While there have been plenty of threads (both on here and throughout Reddit) asking for biography recommendations/asking for the best biography about a specific historical figure, I'd like to start a discussion about the genre itself, about what makes a good biography and about the specific aesthetic challenges faced by biographers. In short, about biographies as literature.
I'm currently reading Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. In his introduction, Guralnick meditates on these challenges:
This is an heroic story, I believe, and ultimately perhaps a tragic one, but — like any of our lives and characters — it is not all of one piece, it does not lend itself to one interpretation exclusively, nor do all its parts reflect anything that resembles an undifferentiated whole. To say this, I hope, is not to throw up one's hands at the impossibility of the task; it is, simply, to embrace the variousness, and uniqueness, of human experience.
To me, this is a very important point, which speaks to perhaps the key challenge of writing a biography — how to craft a narrative out of the countless little details that make up anyone's life. I suppose it's about hitting a golden mean, with oversimplification on one end of the spectrum and getting bogged down in uninteresting detail on the other. And, as Guralnick suggests, it's important to recognize the sheer variety of any individual human experience.
Two other challenges occur to me. First, the challenge of getting inside the subject's head without indulging in armchair psychological evaluation or even amateur psychiatric diagnoses.
Second, the question of subject matter expertise. I once read a biography of Jimmy Stewart that really disappointed me because the author demonstrated no real insight into Stewart's development as an actor, which is a probably because that was his primary claim to fame.
What makes biographies aesthetically interesting from the reader's perspective? Is it the promise of getting behind the public persona (or the simplistic way we often remember historical figures) to that person's real story? Is it simply a way to deepen one's fandom of a favorite writer/artist/etc.?
In his introduction, Guralnick mentions something that plays a major role in the biographies I've enjoyed. (Which is only a few, to be honest; I'm generally more drawn to other genres.) While researching the book, Guralnick writes, he discovered "worlds within worlds:" the various worlds of Presley's life, from postwar American radio to segregated Memphis TN to the fifties music industry. "I have tried to suggest these worlds," Guralnick writes, "and the men and women who peopled them, with a respect for the intricacy, complexity, and integrity of their makeup, but, of course, one can only suggest."
Getting these glimpses of life in sociocultural worlds very different from my own (and the ways in which a particular person can inhabit different worlds at different stages of life) is what I really enjoy about a good biography.
What are your thoughts on this genre?
by Melodic_Ad7952