I have always believed that college professors teach best when we incorporate our own research into teaching. We can focus our and our students’ efforts, offer them our factual expertise, guide them readily into feasible topics, and judge the plausibility of their interpretations.
After writing biography for a decade, I found that I had reflected little about the theory behind biography. I had read a number of model biographies. But biographical theory and methodology was not easily available because it is a relatively recent field, or at least is an area of study that has been resurrected after a long period of neglect. Interest in relating and reading lives has grown enormously. For instance, there is now a journal devoted specifically to biography, biographies are becoming best sellers, and biographies are being taken seriously in the academic world as well.
It occurred to me that my students and I might profit from a graduate seminar in writing biography. While our department had offered undergraduate courses in the study of biographies, no one had previously approached the subject from the angle of writing biography nor had such courses been taught at the graduate level.
I faced certain conceptual and practical questions in designing the course. How much theory should the course include? How much did the students already know about writing biography? How does writing biography differ from other writing? At what level did the students write?
I decided that the major project for each student would be a fifteen to twenty-five page biographical paper based on primary sources when possible. The students then would submit their completed papers to journals for publication, which involved learning the journals in their field, writing query letters, and tailoring their studies for particular audiences.
In addition, students would lead class discussions based upon their topics. This would provide an opportunity to discuss special problems in their research and sources that might be of general interest and share hints for success. They could also get feedback from the class that might help them in the final stages of writing their papers. Finally the students would write critiques of a major biography, and we would discuss the critiques in class. The critiques would be based upon a book read by the entire class, and we would follow up with a roundtable discussion in class. Grades in the course would be based one-quarter on the discussion led, one quarter on class participation, and one half on the biographical paper.
I seriously considered several books as texts for the course. James F. Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), consists of interviews with biographers and essays about specific aspects of biography. However, it does not provide the step-by-step approach I wanted, is too specialized for my students and, since it is only available in hardcover, is too expensive.
While our department had offered undergraduate courses in the study of biographies, no one had previously approached the subject from the angle of writing biography nor had such courses been taught at the graduate level.
Marc Pachter, ed., Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) consists of articles by prominent biographers on selected aspects of biography. While it is stimulating to me, it does not provide a nuts-and-bolts approach and is written for other biographers and for readers of biographies, not for students. I considered several additional books, including Anthony Friedson, ed., New Directions in Biography (University of Hawaii Press, 1982), and Robert Beck, Experiencing Biography (Montclair, NJ.: Boynton and Cook, Pubs., 1978). I concluded that there is no single book that fits all my criteria for course adoption: that it be simple, interesting, inexpensive, brief, and descriptive of basic methodology. The closest book to what I wanted is John Garraty’s The Nature of Biography (London: J. Cape, 1958), but it is out of print. Portions of this book succeeded in stimulating the students and in providing an overview of writing biography.
When I teach the seminar again I plan to use Milton Lomask’s The Biographer’s Craft (Harper and Row, 1986), a clear exposition directed to students and beginning biographers. Lomask describes each stage in writing a biography from finding a subject to finding a publisher. Though written at a more elementary level than Garraty, it is nevertheless the best basic book in print and will soon appear in paper.
Because I have always been inspired by speaking with other biographers, I decided to ask several biographers to visit and talk to my class. I devoted two class sessions to these guest discussions. I decided to invite three authors who wrote distinctly different types of biographies, who had different ideological viewpoints, and who had published within the last five years.
My first guest speaker was Professor Thomas C. Reeves of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, who had written a major life-and-times biography of Sena tor Joseph R. McCarthy. I invited to later sessions Professor Milton Bates of Marquette University, who had written a literary biography of Wallace Stevens, and Dimitri Lazo of Alverno College, whose dissertation was a biography of an American missionary and diplomat in China, and who was working on a diplomatic biography of Robert Lansing. I provided the guest speakers with a course syllabus and asked them to draw upon their personal experiences to describe problems encountered by biographers.
One week prior to each guest’s talk, I discussed the subject of his book with my students. I told them about the back grounds of the biographers, the reception of their works by critics and the public, and placed excerpts from their studies and reviews of their books on reserve.
The guest discussions seemed to turn the students on to biography. They were particularly intrigued by the authors’ accounts of how they had wandered in the wilderness for topics and found ones that seemed exciting, some times accidently, and how they had searched for sources. The guests talked about finding letters in old trunks and attics, dealing with family and friends in the use of privately owned papers, and the reactions of relatives to their books. The speakers discussed writing biographies as articles, dissertations, and books. They also discussed what publishers look for, the changing tastes of readers, and trends and fads in biography. They agreed that, while writing biography is exciting and rewarding, it is also time-consuming and risky. One never knows if his sources will be sufficient to make the subject come alive or if the person that interests him will interest readers.
The period after the guest lectures was devoted to brainstorming for topics. I made it clear to the students that, while I would advise them, it was their responsibility to choose topics that could be completed in one semester with the resources available, and that they should not rely on interlibrary loan or archives located in distant cities. I emphasized that finding the right topic was probably the most important single aspect of writing a biography.
. . .a proper topic was one that interested them, was significant, was feasible with available sources, and was about a person on whom there remained something original to say.
I told them that a proper topic was one that interested them, was significant, was feasible with available sources and was about a person of whom there remained something original to say. I referred them to the chapter in Garraty on selecting a subject and discussed turning an idea into a paper by narrowing or expanding it. Then we all discussed our interests and began to suggest topics for ourselves and others, and how to modify topics to fit the format of the course. I find such brainstorming sessions among the most stimulating aspects of teaching graduate students and usually discover three or four ideas for books or articles that I would like to write. I keep a file of such topics for myself and for students searching for topics.
After the students had settled on topics, I devoted a class meeting to a guest lecture by a reference librarian on research tools. She discussed how to proceed from a general to a specific idea, how to begin research in the li brary, and how to build a bibliography. She suggested special sources for biography, including directories and indexes, reviews, articles, abstracts, and oral history sources. She explained strategies for searching for information and how to find material on living and dead persons, on persons in foreign countries, and on persons by their occupations or fields of interest. She explained how to use computer searches and how to use the Historical Biographical Dictionaries Master Index, a reference to other reference books. This was followed by a question-and-answer period, during which students asked about reference tools relating to their specific topics.
While students were engaged in re search, I tried to sharpen their analytical skills by having them read and write a critique of a well-known biography. I selected the book Huey Long, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for its author, the late Professor T. Harry Williams. This study of Long paralleled my own research, and I felt that I could be most helpful in analyzing a book with which I was familiar.
I asked the students to write an eight to ten-page paper, to analyze specific details of the book and evaluate it. The analysis would include a discussion of the background of the author, his thesis, a summary of the subject, the author’s research, his style, and the audience for which it was intended. I distributed two pages of questions for analysis and re quested that they address two of my general questions and four of my specific questions, but I did not limit them to questions on the handout. I asked them to incorporate reviews of the book and to discuss biases of reviewers as well as any bias of the author. They were asked to incorporate more recent scholarship on Long and place the book in historical context.
We devoted an entire class period to discussing the critiques, and the discussion was animated. A wide variety of opinions about the book emerged. Some thought it fair, others biased; some found it interesting, others dull; some concluded that it was a captive of the time it was written, others that it stands the test of time. I made marginal comments on the papers and returned them. I did not attach grades to the papers, but encouraged students to meet with me and discuss them.
The most difficult class was the one in which we discussed psychohistory. I am tempted to avoid it altogether, because one cannot learn to write or even read psychohistory in a limited time. However, it is a major facet of recent scholarship and some of the students had asked me to devote a class to it.
As might be expected, it was difficult to find a suitable book to serve as the basis for a discussion in psychohistory. Most of the studies available are either attacks on psychohistory, defenses of psychohistory, or advocates of a particular type of psychohistory. There are books that are oversimplifications and 1 on the other hand, those that assume that the reader has a background in psychoanalysis.
The book I ended up using was William McKinley Runyan, Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). The book was not entirely satisfactory because it covers too much, requires some knowledge of the lives of the individuals he uses as examples, has no discussion of Freudian or other theories of psychoanalysis or of methodology, and is written from a psychiatric, not a historical, perspective. In addition, I placed several useful essays on reserve in the library: Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: Dover Publications, 1964), v-xiv; H. N. Hirsch, “Clio on the Couch,” World Politics, 23 (Oct., 1979-July, 1980), 406-424; and Bruce Mazlish, “Psychohistory and Politics,” Center Magazine, 10 (Sept.-Oct., 1977), 5-14.
We discussed psychoanalysis in class, and I assigned several students to outline some of the major schools. We found the case for using psychohistorical methods strong but appropriate only in cases in which we knew, or could infer, sufficient information about the subject’s early years. One student wrote a perceptive paper on the racist thought of Gerald L. K. Smith and attempted to relate his work to internal influences. We found it more inviting to psychoanalyze pathological personalities than nor mal ones. The discussion left us eager to read psychohistory but cautious about trying to write it.
The most rewarding class period was the one devoted to writing. I focused on the creative act of writing rather than on the technical aspects of footnoting, punctuation, and grammar. Both the students and I learned much from reading Donald Hall, Writing Well (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 5th ed., 1985). Hall writes beautifully, and his own style illustrates the results of following his advice. He devotes separate chapters to nouns, verbs, modifiers, sentences, and paragraphs; to definition by description; and to similes and metaphors. He explains that to write well, one must read well; one must read for style as well as content, for pleasure as well as information. In class we discussed how to begin writing, how to work from notes, how to analyze clearly, how to organize, and how to write introductions and conclusions. We agreed that although great writers are gifted, all of us can improve by concentration and practice. The final portion of the class was devoted to specific writing problems the students encountered in completing their papers.
When I teach the course again I in tend to devote a class period to a discussion of oral history. Some of my students employed it in their research, but their inexperience led to several problems, including insufficient background reading prior to the interviews, poorly planned questions, and use of unwieldy equipment.
My students, on the whole, felt that they acquired insights into writing biography that will facilitate future projects. They learned something about how to conceive topics, about research tools they had not known existed, and about how to stimulate their own creativity. There were a few disappointments. Some students had to change topics during the semester, and several did not complete their papers on time. Some of the papers were derivative and several were disappointing. My students found that biography is difficult and infinitely more complex than it appears. Yet some continued their biographical studies after the course ended by developing their topics into graduate theses.
Glen S. Jeansonne is associate professor of twentieth-century US history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; in 1981 and 1986 he was awarded Beveridge grants by the AHA.
