How To Do Biography: A Primer

by Nigel Hamilton

Overview

Following his recent Biography: A Brief History (from Harvard), award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton tackles the practicalities of doing biography in the first succinct primer to elucidate the tools of the biographer's craft.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674038219
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	353 KB

About the Author

Nigel Hamilton is the author of prize-winning biographies of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and of John F. Kennedy. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction I. Getting Started 1. The Task of Biography 2. What Is Your Agenda? 3. Defining Your Audience 4. Researching Your Subject 5. The Shape of a Life II. Composing a Life-Story 6. The Starting Point 7. Birthing Your Subject 8. Childhood and Youth 9. Love Stories 10. Life's Work 11. The Twilight Years 12. Ending Your Story III. Variations on a Theme 13. Autobiography and Memoirs 14. Memoir 15. Truth--and Its Consequences 16. The Afterlife Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

This marvelous work-basically, a how-to book-is comprehensive in its treatment of everything necessary to creating a published biography. Hamilton, who has authored biographies of Field Marshall Montgomery, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, here leaves nothing unsaid on the subject. He thoroughly details biography's agenda and motivation and describes its target audience, who will expect something of a revelation concerning the human condition. Of paramount importance, Hamilton insists, is research-the verifiable truth-and a narrative that reveals the individual behind the image. Also vital to the biography's success is sequencing: of the subject's love life (not to be confused with his or her sexual life) and, if relative, of the subject's birth, youth, middle and twilight years, and death. He additionally scrutinizes autobiography and memoir writing, the consequence of telling the truth, and biography's afterlife. The exceptional excerpts Hamilton selects from published biographies to illustrate his points are both edifying and entertaining. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
—Robert Kelly

Library Journal

[How To Do Biography] offers a well-written, sensible, and, given its brevity, fairly encompassing assessment of what it is that a biographer does and how he goes about doing it...Hamilton is quite eloquent and persuasive in discussing how things come around at the end, not only at death, but after, when the life meets posterity.

Boston Globe - Sven Birkerts

No one writing biography can afford to ignore this edifying book. Nigel Hamilton has the depth and breadth of experience to write about a genre that he champions...While this is a “how-to” book, even the most seasoned biographer will find much of value about choosing a subject; doing proposals for biographies; handling interviewing; negotiating the perils of publishing unauthorized biographies; managing biographical narratives; writing with an audience in mind; and the nexus between memoir, autobiography, and biography.

thebiographerscraft.com - Carl Rollyson

The book is full of good advice and interesting stories.

The Age - Owen Richardson

The book is full of good advice and interesting stories.
— Owen Richardson

The Age

[How To Do Biography] offers a well-written, sensible, and, given its brevity, fairly encompassing assessment of what it is that a biographer does and how he goes about doing it...Hamilton is quite eloquent and persuasive in discussing how things come around at the end, not only at death, but after, when the life meets posterity.
— Sven Birkerts

Boston Globe

No one writing biography can afford to ignore this edifying book. Nigel Hamilton has the depth and breadth of experience to write about a genre that he champions...While this is a “how-to” book, even the most seasoned biographer will find much of value about choosing a subject; doing proposals for biographies; handling interviewing; negotiating the perils of publishing unauthorized biographies; managing biographical narratives; writing with an audience in mind; and the nexus between memoir, autobiography, and biography.

— Carl Rollyson

thebiographerscraft.com