Between the four of us we have written at least 17 biographies. It might be more than that. I was losing count because Randy Roberts has written so many. Youve written more than half of our total number i think. So we have a lot of experience in the genre. We have obviously been drawn to it and have an affinity for it some way or another. Before we begin, let me introduce the panelists, and as i introduce each of you, if you could just stand a minute or two, telling the audience what was it that you used for your biography. What is it you love about the genre. First we have larry, from New York University of arts and a musical writing program. He is particularly interested in the history of broadway and comedy. He has written a play with Richard Rogers in addition to several other books. His most recent biographical word is the documentary film semi davis junior, i gotta be me. Larry, tell us what has drawn you to this. I may be a little different from the rest of the panel my venue is really entertainment. Obviously, in entertainment you are dealing with the public persona and performers. What they saying, dance, acted. And of course what happens offstage or behind the curtain is equally fascinating to try to make some sense out of what a performer did publicly with what were his or her motivations. What was the context that of their time. What trends and tastes changed and, my case particularly american entertainment in favor or out of favor. I have always been interested and that dialectic between offstage and onstage and hopefully when we talk a little more about semi davis junior that may it be a little more persuasive. Thank you. John weaker, professor of the History Department at the university of missouri columbia. He is interested in religious history, particularly method had some. He was also on my committee when i took my comprehensive exams and wrote my dissertations. Im glad that im asking you the questions this time. He has written biographies on minister Francis Alice barry and most recently p. T. El, the rise and fall of jim and tammy fay bakers evangelical empire. Can you tell us a little bit about this . Thank you for organizing this and bringing it all together. You saw my paper, right . Bad joke. Thank you i dont really think of myself as a biographer. I have never really thought of it that way. In my mind, i dont research or really write any differently than when i am doing a biography versus anything else, historical or nonfiction. I think the advantage that biography has is that it lends itself to a good story well told. You can reach a broad audience with an engaging story that has a lot of human drama in it. That is not a bad thing and i think that is what of sort of drew me to writing what turns out to be biography. Emily said i wrote a book a few years ago on frances asbury, a guy who i think is endlessly fascinating and important. It was a big, dense book. Nobody read it. I sat back after doing that, and i thought, this is a lot of work. If im going to do this im going to write about topics that i care about and i think are important and will draw an audience. That is when i did jim and tammy baker book. Sure enough okay, sorry. I make sure your mic is on. Do i need to start over and do this all over again . Thank you. Thank you. Randi roberts is a professor in the History Department at purdue university. He is particularly interested in African American and sports history. Randi has written biographies of mike tyson, john wayne, charles lindbergh, john lewis, jack dempsey, jack johnson, Ronald Reagan, joni mitt and a team biography of the pittsburgh sealers. His most recent biographical works our blood brothers, the fatal friendship of malcolm x and mohammed halle. A season and the sun, the rise of making mental. Really, can you tell us a little bit about your interests and all this . This fits perfectly for me to kind of political history and biography Popular Culture. I have always seen myself as working at the intersection between political history and culture and Popular Culture. I write about performers like you. Actors, athletes, but ive never really been interested in writing a book about an athlete who is just an athlete or an actor who is just an actor. Somehow, they have to engage in a wider political culture, somebody like, for example, john wayne or muhammad ali, who clearly became iconic and you can tell a persons politics by talking to somebody and talk to them about john wayne. Their attitudes on john wayne will tell me a great deal about their politics or attitudes on mohammed ali. It will do the same thing. I brought a quote in here. How can i tie these things together . How can i tie politics in this political conference. With biography. Popular culture. I did find in a box in quote that i wanted to read to you and it was the sage of orange new jersey. I dont know if ever anybody ever heard of this. He was a rowley pulley boxer. Before he fought jewel lewis, he fought a guy named abe feldman down in miami on George Washingtons birthday. So he is trying to build up a fight a little bit and he also wants to Say Something about american history. Say something about american politics. Engage with the crucial questions of his day. This is the quote. Supposedly this quote is true, i but it came from a journalist, so we will see. He is trying to Say Something about George Washington and build up the fight at the same time. He said, it is time, it is high time that the south came to know and love washington as we know and love him more than the equator. Why cant we forget the civil war and its petty grudges. Why freed the slaves, but remember he also invented the lightning rod . Let the north and south class the hand of friendship on old hickorys birthday and try to get there early. Anybody who can conflate link in, Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin is truly the sage of orange new jersey. I have more on biography, but maybe we can get to it as we go along. I am emily raymond. I am a professor in the History Department and virginia commonwealth university. My area of focus up until now i am shifting a little bit, but it has been hollywood and pilot six. Ive written biographies on Charlton Heston, most recently about black celebrities in the Civil Rights Movements, called sars for freedom. I did not think of myself as going into the biography genre either. I really wanted to write about Charlton Heston because this is my dissertation topic. It was when he was the president of the national association. I also knew he had been involved in democratic administrations and in the Civil Rights Movements before he came to the gun cause and supporting republican candidates. I was really fascinated about his evolution and what that said about american political culture. I started with that. Then my next book, i had no intention of it being a biography. It was going to just generally be about celebrities in the Civil Rights Movement. But the more i looked at it, the more became very clear that there were about six who were really leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement and they deserve to be recognized as the earliest, most consistent, most effective celebrity supporters. I decided to turn it into a group biography with this leading six at the forefront. Now my next book is going to be a dual biography. Ive come to really love the genre, because it is such a great way to look at these fascinating people in american political culture, and the dynamic tape that they bring to making change in particular. That is my spiel on biography, i suppose. I guess one thing, to point out, is that i feel biography has a lot more variety then most people think. A lot of people think biography is just a book about one person. But randys book, blood brothers, is about malcolm x and mohammed aly. Their relationship. John winners, the book on ttyl is about jim and tammy fay, and then of course stars for freedom is a group biography. It does not just have to be about one person. What i wanted to ask you all is what other ways can there be more variety to biography then might first meet the eye . Can i pitch in . Two quick things. I am also documentarian. Half of my work has been nonfiction publications and half my work has been film so obviously on film, if you are doing say, semi chavez junior, you have a whole different canvas to work on. You can kind of obviously use performances in juxtaposition to other performances as a way of creating some kind of tension. When you do that the other thing is i worked on another companion book to a six hour documentary series i did for pbs called make them laugh, the funny business of america. Essentially, it was American Comedy from chaplain to, who did we end with . Sarah i think was the most recent person we used. The director and i realize that if youre going to do a film, i did a companion book and wrote the documentary episodes. But if youre going to go, okay, here is American Comedy. Lets start in 19 whatever. 1906. Pictures of charlie chaplain. Oh may west. Your first hour would be entirely silent and black and white. People would stop watching. That really forced us to rethink about how we want to what kind of taxonomy we wanted to create intense terms of gaining or ganging biographical figures together. We realize in america there were six great comedic archetypes. There were situation comedies. There were geeks and nerds. There were wiseguys, political satire, physical comedians. Each generation seemed to churn out their own version of that in a way that really reflected the democrat fix of america, the changing demographics of america. When we were able to do that was like an episode of wiseguys, i forget what it is. The wiseguys episode. Not the marx brothers. Then red fox who took on that tradition, eddie murphy took on that tradition. Freddy prince, so on and so forth. There was a way maybe of rethinking certain categories in group biography that would give it a little more spark. Rather than simply doing things chronologically. But within a completely Different Group work. That was really exciting to work on for us. It is a very interesting way to bring variety to the genre. Any other thoughts from you as well . What was the question again . Having more variety to biographies. People tend to think of it to be like one person and you chronologically go through their life and thats it. And that is the formula. What other formulas that maybe you tried and have worked that you liked . I think a dual biography is this interesting approach. It is what i use with muhammad ali and malcolm x in the book that i wrote with johnny smith on blood blood blood brothers. Youre write books, a number of books ive done have been not a full biography, but looking at a person at a particular time. A crucial time in their life. Ive done the full biography and if you do somebody like john wayne, a persons life is not interesting all the time. It is a fact. It is not crucial at one time. Take one segment of it, what you feel might be the most crucial period in your life and dig deeper. Tell a wider story than you could if you did the full beginning to end biography, is a way to approach it. That is what you do with nikki mantles in that biography as well. It is the rise of nick ricky mantle. It ends and 56. 56 was his great year. Mickey mantle before in 1956, he was kind of a failure. If he could have been a failure. A failure in terms of expectations. He came up to the yankees and in spring training he was hitting the ball over the moon when they were playing in the daytime, if you could hit the ball during the day. Everybody said youll be fair and all the players on the team said hes going to be the next demand you. Hes going to be the next babe ruth. Hes going to be the next lou gary. Everyone expected him to perform immediately like garrick, dimaggio, bruce. They were great, but mickey would show signs of brilliance, greatness, but he would get injured, he would not hit in the clutch. By 55 they were bullying him, he was solitary, mad, uncommunicative. Then he has a breakout season where he wins the triple crown and becomes the Mickey Mantle of legend. And that is where you end the book. To the extent, i think what ive done with biographies is more group biography. And that fully interesting people out when they are interesting. There are times when jim and tammy are the most interesting people in the room but other times when they are not. The one advantage of biography is that it allows you to weave a hey narrative to weave a narrative thats interesting. But its not just to tell the story of someones life, its to make larger points. To draw out a story that transcends them, even if they are at the center of it for a large part of the time. One of the most common critiques i have heard about biographies is that its one person from that standpoint it might feel like it does not have the same intellectual heft as opposed to voting patterns of a certain time. How do you respond to that critique . That is just one person . Its tough to make that a generic statement, because people become interesting in different times forward. We look back on people certainly in the theater when we did the broadway documentary, there were people who were fascinating in their time and lost to history, like ethel waters, a great africanamerican performer, the most highly paid entertainer in new york city, and mae west who was arrested and sent to rikers for violating decency acts, and they faded away. Then the world changes in their stories are interesting again. I think a great biography has velcro. You can move forward and it will pick up a life in a way, and when we worked on the Sammy Davis Jr documentary, it was shocking to me, as somebody who knew him, he was a venn diagram. He was a man who knew on one level because ethel waters and bill waterson. Archie bunker, and eddie cantor. Michael jackson as well. These intersection of lives was tremendous. His life was revelatory of when he lived. Thats what we always look for. Sammy davis jr was one of the most challenging subjects i ever came across. In terms of intellectual challenge. He was contradictory, and someone i really had to wrestle with to try to figure out how to characterize. The way you do it in the film, by giving him these different categories, activist, entertainer. Singer, impressionist, hipster. We tried to categorize the chronology of his life in the guises that he took on, or felt that he had to take on, for us to haunt him in his life. I think entertainment is a little bit like sports. You are still if you are an entertainer you are choosing with songs your singing, please you will act in. Those have tremendous external circumstances. You either hit the ball out of the ballpark where you dont. You are again looking at these things going on simultaneously but in terms of a performer, you are always looking at the choices they make. What are they choosing to portray. What are they choosing to be about. That is such a vacuum of the times in which they lived. Looking back on it, we have footage of semi davis when he was five years old tapped and sing. Then we have footage of him three months before he died, tap dancing. Within that bracket you can accomplish a lot, if you are clever about how you put those things together. John, i would say for jim and tammy fay baker, the book, it is not just about jim and tammy fay, right . No. It is not. It is really about the entire organization event. And to the weightiness of biography, if your sources are good, i dont see where its suffers in comparison to any other kind of non fiction writing. If your sources are good, and you can tell a rich story. You are political history is oftentimes, is the history of the aggregate. History is aggregate. Biography is history of individuals. There is an excitement to biography. There is a joy to it. If i could tell one story of a biographer i like. Hes a guy by the name of Richard Holmes. Has anybody ever heard of Richard Holmes in here . Richard holmes is an english biographer of the romantic period. He did a big thick book on shelley, a two volume biography on cool rich. In 1964 when he was about 19 years old, he read a book. Traveled with a donkey go up by robert lewiss davidson. Robert Lewis Stevenson before he became famous with kidnapped and doctor jekyll, Treasure Island and all these books. He read this book and robert Lewis Stevenson goes through this trip with a donkey, which is kind of an appellation region of france. He was intrigued by the book. He was intrigued by the biography of robert Lewis Stevenson at the time. Robert Lewis Stevenson was moving towards his mid to late twenties. He had not written anything great. He had scottish strict calvinist parents. When are you going to get a job . We are going to do something with your life . And maybe Richard Holmes felt the same way. What is he going to do . He wants to be a poet. Is there life and poetry . All of the anxious that a 19 year old would have. Robert Lewis Stevenson was going through a love problem, relationship problem. Maybe holmes was, i dont know. He decided to reproduce the strip. Sand donkey. No donkey. It was a very stylish hat. So he starts off, he is sleeping under the stars and what have you. He crosses over a bridge into langone a. A small little village. It is around dusk. The shops are closing up. He can smell garlic, crushed fruits from the stalls. Children are coming out and playing. People are taking walks and he has this overwhelming urge, overwhelming premonition he is going to meet robert Lewis Stevenson. He is serious. This was the 1960s, what else brought that on, i dont know. But he has this pre