Talented biographers examine the interplay between individual qualities and greater social forces, explains Elizabeth Taylorâchair of the judges for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award for biography. Here, she offers us an overview of their five-book shortlist, including a garlanded account of the life of J. Edgar Hoover and a group biography of post-war female philosophers.
Itâs a pleasure to have you back, Elizabethâthis time to discuss the National Book Critics Circleâs 2023 biography shortlist. Youâve been chair of the judging panel for a while, so youâre in a great position to tell us whether it has been a good year for biography.
Iâm also optimistic about the future. As the world opens and libraries, archives and places where history happened are becoming more accessible. Figuresâor groupsâonce regarded marginal are now being discovered or reappraised with new evidence and interpretation. Biographies are ambitious in structure and form, and focus beyond the pale, stale, and male.
That comes through in the shortlist, I think. Thereâs a real range here. I think any reader is bound to find something to appeal to their tastes.
Shaping a shortlist seems quite like arranging a bouquet. A clutch of peony, begonia, or orchid stemsâŠeach may be lovely, an exemplar in its own way. We aspire to assemble a glorious arrangementâa quintet of blooms that reflect the wildly varied human experiences represented in the verdant garden of biography.
While our committee resisted the impulse to conform to a particular aesthetic or worldview, it did seem that many biographies were deeply rooted in American soil that required years of research to till. End notes are my guilty pleasure, this yearâs finalists provided rich feasts, as one might anticipate from the longestâ832 pages!âbiography, Beverly Gageâs G-Man.
Letâs talk about G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century first, then, shall we? It is your 2023 winner of the NBCCâs prize for best biography; it also won a Pulitzer Prize. Itâs also, and correct me if Iâm wrong, the most traditional of the biographies that made the list.
G-Man is traditional in as much as Beverly Gage captures the full sweep of Hooverâs life, cradle to grave: 1895 to 1972. In that way, structurally G-Man sits aside the epics of David McCullough (Truman, John Adams) and Ron Chernow (Grant, Alexander Hamilton).
Unlike those valorized national leaders, Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential âGovernment Man,â a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents, of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer andâas he accrued powerâwas simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: âWe cannot know our own story without understanding his.â
In G-Man, Yale University professor Gage untangles the contradictions in Hooverâs aspirations and cruelty, and locates the paradoxical American story of tensions and anxieties over security, masculinity, and race.
âThis year, many biographies were deeply rooted in American soil that required years of research to tillâ
Hoover lived his entire life in Washington D.C., and Gage entwines his story in the cityâs evolution into a global power center and delves deeply into the dark childhood that led him to remain there for college. Critical to understanding Hoover, Gage demonstrates, was his embrace of the Kappa Alpha fraternity; its worldview was informed by Robert E. Lee and the âLost Causeâ of the South, in which racial equality was unacceptable. He shaped the F.B.I. in his image and recruited Kappa Alpha men to the Bureau.
For Hoover, Gage writes, Kappa Alpha was a way to measure character, political sympathies, and, of course, loyalty. One of those men was Clyde Tolson, and Gage documents their trips to nightclubs, the racetrack, vacations, and White House receptions. Hoover did not acknowledge that he and Tolson were a couple, but in the end their separate burial plots were a few yards from one another.
While Hoover feels very much alive on the page, Gage captures the full sweep of American history, chronicling events from the hyper-nationalism of the early part of the century, moving into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., making use of newly unclassified documents. When Hooverâs F.B.I. targeted Nazis and gangsters, there was clarity about good guys and bad guys. But by the mid-century, as the nation began to fracture, he regarded calls for peace and justice as threats to national security. Among the abuses of power committed by Hooverâs F.B.I., for instance, was the wiretapping and harassment of King.
Beyond Hooverâs malfeasance, Gage emphasizes that Hoover was no maverick. He tapped into a dark part of the national psyche and had public opinion on his side. Through Hoover, Americans could see themselves, and, as Gage argues, âwhat we valued and refused to see.â
A biography like this does make you realize how deeply world events might be impacted or even partially predicted by the family background or the personalities of a small number of key individuals.
Youâve hit on a fascinating question at the heart of biography: the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces. A late history professor of mine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, once told me that biography was âpeopled history.â
After the Civil War, they learned that their brute of a brother had fathered at least two sons with a woman whom he had enslaved. The sisters provided some financial assistance in the education of these two young men, one attended Harvard Law School and the other Princeton Divinity Schoolâand did not let their nephews forget it.
Letâs turn to Mr B.: George Balanchineâs 20th Century by Jennifer Homans, the story of the noted choreographer. Why did this make your shortlist of the best biographies of 2023?
The perfect match of biographer and subject! A dancer who trained with Balanchineâs School of American Ballet in New York and is now dance critic for The New Yorker, Homans has written a biography of the man known as âthe Shakespeare of Dance.â In felicitous prose, Homans channels the dancerâs experience onto the page, from the body movements that can produce such beauty to the aching tendons and ligaments. Training is transformation, Homan writes, and working with Balanchine was a kind of metamorphosis tangled with pain. She evokes the dances so vividly that one can almost hear the music.
âAt the heart of biography is the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forcesâ
Homans captures Balanchine in a constant state of reinvention, tracing his life from Czarist Russia to Weimar Berlin, finally making his way to post-war New York where he revitalized the world of ballet by embracing modernish, founding New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine was genius whose personal history shape-shifted over the years. Homans grounds Mr. B in more than a hundred interviews, and draws from archives around the world.
Homans captures Balanchineâs charisma and cultural importance, but Mr. B. is no hagiography. Homans grasps the knot of sex and power over women used in his work. He married four times, always to dancers. They were all the same kind of swan-necked, long-waisted, long-limbed women, and although Homans does not write this, his company often sounds more like a cult than art.
And, of course, there is the matter of weight, which Homans dealt with directly, as did Balanchine. He posted a sign: âBEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAYâYOU MUST WEIGH.â
I donât think Iâve ever considered reading a ballet biography before, but it sounds fascinating.
Indeed!
The next book on the NBCCâs 2023 biography shortlist brings us to Oxford, England. This is Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
At the outset of World War II, a quartet of young women, Oxford studentsâElizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgleyâwere âbored of listening to men talk about books by men about men,â as Mac Cumhaill, a Durham University professor, and Wiseman, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, write. In their marvelous group biography, MacCumhaill and Wiseman vivify how the friendships of these women congealed to bring âphilosophy back to life.â
As their male counterparts departed for the front lines, this brilliant group of women came together in their dining halls and shared lodging quarters to challenge the thinking of their male colleagues. In the shadows of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, these friends rejected the logical positivists who favoured empirical scientific questions. They didnât really create a distinct philosophical approach as much as they shared an interest in the metaphysics of morals.
While today we may recognize the prolific Iris Murdoch more for her fictionâlike her Booker-winning novel The Sea, the Seaâothers made an enduring mark. For example, I learned that after their Oxford years, Murdochâs good friend Phillipa Foot was responsible for the classic conundrum of the âtrolley problem,â which posed the question of whether one wouldâor shouldâwillingly kill one person to save five. And beyond philosophy, Mac Cumhaill and Wisemanâs deft sketches of these women sparkle with details of their world, from hot tea and cold shared flats to the lovers and ex-lovers who sometimes shared those flats.
Brilliant. A book that is ostensibly âimprovingâ but which turns out to be absolutely chock-full of gossip sounds perfect to me. Letâs move on to the fourth book on the NBCCâs 2023 biography shortlist, which is Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs.
A biography about writing biography! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis.
While Melville is now firmly ensconced in the American canon, most appreciation and respect for him was posthumous. The 20th-century Melville revival was largely sparked by a now overlooked Mumford, once so prominent that he appeared on a 1936 Time magazine cover.
Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times.
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As Mumford grappled with tragedies wrought by World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic and urban decay, Melville had dealt with the bloody Civil War, slavery, and industrialization. In a certain way, this book is about the art of biography itself, two writers wrestling with modernity in a bleak world. In delving into Melvilleâs angst, Mumford was thrust into great turmoil. Sachs evokes so clearly and painfully this bond that almost did Mumford in, and writes that âMelville, it turns out, was Mumfordâs white whale.â
Thereâs a real sense of range in this shortlist. But do you get a sense of there being certain trends in biography as a genre in 2023?
In many ways, this is a golden era for biography. There are fewer dull but worthy books, more capacious and improvisational ones. More series of short biographies that pack a big punch. We see more group biographies and illustrated biographies. But just as figures and groups once considered marginal are being centered, records that document those lives are vanishing.
The crisis in local news and the homogenization of national and international news will soon be a crisis for biographers and historians. Where would historians be without the âslave narrativesâ from the Federal Writers Project, or the Federal Theatre Project? Reconstruction of public eventsâfederal elections, national tragedies, and so onâmay be possible, but we lose that wide spectrum of human experience. We need to preserve these artifacts and responses to events as they happen. Biographies are time-consuming labors of love and passion, and are often expensive to produce. We need to ensure that we are generating and saving the emails, the records, the to-do lists of ordinary life.
The affluent among us will always be able to commission histories of their companies or families, but are those the only ones that will endure?
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Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.
Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.