Biographers, start your engines

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist  |  June 17, 2008

I couldn't help noting that award-winning University of Massachusetts biographer Nigel Hamilton has just written not one but two books about biography, the latest being "How to Do Biography: A Primer." So I shot Hamilton an e-mail: What biographies are out there, asking to be written?

Hamilton pointed out that publishers generally opt for safe choices, favoring the X-thousandth take on Lincoln's fondness for pets over a riskier, more original work. "I do wish, as the American empire winds down, we'd show a little more interest in the biographies of foreign figures," Hamilton added. "Among foreign individuals we've had Napoleon, Nehru, and Mao; but what of Mehmet Ali, Annie Besant, Subhas Bose, Reza Shah, Abel Gance, and Massimo Troisi? The field is ripe with fascinating lives to explore . . . if only we are willing to look beyond our borders."

As Alex Trebek would say, that wasn't the answer I was looking for, but I will accept it. I was hoping that Hamilton would name someone a little closer to home. Jean Strouse plucked Alice James off the bough of history; no one knew she was there. I think the right biographer might do the same for Maud McVeigh Hutchins, the mildly neurasthenic American mid-century novelist.

Next I rang up Justin Kaplan, author of acclaimed biographies of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Who needs to be done? Kurt Vonnegut, he answered. "That's the biography I'm looking for."

That one is already in the works. Charles Shields, the author of "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," started working with Vonnegut about a year before the author's death. Kurt's son Mark, a pediatrician and a writer, didn't sound over the moon about the whole prospect. "I think Justin Kaplan is probably a better biographer," he said. "If I had a point to make it would be: Read the writer and let the biographies come as they may."

Speaking of recently deceased, big-footprint American writers, what gives on the Norman Mailer front? By coincidence, a vast trove of Mailer-iana - 1,000 boxes of materials, including 50,000 documents - became publicly available at the Harry Ransom Center archive in Austin, Texas, less than two months after the writer's death last fall. Catnip for writers, I say. A larger than life, rakish, deceased (i.e., libel-proof) titan of letters, with documents galore. University of Texas archivist Steve Mielke told me the Mailer boxes have not lacked for visitors.

Mailer's official biographer, Michael Lennon, correctly points out that freebooting scribes heading for Texas to score book contracts "are not going to get access to the copyright permission that I am going to get." That means they may have trouble quoting from letters and manuscripts. But I say the woods are teeming with ex-Mailer associates and galpals eager to dish on the self-aggrandizing "hero" of the '67 march on the Pentagon.

Mailer's longtime collaborator, and freebooter extraordinaire, Lawrence Schiller agreed with me. "Norman would welcome all kinds of biographies," he says. "The amount of unrestricted material out there is unbelievable."

Here are the ongoing Mailer projects I know about: His widow, Norris Church Mailer, is working on a memoir; Lennon is doing his scholarly biography; Ransom-bound writer Lee Siegel is working on a book about Mailer's tumultuous 1969 run for mayor of New York; and Simon & Schuster plans to re-publish Peter Manso's 1985 biography, "Mailer, His Life and Times," with a new afterword, this fall.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your tape recorders! There is a world of opportunity out there.

Aimez-vous history?

Kennedy family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy was a notorious bootlegger - everyone knows that. Or was he? In the course of researching his cultural history of Prohibition, writer Daniel Okrent walked the bootlegging stories back to their source. The facts are more interesting than the myth, and you should buy his book when it comes out next year to read the complete story.

Okrent concluded that JPK did legally sell booze, but was not a bootlegger. He compared notes with David Nasaw, who has been granted access to the Joe papers to write an authorized biography. "I am still searching for any credible evidence that Kennedy was a bootlegger," said Nasaw, who has already spent two years on the project. "I don't think it is there, but I will continue to look."

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.