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 Johnson's 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 problems 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 according to 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 that the biographies 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.

understanding the difficulty of biography writing.

Everything.

William Zinsser who wrote several excellent books on writing. He passed away in 2015.

I picked it up for Kindle since I had read Zinsser's other books on writing several decades ago and had benefited from them, but I found it much better than a how-to book. Even if a writer will never write a biography, it may be a good idea to read this book.

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