Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography

by William Zinsser

“There are two reasons why a man does anything. There’s a good reason and there’s the real reason.”

Harry Truman, the whole way along. He’s the only President I know of who was in better health when he came out of the White House than when he went in.

Lee writes: “You must be frank with the world. Frankness is the child of honesty and courage.” (Very interesting idea.) “Just say what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right. If a friend asks you a favor, you should grant it, if it is reasonable. If not, tell him plainly why you cannot. You will wrong him and wrong yourself by equivocation of any kind. Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one.” And this is the great line: “Above all, do not appear to others what you are not.”

Goethe: “Nothing in nature is isolated. Nothing is without reference to something else. Nothing achieves meaning apart from that which neighbors it.”

Three years ago, during a two-day Emily Dickinson festival in Amherst, at which some of these views were aired, the poet Susan Snively introduced the final session with a word admitting her own confusion. She said, “I feel like the master of ceremonies on the TV show What’s My Line?” when he comes to the pay-off question, ‘Will the real Emily Dickinson please stand up?’“

The program she is thinking of is not What's My Line; it is To Tell the Truth.

Louisa Adams even wrote bitter plays while she endured her White House captivity. There was one, for instance, called Suspicion, or Persecuted Innocence, which contained these lines: “Men ever dread the weakness of our softer sex, but ‘tis in the hour of peril that woman displays the energy of her nature and proves herself the noble helpmate of creation’s lord.” The word helpmate intrigued Louisa, who, when she was still in the White House, wrote: “Man’s interpretation of the word ‘helpmate’ as used in the Bible means this: Women made to cook his dinner, wash his clothes, gratify his sensual appetites, and thank him and love him for permission to drudge through life at the mercy of his caprices. Is this the interpretation intended by the Creator, the father of all mercy?” A deeply religious person herself, she often thought about the prevailing notion that heaped guilt and inferiority only on women because of Eve and the apple. As Louisa wrote, “The curse of pain in childbirth and the cares attendant in the rearing of wayward children, this was the punishment annexed to her fault.” Because of this atonement, Louisa believed that women didn’t deserve “the undermining scorn of her companion who deliberately partook of her sin while he is said to have possessed the Master Mind.”

contemplating the development of ideology is good training for a biographer.

reality is not about facts, but about the relationship of facts to one another.

the duty of government is to help people who are “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.”