Biographer T.J. Stiles

As promised, here are a few books that influenced me as I wrote The First Tycoon.

Some of these books included essential information, of course. I'm thinking, for example, of James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, his splendid one-volume history of the Civil War era, or Maury Klein's The Life and Legend of Jay Gould. But I'm not speaking at the moment of sources, but rather literary influences. McPherson combines narrative momentum, contextual discussions, and character sketches in such a marvelous manner that (as one reviewer put it) you read this book rather breathlessly, as if you don't know how it will all come out. Klein's elegant work matches tremendous research and scholarship with crystal-clear explanations of business matters and, again, a brisk narrative pace. He balances Gould's private and business lives wonderfully, creating a real model for a biography of a business figure.

In the realm of nonfiction, Robert Caro, too, sets the standard. I read Master of the Senate when I was writing The First Tycoon, and I was overwhelmed by his ability to create real, believable characters from his research. More than that, he brings to life secondary characters, an overlooked component in many biographies, so that the reader clearly sees the interplay of egos, emotions, and agendas in Lyndon Johnson's life.

I believe in reading fiction as nourishment for my writing. I've written elsewhere of Tolstoy's riches, so visible in his two giant novels. Let me add here that Conrad is a favorite as well. I re-read Nostromo when writing The First Tycoon. It almost seems to be a fictionalization of Vanderbilt's Nicaragua venture, for one thing. For another, it, too, creates a rich, believable world, immersing the reader in seemingly real people, scenes, places, businesses, and cultures. The fast-paced plot and the range of characters (from the stevedore Nostromo to political kingpins to a San Francisco financier) inspired me.

Stay tuned for more.

Over at my general biography-writing blog, I'm starting to post reading recommendations for the biographer—a range of fiction and nonfiction.

In a future post, I'll discuss the books that influenced me in writing The First Tycoon—that is, books that inspired me, rather than simply gave me information. I think it's vital for a writer with artistic aspirations to read broadly, and infuse the insights and virtuosity encountered there into his or her own work. Often in my writing, I cite a novel or essay that is not directly relate to my topic, or even deliberately echo a well-known passage from a work of literature. Hopefully this enriches the writing, and places the book in a broader cultural continent. Or it sounds pretentious—one of the two.

Stay tuned for more.

I recently reviewed H.W. Brands's new history of late nineteenth-cetury America, American Colossus. You can read the review, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, here.

As the review makes clear from the first sentence, I do not think well of this book. I have some strong interpretive disagreements with Brands, which you can read in the essay itself. But I'd like to stress another problem with the book: the way it perpetuates false notions about Vanderbilt, as well as invented quotations.

No, Brands himself did not invent anything about Vanderbilt—this book is absolutely not a hoax or fraudulent. But he didn't do his research, to my mind. He repeats old chestnuts that have been shown to be false. He includes, for example, this notorious letter from Cornelius Vanderbilt, supposedly written in a letter to his former business partners in 1853, after they betrayed him: "Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you."

As I show in my book, this quotation first appeared in 1877, in an obituary of Vanderbilt in the New York Times. It is an invention. It did pick up some wording from a statement made by Vanderbilt in 1867 to a committee of the New York State Legislature, but that testimony pertained to a completely different matter. In fact, Vanderbilt never wrote the famous 1853 letter. To the contrary: When he found out his partners had turned against him in 1853, he wrote a letter to the press, promising that he would sue them.

Now that Brands has repeated this invention in his book, it has taken on new life, a year and a half after my debunking was published. In a review in the Wall Street Journal, for example, the quote is repeated without question. You can read the review here.

This may seem like a small detail. But such details accumulate, building false impressions. You would never know from this quote that Vanderbilt relied heavily on the courts to settle disputes, or that he actually offered to refer most disputes to arbitration. He was indeed ruthless in combat, but he pursued negotiations and legal remedies before resorting to extreme measures.

You can now buy my first biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, as an e-book. Amazon has it for sale here. Barnes & Noble has it for sale here.

Why now? After all, the book is eight years old. Because I urged my publisher to release an electronic edition, and the company agreed. I mention this because some may have formed the impression that I am some kind of Luddite, thanks to my posts about e-book pricing. No, I am not opposed to e-books. If anything, the rapid rise of e-books shows that interest in books remains alive and well, despite our click-click short-attention-span digital culture. That's good. I like people reading, no matter what format.

Do I still have qualms about digital pricing? Oh, yes. I can't stand blather on Amazon customer reviews about how "it stands to reason" that packaging, warehousing, and shipping comprise the bulk of a book's cost. That's simply uninformed nonsense. If that's so, why does Microsoft charge $150 for its Office product, when its cost of packaging, etc., is radically less than that of a heavy $35 hardcover? More important, why do you pay $150? Why pay $55 or more for a video game? Both software and books are intellectual property—what gives them value is not the delivery system, but the fact that they embody creations of the human mind. You don't imagine that you're mainly buying CDs when you buy software, nor should you imagine that you're mainly buying paper when you buy books. I've never heard of anyone who was enjoying a good book looking up and saying, "Gosh, honey, this book is printed on such nice paper! You should see this—the ink is fantastic!" No, you quote the passages that you like.

The value is in the content. And the content is the same no matter what the format, e-book or physical book.

Of course, I recognize that, under current conditions, digitization will tend to depress the price of books. Currently, the main force is downward. Yes, there are some savings with digital books, though nowhere near as much as people think. But most of the downward pressure is exerted by competition among retail outlets, particularly Amazon, which is willing to absorb losses in return for market share. Be warned: This downward pressure is building up resistance, which will spring back upward before too long. For one thing, Amazon cannot continue to absorb losses forever. But even if it succeeds in setting all e-book prices at $9.99, the spring back up will inevitably occur. That, or certain books will disappear from the marketplace.

A research-intensive book of the kind I write requires an upfront investment from the publisher in the form of an advance. Then comes a major investment of time and money on the part of the author, followed by lots of product improvement by the publisher—editing, copy-editing, design, etc.—as well as marketing. Unless a radically larger number of units sell at Amazon's magical $9.99 price point than have been selling in physical form, that $9.99 price will lead to a loss for the publisher, and ultimately the author. Already there is intense downward pressure on advances, and it will only grow worse as revenue from books falls. The inevitable result will be that serious, research-intensive nonfiction will be abandoned to academics (who are not rewarded professionally for writing well), or else book prices will go up. It's the fierce law of the market.

I couldn't have written The First Tycoon in my spare time. Nor could I have undertaken it if the list price on all copies sold was $9.99. It wouldn't have been possible. Self-publishing? I'm sorry, but that doesn't fly with my kind of work. For multi-year, research-intensive books, the self-publishing business plan goes like this: "First, be rich. Then, live off your wealth while you write."

But my point is this: Books are not interchangeable. The effort and process of writing them, let alone the experience of reading them, is radically different from book to book. None of that has anything to do with whether the book appears on paper or in digital form. There is no earthly reason why a one-size-fits-all price should apply to e-books. Yes, I want books to be cheaper, too, but readers should accept varied prices, and not be fooled into thinking $9.99 is a natural price for all e-books.

On Sunday, October 30, 2010, the San Francisco Chronicle will publish a review I wrote of H.W. Brands's history of the United States in the late nineteenth century. You can find it here. This follows a review I wrote of Ron Chernow's big new bio of George Washington, published the week before by the Washington Post. You can read it here.

On reading the comments posted on the Post's website, I'm struck by how the readers' reactions reflect our modern politics, rather than the eighteenth century. I'm betting that many readers will react similarly to my review of Brands's book. There's an irony to this: My most important point, in both reviews, is to say that we must understand historical figures in the context of their times, not ours.

And yet, when political passions run high, as they do now, it is inevitable that many readers will not follow this advice. Politics tends to dirty up the historical waters—not because politics itself is bad or dirty, but because it is so filled with emotion, with passion. It's difficult to step outside of the urgency of now to coolly understand the very different world of yesterday. I guess that's why I get paid the, er, small bucks.

But my job, as a biographer, is to try to bring readers along with me when I try to move inside the contemporary mindset of the past. Not everyone will be willing to follow; many will insist on seeing the past in terms of the arguments of the present. But we can't really understand the present unless we see how it emerged from the past. Things do change, and we'll never really see where we are unless we know where we came from to get here.