American Biography: The Year in The US

Near the end of every year an assortment of top-ten lists proliferates claiming to identify the best work in fiction, nonfiction, biography, and much more. Sometimes the choices make sense, but most often they simply reflect the reading habits and biases of committee members trying to cope with evaluating too many books in too little time. I propose to do something different for this year and every year I am permitted to do so: provide commentary on a small selection of books that reveal the extraordinary range and diversity of the genre while, in some cases, also pointing out missed opportunities and problematic maneuvers in the biographies at hand.

The historical biography is one of the enduring branches of the genre. Apparently there cannot be too many biographies of Napoleon, or General Grant, or in this case, General Sherman. This year James Lee McDonough in William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country presents a figure who very much corresponds with the one portrayed in Robert L. O’Connell’s Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, which is perhaps why O’Connell calls McDonough’s book “superbly researched and richly detailed” on the jacket of this book. And so it is: a biography that is the product of a historian’s lifelong study, including books on several Civil War battles. Fierce Patriot is a kind of biography built out of a lifetime’s work.

If you have read O’Connell, you may well ask, “Do I need to read McDonough?” Absolutely. For one thing, O’Connell, as his subtitle indicates, tends to carve Sherman up, claiming that watching him in other biographies is like being at a “three-ring circus … too distracting to watch all simultaneously,” which is what previous biographers have tried to do. So O’Connell splits Sherman into three narratives, as if that rectifies the problem in previous biographies: “the strategic man, the general, the human being.” Each narrative is taut and well done, and yet there are overlaps that result in repetitions that mar our cumulative understanding of Sherman’s motivations and achievements. It is disconcerting to return to his childhood in the middle of O’Connell’s book when that childhood—especially Sherman’s father’s early death and his adoption by a prominent Ohio politician—so clearly influenced Sherman’s choices and behavior. To a biographer like McDonough, the romance is in the details, which partly explains why McDonough’s biography is more than three hundred pages longer than O’Connell’s.

The basic picture of Sherman is the same in both biographies, but the nuances and emphases are different. For example, the two biographers are fascinated with Sherman’s theatrical personality. O’Connell is especially compelling here, showing how Sherman “played his role to the hilt, alternating between model conqueror and modern Attila, sowing confusion and fear and in the end breeding despair” in the “last stages of the March to the Sea.” And yet these biographers left me wanting more of Sherman, a reaction his own men shared, never allowing him to appear in public without giving a speech. And Sherman never failed to deliver stirring words, without notes or prior preparation. This observation leads me to an astounding phrase in O’Connell’s narrative: “Cump [Sherman’s nickname], who briefly played Hamlet in St. Louis, was the obvious focus of the campaign” (301). What? Tell me more! I searched O’Connell’s notes but could find no source for the Hamlet reference. As Montaigne said so long ago, these kinds of details tell us so much about the biographical subject. Why did Sherman play Hamlet? Did he ever play other roles? And how did he play Hamlet? I envision him as Rebecca West’s Hamlet: not an indecisive youth, but the hotheaded redhead that was Sherman, who, like Hamlet scolding the king, would tell President Lincoln his business.¹

Both Sherman biographies are long, and I have heard certain biographers lament the growing length of life writing. And yet publishers now put considerable pressure on biographers to shorten and speed up their narratives...