s death, she made an “honest” choice––in her biography, Cleopatra dies twice.
After gaining enough insight into their subjects, biographers must answer an important question: how will they put together their information? As Schiff put it, “the data has to be curated for some sort of sense to emerge.” This step is where the author’s voice arises––where the biographer can make their writing stand out.
For example, Samuels paid attention to the “Jewish dimension” of Dreyfus’s life. His book was a part of Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series, and he focused less on original primary research and more on taking a “fresh perspective.” While his narrative perhaps does not present the most objective, all-encompassing story of Dreyfus’s life, it offers interested readers a sharper and more nuanced perspective into Dreyfus’s life compared to, say, the comprehensive, 1300-page biography written by Vincent Duclert in 2005.
“I drilled down into what Jewishness meant for him, what role antisemitism played in the [Dreyfus Affair] case, and then what role his life had for Jews around the world,” he said. “Certainly everyone who writes about the Dreyfus Affair mentions that he’s Jewish. It’s clearly a part, but I realized that very few people, with some exceptions, had really made his Jewishness the focus of their writing.”
Goodyear’s biography of Garfield went beyond his life story to portray “how intimately he was connected, not just with the events of the times, but with the soul of the nation.” President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier illustrates how Garfield, as a perfect product of post-Civil War America and representative of its values, influenced almost every political event in the two decades following the war.
This process of curating stories and selecting nuances becomes especially difficult when one writes a biography about a notoriously difficult subject—oneself.
Earl Martin Phalen ’89 decided to write an autobiography after joining the board of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and reading Kauffman’s autobiography. Kauffman was a pharmaceutical entrepreneur who later bought the Kansas City Royals. Phalen said the autobiography allowed him to understand who Kauffman was “as a man, what his values were, and what institution [foundation] you’re joining—so that you can carry on his values and priorities.”
When Phalen founded his nonprofit organization, the George and Veronica Phalen Leadership Academies, named in honor of his parents, he penned his own autobiography to share his and his parents’ values. Because he had kept “almost a thousand” vignettes throughout his life, he struggled with selecting the most effective anecdotes to convey his narrative.
“It was very difficult to find a common storyline because every section of my life had 15 to 20 stories with some having a hundred, but I needed to put two or three,” he said. “When I shared [my vignettes] with somebody at a publishing company, she was like, ‘Hey, Earl, this is great, but this is way, way too much. And nobody’s going to want to read all of this.’”
Phalen believes that an autobiography can more easily balance the positive and negative than a biography. The question that arises, however, is to what extent the autobiographer can resist the urge to justify their own shortcomings––how the autobiographer’s middle ground compares to that of the biographer.
“The biographer might say, ‘No, we want to talk about the worst days of Earl’s life,’ or they might say, ‘Oh my God, he has done some incredible things,’” he said. “I tried to cut it down the middle with my autobiography, but a biographer could go either way.”
In fact, many biographers do indeed go either way. Each of the some 15,000 biographies of Abraham Lincoln, for example, tells its own story–– some friendlier to Lincoln than others.
Goodyear said there is no better story someone can share with the public than the story of a significant life.
“The closer you read about the ordeals, the victories, the triumphs, the struggles of past people,” he said, “it really puts things into context for yourself personally, for the writer as well as the reader.”
It is impossible to put every single detail about the subject on their pages; the biography must stop somewhere.
“If one were to wait until one had a perfect understanding of somebody before writing a biography about him, you’d never write a page,” Goodyear said.
He believes that an understanding of the subject’s “moral code” and the ability to “put yourself in their shoes a little bit” represent a point where he feels comfortable with the knowledge of the subject.
“You can’t ever get there entirely,” Goodyear said, “but you can imagine how they would respond to any given situation. You have a general understanding of the moral compass of somebody, what way their soul is drawn towards.”
It’s easy to understand a biography simply as an account of a life. However, no biography can, or should, be perfectly objective, and biographies are more than just a series of facts. Biographers disagree on what constitutes a biography, which sources to trust, what makes a trait positive or negative, and from which perspective to narrate their story. Through a series of these choices, a biographer must craft a compelling story true to their subject’s life. Their challenge is not only that of the historian—it’s also that of the interpreter and the artist.