BIOGRAPHY

Between 1870 and 1920, biography was an unstable genre, and many questions surrounded the practice of it. Who, for example, deserved to be the subject of a biography? Should biographers present their subjects as unique individuals or as representative of something larger? Should they consider only the public lives of their subjects or their private lives as well? Should they attempt to elevate their subjects or should they "debunk" them by revealing their unknown shortcomings? Must a biography present a complete, linear narrative of a subject's life? Or should a biographer distill the essence of a subject's "inner life" using a few telling anecdotes? Such questions reflect the development of biography as a genre, but also circumstances that were specific to the cultural context of the United States.

HAGIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY

In the broadest sense, modern biography reflects an abiding Western belief in the autonomy and importance of the individual. The genre emerged in part from the medieval Christian tradition of hagiography, that is, spiritual biography that presents the exemplary lives of saints so that believers might imitate them. Hagiography is not supposed to be strictly factual or objective; it presents idealized role models that help to construct and stabilize the values of the communities.

By the late eighteenth century, however, the values of the Enlightenment were encouraging greater objectivity in biographical writing. Secular biography sought to present factual, even scientific documentation of the actions of important figures in politics, exploration, science, and war in the emerging democratic nation-state. Secular biographies may have an exemplary character, but their importance to readers is presumed to lie less in the realm of faith than in their encouragement of civic progress. The main tendencies reflected in these two traditions—religious and secular, subjective and objective, idealistic and realistic, exemplary and individualized—were continually being renegotiated by communities of authors and audiences. The general development has been away from the religious traditions of hagiography. Nevertheless, both traditions supported a view that individual lives were worth documenting for the instruction of future generations.

The circumstances of postcolonial cultural nationalism in the United States after the Revolution—coupled with the uneven spread of Enlightenment secularism to relatively isolated rural communities—meant that hagiographical writing persisted well into the nineteenth century, particularly in education and religious culture. After the Civil War, the assassinated Abraham Lincoln became the great exemplar of national virtues. Of course, there was a note of Northern triumphalism in this celebration of the Rail-splitter, but Lincoln was also a better model of the self-made man than the slave-owning George Washington, whom he replaced as a favorite subject of biography. Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–1899), author of the best-selling Ragged Dick series (beginning in 1868), applied the rags-to-riches template to Abraham Lincoln, the Backwoods Boy; or, How a Young Rail-Splitter Became President (1883). After President James Garfield was assassinated, Alger wrote a companion volume: From Canal Boy to President; or, The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield (1881). Similar popular volumes about Garfield as a self-made man and secular saint were written by James S. Brisbin, James Dabney McCabe, William R. Thayer, and many others. Of course, the somewhat priggish version of American presidents inflicted on generations of schoolchildren probably did much to encourage a complete rejection of the vestiges of the hagiographical tradition toward the end of the nineteenth century. These popular biographies would provide writers with a tradition to define themselves against, particularly in the so-called Gilded Age when the notion of a saintly politician seemed cloying and that of the self-made man a misguided justification of the excesses of capitalism.

MONUMENTAL BIOGRAPHY

While popular biographies reached large segments of the reading public by presenting simplified and idealized subjects, so-called monumental biographies were often unreadable compendiums of ill-digested letters and diaries presented chronologically within their historical context. With titles such as "Life and Times" or "Life and Letters," these biographies occupied several volumes and were ponderous in style as well as heft. If scrupulously edited, monumental biographies could be valuable repositories of primary documents. More often, these documents were selected, edited, and in some cases revised to suit the interests of the compilerbiographer. Readers were frequently left to extract their own interpretations from the mass of material and most had little interest in doing so.

Monumental biographies usually took many years to write because of the difficulty in gaining access to papers and permission to publish their contents. Unlike popular biographies, written on short notice to meet market demand, a monumental biography generally could not be produced until a generation or more had passed since the death of its subject. Most of the more reliable monumental biographies of revolutionary figures were not published until well into the nineteenth century. For example, William W. Henry published Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches in three volumes in 1891. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, subjects' writings in such biographies increasingly tended to be presented in more complete form, particularly as close associates and relatives ceased to have control of the documents. Indeed, at that time an author's close association with the subject of a monumental biography was thought to undermine its claims to objectivity. This was particularly true when the biographer was a family member, friend, employee, or political associate.

Lincoln's secretaries, John G. Nicolay (1832–1901) and John Hay (1838–1905), collaborated for nearly fifteen years to write Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vols., 1890). The biography was serialized in the popular Century Magazine (1886–1890), earning its authors the enormous sum of fifty thousand dollars. Nicolay and Hay were careful to avoid the shortcomings of Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889), which considered Lincoln's religious unorthodoxy, his stormy marriage, and his youthful romances. Instead of personal anecdote, Nicolay and Hay relied as much as possible on documentary evidence, although many of Lincoln's papers were under the control of Robert Lincoln, who insisted on his right to dictate the interpretation of materials. Unlike William Henry Herndon (1818–1891), Nicolay and Hay spent little time on Lincoln's obscure youth; eight of the ten volumes focus on the Civil War. Their work was partisan, favoring the North and the Republican Party, and Lincoln was clearly presented as a heroic figure. Still, Abraham Lincoln: A History, although not monumental in scale, reflected an ongoing shift toward more interpretive forms of biographical writing.

Although the Nicolay and Hay biography was an important publication, monumental biographies for the most part were the literary equivalent of Grant's Tomb: structures so grandiose that one could scarcely remember who was buried inside. Of course, there was an economic incentive behind their size: subscriptions for two-volume biographies were more profitable than over-the-counter sales of single volumes. To judge from the many extant copies of monumental biographies with pristine pages, the vast majority of these works were never read by the owners who displayed them. Eminently respectable, they were biographies as furniture, signifiers of middle-class status. After World War I, monumental biographies would come to represent everything that was stodgy and hypocritical about the Victorian era.

In Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey (1890–1932) complained of

those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, the lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. (Altick, p. 281)

Although they are often useful as scholarly resources, few monumental biographies could be regarded as literary, and, from the start, they coexisted with—and perhaps contributed to—the desire for shorter, more readable, and more analytic biographies by disinterested professional writers.

JAMES PARTON, PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHER

James Parton (1822–1891) was the first professional biographer in the United States; he invented the role as the market for biography was growing, but he also helped to create the market. He was not a hagiographer or a didactic nationalist, nor was he an associate of the famous or a specialist in a single figure like Nicolay and Hay. Parton attempted to capture the "inner life" of his subjects in deft strokes rather than overwhelming his readers with extensive documentation. Most of all, he wanted to elevate biography to a literary art, a hybrid of history and novel. Parton could adapt his style to the North American Review as well as to the New York Ledger, and the various forms his biographies took—multiple volumes, single volumes, shorter pieces for literary magazines, and popular articles for newspapers—catered to different kinds of readers.

Parton did not reduce the complexity of his subjects to suit a preconceived didactic purpose. He cited extensive printed sources and conducted interviews. His methods were historical, but his prose was journalistic, even literary, uncovering mysteries about his subjects. He used dramatic license such as invented dialogue and paced the narrative to maintain reader interest. In that sense, Parton pursued the connection between biography and the bildungsroman, a novel that describes a protagonist's moral or intellectual development. But Parton did not regard himself as a fiction writer, still less as a sensationalist. He refused to repeat unsubstantiated rumors, even on matters of substance, such as Aaron Burr's reputation as a womanizer.

For his subjects, Parton generally chose American figures who were already well known. His career began with Horace Greeley (1855), a biography that presented its subject as a virtuous, self-made man. It was remarkable in part because Greeley was still alive, but it rose above adulation by virtue of Parton's in-depth research. He followed Horace Greeley with The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (1858, enlarged to two volumes in 1864), which was also extensively researched and supplemented by interviews. In each case, Parton claimed he wanted to discover the complex inner man, not just present the public record. Burr, for example, is depicted as a morally flawed political visionary with many redeeming qualities. Parton's subsequent biographies—The Life of Andrew Jackson (3 vols., 1860–1861) and The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2 vols., 1864)—were even more extensively supported with quotation and documentation, but they also demonstrated Parton's flair for storytelling. The success of these works made Parton the foremost American biographer in the 1860s. Atlantic Monthly praised him as a literary artist, and biography began to establish itself as a distinct genre, a mixture of history and literature.

In 1893, shortly after this pioneer's death, McClure's Magazine published "James Parton's Rules of Biography." In this essay, Parton explained his techniques: research your subjects thoroughly; do not eulogize them; keep events in perspective; and hold back nothing that the reader has a right to know. The biographer's job was not to provide moral instruction but to satisfy curiosity about the subject's life. "The great charm of all biography," according to Parton, "is the truth, told simply, directly, boldly, charitably" (p. 59). But Parton had a complex view of human behavior: "A human character is complicated. It is often inconsistent with itself, and it requires nice judgment to proportion it in such a way as to make the book correspond with the man" (p. 59). Such views mark Parton as an antecedent of biographers who sought to reveal the psychological complexity of their subjects, and his status would remain high in the late nineteenth century, when most biographies written by his generation were ridiculed.

LITERARY BIOGRAPHY

One of the factors influencing biographers such as Parton to explore the "inner life" of their subjects was the growth and spread of literary romanticism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Romanticism broadened who could be considered worthy of biography; it stressed the importance of individuals of "genius," who could be figures such as Washington or Napoleon but also writers and artists. In the American context, the exceptional individual was often seen as what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a "Representative Man," one who embodied the virtues of his time and place. Sainthood and the notion of the self-made man were reframed in the Romantic era as a quest for "character," a search for individuality. There was also a nationalistic quality to American literary biography, which sought to demonstrate that the United States could produce individuals of genius as well as successful practical men.

Literary biographies were frequently written in the monumental style by family members for a middle-class audience, and many of these are little more than letters strung together with brief transitions. Examples of this genre include Samuel Longfellow's Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence (3 vols., 1886) and Charles Edward Stowe's Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1899). One of the more notable examples is Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography (2 vols., 1884), compiled by their son, Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934). Julian's avowed purpose was to shed light on his parents' celebrated marriage rather than to assert the literary merit of such works as The Scarlet Letter (1850). His method was to let the subjects "speak for themselves whenever possible," and Julian claims he did not "err on the side of reticence," though, he adds, "there was nothing to be hidden" (p. 1). He included long quotations from his father's unpublished letters, but he also edited the letters to suit the portrait he wished to present. The decision to depict a marriage was a remarkable endorsement in literary history of the value of private, romantic relationships, and, though the biography is generally positive, it also presents the psychological difficulty of being the child of a famous writer.

Biographies by the close friends and family members of authors were often highly flattering of subjects whose deaths the writers were still mourning. William Ellery Channing's recollections in Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (1873) presents the author of Walden (1854) as a modern-day Saint Francis. Such works were an invaluable resource for subsequent biographers, but the living guardians of an author's reputation were also an impediment to increasingly professionalized scholars seeking to write more objective biographies. In his novella The Aspern Papers (1888), Henry James (1843–1916) presents the heirs of a famous Romantic poet as hindering serious research rather than serving

Henry James's The Aspern Papers (1888) describes the efforts of an American biographer to obtain a bundle of letters written by Jeffrey Aspern, a fictional romantic author based on Lord Byron. The letters are in the possession of an elderly former lover of the poet and guarded by her niece who, ultimately, will not surrender them to anyone besides the man who agrees to become her husband. The biographer is faced with a choice between his private happiness and his desire to document the life of his favorite author.

The world, as I say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had recognized him most. The multitude, today, flocked to his temple, but of that temple he and I regarded ourselves as the ministers. We held, justly, as I think, that we had done more for his memory than anyone else, and we had done it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss Bordereau's hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an impression about 1825 that he had "treated her badly," just as there had been an impression that he had "served," as the London populace says, several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances. These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious fashion many complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise . . .

. . . Every one of Aspern's contemporaries had, according to our belief, passed away; we had not been able to look into a single pair of eyes into which his had looked or to feel a transmitted contact in any aged hand that his had touched. Most dead of all did poor Miss Bordereau appear, and yet she alone had survived. We exhausted in the course of months our wonder that we had not found her out sooner, and the substance of our explanation was that she had kept so quiet. The poor lady on the whole had had reason for doing so. But it was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep so quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century—the age of newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers. And she had taken no great trouble about it either: she had not hidden herself away in an undiscoverable hole; she had boldly settled down in a city of exhibition. The only secret of her safety that we could perceive was that Venice contained so many curiosities that were greater than she. And then accident had somehow favored her, as was shown for example in the fact that Mrs. Prest had never happened to mention her to me, though I had spent three weeks in Venice—under her nose, as it were—five years before. Mrs. Prest had not mentioned this much to anyone; she appeared almost to have forgotten she was there. Of course she had not the responsibilities of an editor. It was no explanation of the old woman's having eluded us to say that she lived abroad, for our researches had again and again taken us (not only by correspondence but by personal inquiry) to France, to Germany, to Italy, in which countries, not counting his important stay in England, so many of the too few years of Aspern's career were spent. We were glad to think at least that in all our publishings (some people consider I believe that we have overdone them), we had only touched in passing and in the most discreet manner on Miss Bordereau's connection. Oddly enough, even if we had had the material (and we often wondered what had become of it), it would have been the most difficult episode to handle.

Henry James, "The Aspern Papers," in Complete Stories, 1884–1891 (New York: Library of America, 1999), pp. 230–232.

as useful collaborators. Relatives of biographical subjects might make access to their letters conditional on some distortion of the full truth; they might seek to sanitize the historical record or conceal crucial documents, which could surface later to the embarrassment of the biographer. As romanticism gave way to realism in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a need for more disinterested, authoritative analyses of authors who could establish a national canon by reaching a wide audience.

Inspired by the English Men of Letters series (1878–1884), the American Men of Letters series was edited by Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900). The series began with Warner's Washington Irving in 1881 and by 1904 twenty-two volumes in all had appeared. Published as a uniform series with the more successful American Statesmen series, they were a collectible pantheon of American authors such as N. P. Willis, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of the more remarkable volumes in the series was George Woodberry's Edgar Allan Poe (1885). Woodberry (1855–1930) called himself a "documentary biographer" and regarded his research as almost scientific in its precision. He conducted research more thoroughly than any previous Poe biographer and corrected Rufus Griswold's defamatory portrait that had persisted since the 1840s. Woodberry's Poe was not a tragic Romantic figure so much as a talented writer ruined by moral shortcomings. Woodbury, along with several other writers in the American Men of Letters series, moved literary biography away from personal reminiscence and closer to modern research and criticism.

The success of the American Statesmen series and some volumes in the American Men of Letters inspired other series such as American Crisis Biographies, American Worthies, American Men of Progress, Men of Achievement, Great Commanders, and the short Beacon Biographies (31 vols., 1899–1910), edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. The Beacon Biographies were cheaply priced and pocket-size; they came with a portrait, a chronology, and a bibliography. They treated literary figures (James Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, Hawthorne), statesmen (Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln), military leaders (Ulysses S. Grant, David Farragut, Robert E. Lee), and scientists (Louis Agassiz, John Audubon, Samuel Morse). The purpose of the series, according to Howe, was to provide brief, readable, and accurate accounts of important Americans in a variety of fields for a wide audience. The spread of such biographies reflected a convergence of conventions in a genre that had once been clearly divided between the hagiographic popular forms and the more documentary monumental forms.

GROUP BIOGRAPHIES, COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHIES, AND "MUG BOOKS"

Even as biographies of a single subject began to establish some generic norms, new forms of biographical writing proliferated. Group biographies, for example, describe the interactions of a subject with other individuals. They may include anecdotes, remembered conversations, and exchanges of letters, among other elements. They are not comprehensive but instead re-create the web of relationships that defines an intellectual or social coterie. Henry James's William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903) describes a cluster of individuals who had dealings with the nineteenth-century American sculptor. James says the "subject is the period—it is the period that holds the elements together, rounds them off, makes them right" (Parke, p. 112). Other group biographies published near this time include James Russell Lowell and His Friends (1899), by Edward Everett Hale; Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), by William Dean Howells; and Authors and Friends (1896), by Annie Fields.

Collective biographies are usually arranged thematically or alphabetically. Following the British Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901), edited by Leslie Stephen, Appleton's National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1887–1889) aspired to be a comprehensive biographical dictionary, including founding fathers, patriots, and individuals of note up to the present time. The authoritative Dictionary of American Biography was first published in 1928 and continues to be updated. Directories such as Who's Who in America (1899–), founded by A. N. Marquis, began with 8,600 names and included only basic data (education, career, honors, memberships). Who's Who helped to define the regional, national, and professional elite. Indeed, having one's biographical sketch published in a reference work became so desirable that people sometimes paid for the privilege.

Local histories often included biographical volumes; in many cases, historical discourse proper was eliminated altogether in favor of biographical sketches of leading local citizens. These so-called mug books were a means for the rising middle-class to establish its legitimacy. The subscription agent was often the writer, and subjects paid a fee for the biographical sketches based on their length. These circumstances were never mentioned in the publication itself. Larger regional books such as Hubert Howe Bancroft's Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth (1891) included only figures who had paid at least a thousand dollars to be included. Undoubtedly, mug books have value as regional histories, but their primary market was the subjects themselves, who regarded a printed biography as proof that they had "arrived." Mug books confirm there was an ongoing belief in the self-made man and in the importance of local communities.

During this period, however, novelists such as William Dean Howells (1837–1920) questioned the reality of the conventional rags-to-riches narrative that characterized nearly every American biography. Howells was a rags-to-riches story himself, but he came to see social mobility as a source of unhappiness and social disorder and as out of reach for most Americans. His novel A Modern Instance (1882) depicts the rise of a journalist from youthful poverty to professional success at the cost of his moral character and eventually his life. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) demonstrates the costs of rapid social mobility, showing how the behavior of the upper classes cannot simply be learned; even in America, the upwardly mobile individual is always an interloper. For Howells, the democratization of biography was one way that the illusion of the self-made man was perpetuated at the expense of social reforms.

THE "NEW BIOGRAPHY"

As the twentieth century approached, biographers began to respond to the ideas of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herbert Spencer. Less subject to the conditions of the immediate postcolonial period and its concern with nation-building, biographers in the Progressive Era began to question received wisdom about figures such as Washington and Lincoln. Although the "Great Man" approach remained popular in schools and among the general public, professional historians now tended to emphasize large-scale social forces over individuals. Literary realism also rejected the idea of heroism in favor of more accurate representations of human behavior based on the insights of science, economics, and psychology.

The True George Washington (1896) and The Many-Sided Franklin (1899), both by Paul Leicester Ford (1865–1902), were not comprehensive biographies arranged chronologically so much as a series of topical essays. The Franklin biography, for example, includes chapters titled "Physique: Theories and Appetites," "Relations with the Fair Sex," and "The Scientist." Other biographies reappraised national heroes such as Thomas Jefferson, William Penn, and Andrew Jackson. What were called "true" biographies sought to "humanize" their subjects by investigating themes absent in the more linear, comprehensive biographies By contrast, "real" biographies attempted to debunk their subjects, which they regarded as inflated and sanitized. Charles L. C. Minor's The Real Lincoln (1901) uses contemporary accounts to demonstrate that Lincoln invoked Christianity hypocritically and supported the abolition of slavery inconsistently for his own political advantage. Both the "true" and the "real" approaches encouraged the unauthorized publication of private letters, investigative reporting by muckraking journalists, and exposés by former employees and associates (who were well compensated for their information). Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944), the author of The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln (1896), portrayed John D. Rockefeller as a corrupt monopolist in her History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). Tarbell showed how the ideal of the American self-made man embodied by Lincoln was out of reach for the average American in an age of unregulated capitalism and incipient class warfare.

The New Biography earned a bad name for itself among some readers, who regarded it as unpatriotic sensationalism at best. Owen Wister (1860–1938) attempted directly to refute the debunkers in adulatory biographies such as The Seven Ages of Washington (1907). M. A. DeWolfe Howe (1864–1960) drew on the monumental tradition, basing his lives on excerpts from letters, but, in works such as Phillips Brooks (1899), Life and Letters of George Bancroft (2 vols., 1908), Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (1913), Memories of a Hostess (1922), and Barrett Wendell (1924), his writing was more interpretive and more willing to explore sympathetically the complexities of his subjects. Similarly, biographies by William Roscoe Thayer (1859–1923) such as The Life and Letters of John Hay (1915) and Theodore Roosevelt, An Intimate Biography (1919) offered insight into the private lives of his subjects, but in doing so the author attempted to demonstrate the authenticity of the virtues displayed in their public lives. Roosevelt, he argued, was above all "pledged to Righteousness" (p. ix).

Thayer described his methods in a series of lectures called The Art of Biography (1920). He sought a compromise between idolatry and debunking, between hagiography and the New Biography. Thayer believed that everything about a subject's life should be open to investigation, but the results of this investigation should be interpreted in a novelistic manner. "The scientific method," he writes, "defeated its purpose by substituting material and mechanical standards for the spiritual. Science can vivisect bodies, but up to the present the soul of man eludes the microscope and the scalpel" (Novarr, p. 22). Thayer laments that the biographers of his era emphasized historical and natural forces above the unique qualities of the individual, which, according to him, it is the sole task of the biographer to describe. For Thayer, the biographer was ultimately an intuitive artist more than a historian, scientist, or political activist.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD AND "PSYCHOGRAPHY"

Gamaliel Bradford (1863–1932) was one of the most prominent and influential biographers of the early twentieth century. In addition to full-length biographies such as Lee the American (1912), he wrote more than a hundred substantial character sketches, which were collected in Types of American Character (1895), Confederate Portraits (1914), Union Portraits (1916),

By the mid-1880s, biographical sketches of leading citizens had fallen into a generic rut. Quick-sketch biographers, often compilers of mug books, had become a species of literary professional, though one of embarrassingly low rank for those with literary aspirations. Even the more naïve subjects of such mass-produced biographies—when not indulging their vanity—were self-conscious about the rigid conventions of the self-made man tradition.

When Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the "Solid Men of Boston" series, which he undertook to finish up in "The Events," after he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private office by previous appointment.

. . . "I don't know as I know just where you want me to begin," said Lapham.

"Might begin with your birth; that's where most of us begin," replied Bartley.

A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham's blue eyes.

"I didn't know whether you wanted me to go quite so far back as that," he said. "But there's no disgrace in having been born. . . . I was born on a farm, and—"

"Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation thing?" Bartley cut in.

"Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this irreverent version of his history somewhat dryly.

"Parents poor, of course," suggested the journalist. "Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know," said Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-respect, "I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won't interest you."

"Oh yes, it will," returned Bartley, unabashed. "You'll see; it'll come out all right." And in fact it did so, in the interview which Bartley printed.

"Mr. Lapham," he wrote, "passed rapidly over the story of his early life, its poverty and its hardships, sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted mother, and a father who, if somewhat her inferior in education, was no less ambitious for the advancement of his children. They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious, after the fashion of that time, and of sterling morality, and they taught their children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's Almanac."

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted to Lapham's unliterary habit of mind for his security in making it, and most other people would consider it sincere reporter's rhetoric.

"You know," he explained to Lapham, "that we have to look at all these facts as material, and we get the habit of classifying them. Sometimes a leading question will draw out a whole line of facts that a man himself would never think of."

. . . "Yes, sir," said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was careful not to interrupt again, "a man never sees all that his mother has been to him till it's too late to let her know that he sees it. Why, my mother—" he stopped. "It gives me a lump in the throat," he said apologetically, with an attempt at a laugh. Then he went on: "She was a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate schoolgirl; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides. She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended from daylight till dark—and from dark till daylight, I was going to say; for I don't know how she got any time for sleep. But I suppose she did. She got time to go to church, and to teach us to read the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was good. But it ain't her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees before me at night, washing my poor, dirty little feet, that I'd run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed. There were six of us boys; it seems to me we were all of a size; and she was just so careful with all of us. I can feel her hands on my feet yet!". . . "We were patched all over; but we wa'n't ragged. I don't know how she got through it.

. . . Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book. . . . [He] had learned to practise a patience with his victims which he did not always feel, and to feign an interest in their digressions till he could bring them up with a round turn.

William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, in Novels, 1875–1886: A Foregone Conclusion, A Modern Instance, Indian Summer, and The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Library of America, 1982), pp. 861–864.

Portraits of Women (1916), A Naturalist of Souls (1917) American Portraits, 1875–1900 (1922), and Damaged Souls (1923), his most popular work. Bradford called these sketches "psychographs" and they reflected the influence of Marx's materialist approach to history, Darwin's theory of natural selection, and, most of all, Freud's theories about the unconscious and the importance of childhood development. Bradford thought of psychography as a genre separate from biography. Psychography emphasized the inner self, the "soul" of the subject, which the author abstracted from the whirl of external events. Bradford was an exhaustive researcher but, like Parton and Thayer, he thought of himself as a literary artist informed by science. He too was wary of scientific or psychological generalizations that tended to reduce the uniqueness of individual human "character." Bradford was not interested in long sequences of facts; instead, he paid great attention to small but revealing details such as Freudian slips. "A careless word, spoken with no intention whatever," he writes, "may fling open a wide window into a man's inmost heart" (Biography and the Human Heart, p. 7).

In Lee the American, Bradford says that his aim was to "give a clear, consistent, sympathetic portrait of a great soul," and the focus is on the development of Lee's character rather than his accomplishments as a general (p. vii). Bradford gives notable attention to Lee's "Great Decision" to side with the Confederacy; he presents the conflicted inner man, not the marble statue of Lee, which is the "sort of thing that made Washington odious to the young and remote from the mature for generations," he writes (p. 25). Ultimately, Bradford's portrait of Lee is not iconoclastic; he presents Lee's life as a noble tragedy.

While some biographers were smashing the idols (Strachey) and others were trying to restore them unblemished (Wister), in works such as Damaged Souls Bradford attempted to rehabilitate figures with tarnished reputations: Benedict Arnold, Thomas Paine, Aaron Burr, John Brown, P. T. Barnum. According to Bradford, his purpose was to "bring out their real humanity and show that, after all, they have something of the same strength and weakness as all of us" (p. 4). His sketch of Barnum the showman and circus promoter, is deft, balanced, and largely positive. It is well researched, though not exhaustive or scholarly in tone, and, while Bradford praises Barnum as a purveyor of entertainment and a pioneer in advertising, he also shows his subject's lack of sensitivity toward the people he exhibited as freaks.

On the whole, Bradford's subjects emerged as complex human beings, but the author's psychoanalytic diagnoses were as much a reflection of the analyst's mind as of the subject's psychology. In that sense, "psychography," like the New Biography that preceded it, sought to be more objective without becoming ponderous, but ultimately it represented yet another negotiation between the ultimately unknowable reality of the subject and the organizing power of the biographer.

See alsoHistory; Success

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bradford, Gamaliel. Biography and the Human Heart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932.

Bradford, Gamaliel. Damaged Souls. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Bradford, Gamaliel. Lee the American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

Hawthorne, Julian. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892.

Parton, James. "James Parton's Rules of Biography." McClure's Magazine 1 (June 1893): 59–62.

Thayer, William Roscoe. Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1919.

Secondary Works

Altick, Richard D. Lives and Letters: A History of LiteraryBiography in England and America. New York: Knopf, 1965.

Amigoni, David. Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and theOrdering of Discourse. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Casper, Scott E. Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man: ChangingConcepts of Success in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Cockshut, A. O. J. Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in theNineteenth Century. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

Cunliffe, Marcus, ed. The Life of Washington, by Mason Locke Weems. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Dargan, Marion. Guide to American Biography: Part II,1815–1933. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952.

Flower, Milton E. James Parton, the Father of ModernBiography. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1951.

Merrill, Dana Kinsman. American Biography: Its Theory andPractice. Portland, Maine: Bowker Press, 1957.

Nadel, Ira Bruce. Biography: Fact, Fiction, and Form. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.

Novarr, David. The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography,1880–1970. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1986.

O'Neill, Edward H. Biography by Americans, 1658–1936: ASubject Bibliography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939.

O'Neill, Edward H. A History of American Biography,1800–1935. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935.

Parke, Catherine N. Biography: Writing Lives. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Peterson, Merrill D. Lincoln in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Gamaliel Bradford. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

William Pannapacker