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Review Essays
The Large Book versus the Small
A Presidential Historian's Consideration of Three Recent Biographies
Robert H. Ferrell
| Ours seems to be the time of the large book, those huge bestsellers that cover the tables in bookstores across the country. The biographical volumes among these books might be described as "lives and times." They are written in such an exquisite amount of detail that they present a challenge to readers, both scholarly and non. Older scholars like myself find the books of younger historians piling up around us, and we wonder where we might find time to read such a flood. Confronting an eight-hundred-page biography, and calculating twenty to twenty-five pages per hour for reading, each of these onrushing books would require thirty or forty hours of time. Unless, that is, we skimmed; whereupon we could respond positively to the queries of younger colleagues as to whether we had read the latest scholarship. We had—that is, we had scampered through several hundred pages in an hour, or maybe two or three. |
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The trend toward the dominance of the large book in historical biography is, in my judgment, radically wrong. But it does have a history, and understanding something of the context of today's over-long historical blockbusters may help to make more sense of the books under consideration in this review essay. The first generation of scholars to produce these large books did so under the influence of the late Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard professor and dean of post-World-War-II American historians. Not long after the war, in which Morison served as a naval officer, he produced (albeit with many assiduous assistants) a huge, fifteen-volume account of the Navy from the beginning of the war until the end.1 During the same period Morison also wrote one of his most trenchant essays, "History as a Literary Art," in which he decried the "dull, solid, valuable monographs" published pre-1945.2 Published and republished, for a time distributed free of charge at historical conferences, the essay had an almost immediate effect. Young scholars, among them Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, and Arthur S. Link, went to work on multivolume biographies.3 Although their admiring peers seemed not to notice, these writers were too ambitious; none of the three finished the series that he had set out to write. Nevertheless, their work set a pattern for scholarly historical writing in subsequent decades. Morison's admonitions for color and dash in historical writing were to the good, but he left a more dubious legacy in the flood of large books and multivolume chronicles that followed. |
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Why does the flood of bestsellers (as publishers are quick to denominate them) persist today? The first fault lies with scholarly authors and the tools of their profession. Word processors have virtually taken over the composition process. With the ability to produce beautiful copy, and to transpose sentences or paragraphs without a telltale mark, computer software can fool a writer into thinking that what looks right is right. Today's authors also have a much greater temptation to overwrite and then to bypass the time-consuming process of cutting and editing one's prose. Where one handwritten page might have done, five quickly typed pages will now do better; first drafts come to be regarded as fifth drafts.4 |
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The nature of historical narrative also seems to confound many of today's authors. Anyone who attempts to write a biography knows that many points in the story require background description. Such pages can pile up in a hurry; all too often, they may duplicate information already in other books, be grossly repetitive, and add little or nothing to the store of historical knowledge. |
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