Credible Shrinking Bios
Santa, your holiday book bag just got lighter. An increasing number of publishers are offering slim, trim biographies, perfect for today's time-stretched readers.
Talk about concision: For HarperCollins's Eminent Lives series, in a mere 150 pages, novelist Francine Prose not only includes everything a casual reader needs to know about flamboyant Baroque artist Caravaggio; she makes you want to go to the museum. By contrast, the 200-plus pages that former poet laureate Robert Pinsky devotes to King David in his Schocken Jewish Encounters series seems almost, well, full length.
Length alone should not define a biography's worth. In an E-mail interview, British biographer Peter Ackroyd compares short bios with long essays: "You need to be much more aware of continuing theme and much more intent upon formal structure and fluency." He should know: He is the author of both long (the 572-page Shakespeare: The Biography ) and short bios ( Chaucer ) in his Ackroyd's Brief Lives series.
Each series tries to set itself apart. Oxford's Lives and Legacies and Reaktion Books' Critical Lives tap academics to write compactly about areas of expertise. Oxford's subjects are broad (an Isaac Newton bio was preceded by Winston Churchill); Critical Lives focuses on 20th-century cultural figures like Kafka and Picasso.
Other series go for the high-profile matchup. Eminent Lives asks biographers to pick a topic they care passionately about; Edmund Morris, bestselling biographer of Ronald Reagan, eschews presidents for Beethoven. In the American Presidents series, published by Times Books, former Sen. Gary Hart tackles James Monroe. And in the science-focused Great Discoveries series, David Leavitt, a novelist best known for writing about contemporary gay life, chronicles Alan Turing--a British mathematician as famous for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence as for the prejudice he endured as an openly gay male.
This story appears in the December 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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