Why Read Biography?
What a Founding Father and his forgotten sister reveal about why lives of the past should still matter to us today.
I recently wrapped up my commonplace notes on one of my surprise favorite books of the year thus far: Book of Ages, by Jill Lepore. It is a heartbreaking look at the other side of the American Revolutionary age, the other lives that lived through that era of history, told through the eyes of Jane Franklin.
We know very little about Jane. What we do know is a tale of a life filled with sorrow and the inequities of the times. In every respect Jane seems just as brilliant as her world-famous older brother, the printer-scientist-sage Benjamin Franklin. But she is never given the chance to nurture those tender flames. She never got a formal education, and what she did receive stopped at age 11. She is taught to read, but never to spell; to sew and make candles, but not math or accounting. So she does what most all women of the time did. She marries young, has 12 children, most of whom die young.
Yet she never loses the innate curiosity that she shared with her brother and that so strongly propelled him. They maintain a correspondence all their lives (both lived past 80!). She asked him for book recommendations, they talked politics, the latest going on, family history and current events. He became the teacher she never had.
It’s these letters that allow us to know anything about Jane at all. But most didn’t survive: Ben’s biographers and historians didn’t deem them important enough to keep. Only 68 letters survive to today; many, many more are lost to history. This is self-evidently a loss, one that Lepore deftly rectifies. And in doing so, she raises a provoking question: why read biography?
There are multiple arguments against biography. Saving some for a rainy day, the one addressed here goes something like this. A perfect view of the figures of the past is impossible. There will always be facts, perspectives, motivations of history’s participants that we can never know. The very attempt to tell the story of history through biography then is imprecise, an act more of fiction than fiction itself. “Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance” Lepore quotes, from the English writer William Godwin.
And while there are figures of the past we know more of than others (Ron Chernow has said so much of George Washington’s papers have survived that we likely know more about him than his friends and family did), this presumes by necessity that it is only the men (and they are undoubtedly mostly men) who have lived public lives that have something to teach us; that they had great characters. This time Lepore quotes Charles Brown: “Popular prejudice assists the illusion, and because we are accustomed to behold public characters occupy a situation in life that few can experience, we are induced to believe that their capacities are more enlarged, their passions more refined, and in a word, that nature has bestowed on them faculties denied to obscurer men.” Because they are famous, because they are made known to us, we assume they are nobler than us, that they are more worth of the praise. The end assumes the means.
This is something obviously not true, but for a long time this was all budding historians had to work with. This led to the view of history laid out rather famously by Tolstoy, that there are no “Great Men” of history. That the events of the past are instead an inescapable chain of cause-and-effect dynamics of impersonal forces far larger than any one person. A butterfly flaps its wings, and Napoleon is driven from Moscow.
If there are no great men (or women), if human agency amounts to nothing, if we cannot change our stars, then why read biographies? They are usually long and dense. Hundreds of pages of tiny details about how people dressed, what they ate, when they travelled and where they died. We all have lives of our own to live, jobs to do, laundry to fold. If even these details only tell a shade of the real truth of things, why spend hours, days, months of your life reading this stuff?
The starting point of a defense can be found amongst the pages of another book set in Franklin’s world: his legendary Autobiography. The very fame of which is an interesting tale: Franklin wrote his autobiography later in life, but before his role in the events of American Independance. It was not his work as a Founder, but as a scientist (though not even the kite flying!) that set his fame amongst his contemporaries. So he sat down to tell his story in a presumed letter to his son, and in the act of doing so helped invent the autobiography genre as we know it today.
He started it in his 50s on a summer vacation with friends in the English countryside, but only finished a portion before setting it down. He got busy, and viewed this story as more of an aside. Was it even any good, he wondered? Was it too prideful to write about yourself like this? Was it even useful? He wasn’t sure.
But his friends were. His publisher and longtime correspondent Benjamin Vaughn put it best in a letter to Franklin pushing and prodding him to continue his work on the book. It is worth quoting from at length:
“But these, sir, are small reasons, in my opinion, compared with the chance which your life will give for the forming of future great men; and in conjunction with your Art of Virtue (which you design to publish) [DH: He didn’t] of improving the features of private character, and consequently of aiding all happiness, both public and domestic.
The two works I allude to, sir, will in particular give a noble rule and example of self-education. School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course in life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man’s private power, will be invaluable!
[…] But your biography will not merely teach self-education, but the education of a wise man; and the wisest man will receive lights and improve his progress, by seeing detailed the conduct of another wise man. And why are weaker men to be deprived of such helps, when we see our race has been blundering on in the dark, almost without a guide in this particular, from the farthest trace of time? Show then, sir, how much is to be done, both to sons and fathers; and invite all wise men to become like yourself, and other men to become wise.”
So we’re left with this. Biography will never be a perfect art form. Crucial details will get lost to history, biased and imperfect men and women will hold the pen. [Or as Jane Austen called them, “Partial, Prejudiced, and Ignorant” historians]. But we all have our biases. That does not mean that biography is not worth the attempt, that there are not lessons we can still learn from the study of the flesh and blood lives of the past. People who faced real challenges in the real world, who had to figure out how to get things done at work, how to find love, how to raise their kids, how to comfort a grieving friend.
Again, we likely know more about Washington than any of the people closest to him in his lifetime. Is such a life really not worth studying? To see how you can improve your own, what lessons you can take away for your own problems? And do we not receive a better view of the human condition from such a study than from the mind of a single author, with their own biases and flaws, or from our filtered interactions with those around us?
Assuredly not all biographies are created equal. But neither are all novels, or all fiction, or all Netflix shows. As Virginia Woolf said: “By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.” The good will rise to the top, regardless of the subject. And we shouldn’t let the idea of biography be constrained to the “old rich white man” model. For how do you define “The Great”? Frederick Douglass was great. So was Eleanor Roosevelt. So were the men and women of World War II. No one holds a monopoly on virtue, we can all learn how to lead better lives from studying the lives that have come before us, whether “big” or “small”. We can all strive to learn more about our own lives from the real-world examples of our fellow man.
The OG biographer Plutarch put it well: “When I first took up the writing of these Lives I did it for the sake of others, but now I find that I have grown fond of the task and continue it for my own sake. The reason is that it allows me to treat history as a mirror, with the help of which I can adorn my own life by imitating the virtues of the men whose actions I have described.”
Read about lives and people that inspire you, whoever they are. Check Goodreads reviews. Find others who also read biography for recommendations and new ideas. Substack is full of them.
It doesn’t matter how you do it, so long as you do it, that it becomes part of your reading diet, your information diet (even your entertainment diet!).
Read Jill Lepore. Read Ron Chernow. Read Benjamin Franklin himself. Read biography.