Writing Lives

Great people inspire others to find the greatness within themselves. It is for this reason that I write biographies. There is an urgent need today for role models relevant to the teenage reader. By sharing fine examples of heroes and heroines they might wish to emulate, biographers can provide for those young readers uncertain of their place in society a beacon of light, an anchor in a rough sea. They can dramatize for them the possibilities for human choice, and help them to better understand their own lives.

Young people must be helped to recognize that people the world over are basically the same. Indeed, the greatness of our subjects is brought home to our readers when they feel them to be more human—more like themselves. Regardless of time or place, people's needs, desires, and emotions are alike. We must help our readers to see the universals implicit in all lives: that all great people were once young, with the same fears, doubts, and concerns that young people have today. They achieved. But they achieved by faith in themselves, persistence, and hard work.

How does biography accomplish this? What is the role of the biographer? What makes it so exciting to me?

In a historical series of lectures at Cambridge University sixty-three years ago, André Maurois remarked, "Isn't it curious how the metaphor of the portrait painter crops up as soon as one begins to talk of the biographer?" (110). This metaphor was brought home to me personally last fall when I took a course entitled "High Art in the Low Countries." Standing in front of paintings of the masters in the great museums of Belgium and Holland, I found myself taking notes on the relationship of the portraits to biography.

The biographer is, indeed, a portrait painter, but a painter whose palette is words. Most lives are mosaics, accumulations of little bits of reality, shaped into an image. The biographer is the artist, under oath, shaping this mosaic. The eye of a fine biographer, like that of a portrait painter, sculptor, or photographer, has to catch that special gleam of character that makes the reader feel the presence of a recognizable, approachable life—a real person.

A good biographer tries to "ungrave" her hero—to bring him back to life for the reader—to show him as he really was. She portrays the human being behind the great artist or statesman.

As I was researching the life of Thomas Jefferson (1988), the difficulty, I knew, would be to uncover material that would give proof of life—not noble public posture, but characteristics that belonged to him and him alone. My readers would know Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and as the third president of the United States. I would have to show them why those who knew him best loved him most.

The more I learned about Thomas Jefferson, the more I found myself possessed by a frenzy to bring him back to life, to see him dance a minuet, play the fiddle, break a horse, draw plans for Monticello, plant his garden, actually write the Declaration of Independence. How would I accomplish this?

I would try to make my readers feel that they were living at the same time and moving in the same circle of friends and family as my subject. Let me give you some examples.

First, I would take my readers back in time to help them discover what Jefferson was like as he was growing up: I would show them a young boy afraid to go to class because he hadn't done his homework; a shy, lanky teenager who rose at dawn to practice the violin before breakfast every morning; and a boy whose adored father died suddenly when he was only fourteen.

Then I would show them a law student too busy thinking about his girlfriend to study. Yet he had already learned to read Homer in Greek, Cicero in Latin, Montesquieu in French. He had studied Anglo-Saxon to understand English common law, he read literature, studied physics, and he was never afraid...