Biography for Children

Thomas Carlyle's statement that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men" established a point of view that strongly influenced the writing of biography throughout the 19th Century and which, in large measure, still influences the writing of biography for children. Such an approach creates many problems, for the great man exists very much as a part of his own times and most young children have not developed the historical consciousness necessary to understand fully this relationship. As a result, authors are often tempted to fall into extremes in their portrayals of historical figures: they can give a scissors-and-paste treatment of the past which makes the temporal background of their subjects wooden, or they can so water down the background as to make the heroes of the books seem like people who exist in a timeless realm in which, but for the lack of electric lights and television sets, people seem very much as they are today.

Another problem is created by the fact that the lives of great men are often inner and, as such, are not filled with the physical adventures which make for the exciting, fast-paced narrative enjoyed by children. For example, Herman Melville's times on board a whaling ship and amongst the Typees are the stuff children love, but his long contemplative talks with Jack Chase between watches, his probing conversations with Hawthorne, and his lonely reading of Emerson, Shakespeare and Dante, which are infinitely more important to his development as a writer, would have to be glossed over in a story of his life written for youngsters.

A third problem in biographies for children is to be found in the fact that many volumes are commissioned for series and thus writers may be producing on demand studies about subjects for which they have little knowledge and sympathy. Moreover, an author may be limited by being forced to write within the format of a particular series. One suspects that these problems have created the weaknesses in three of the books under consideration here.

Grace Hathaway Melin's Carl Sandburg, Young Singing Poet, a volume in the Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans series, is frankly a dull book. One quarter of the way through it we have seen the three year old Cully climb aboard a buggy, ask his mother about a wagon with the words Chicago on its side, and live a generally nondescript life. Not until page 145 do we discover that he loves words and not until page 178 do we learn he wants to become a writer. The rest of the time he goes to school, delivers milk and papers, rides the rails, and gets arrested for swimming nude in the local pond. For a person with a knowledge of Sandburg's poetry, it would be possible to discover in his activities the "grass roots" origins of much of his poetry; but the book makes no attempt to trace the growth of his poetic impulses during his childhood. The life described appears as a very ordinary one, told in a very ordinary, almost dull style.

Mervyn Kauffman's Jesse Owens is one of the Crowell Biography series, an easy-to...