So, Bifurcation Events is available for purchase! Unfortunately, it’s not on Amazon yet, nor is the ebook available, but you can order printed copies from my publisher. Here’s the link.
I’ve also done my first online interview for this book. You can check out the audio recording here. A video recording should be along eventually. Watch this space.
Still here?
So am I!
Yeah, I know I should let the above momentous announcement just stand on its own, but really that would make for a very short post, and other things have been going on in my head that I’d like to share.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking recently about the writing of biographies–how each biographer has an objective and a perspective that shapes the book, and how readers have their own objectives that may or may not be met by any given biography. I’ve just finished reading a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman and am almost done reading one of Ulysses S. Grant, and both are good books, though I don’t regard either as perfect, nor do I suppose either will be the last word on its subject.
So how else might biographies of these people be written?
Both present the specific challenge of not being new subjects–most people likely to pick up a biography of either Grant or Sherman likely already know quite a bit about them, and indeed in reading reviews on Sherman biographies I do see reviewers making comparisons, complaining that this or that story had been left out, for example. So how to avoid just writing a new version of the same old book?
Also, both men remain culturally relevant, to the extent that their relationships with the American public have gone on growing and changing long after their deaths. Surely a good biography should address this ongoing relationship as well?
So here is one of my proposals. I might write it someday, but probably won’t, so if you get inspired to write, go for it, and I’ll happily read your results.
Biography of U.S. Grant
My idea here is to begin with a short biographical overview, perhaps twenty pages long, and then to do a series of focused pieces that each look at some aspect of Grant’s life and work through a particular lens. This way, while people who aren’t already familiar with his story will get the overview they need to stay oriented, the book would be able to go into a lot of detail in less well-known areas without having to expend time and ink recapitulating the entire story in chronological order.
Introduction
Basically just a how-to-use-this-book orientation.
Biographical Overview
As noted, a twenty-page mini-biography to introduce Grant to people who don’t know much about him and to help other readers get and stay oriented to his timeline.
Relationships
Rather than looking at an historical figure as an individual alone on center-stage, so to speak, one can also center relationships. This has already been done with Grant several times. Lincoln’s General’s Wives, which I still maintain ought to have been titled Lincoln’s General’s Marriages, has a chapter on Ulysses and Julia Grant. Grant and Twain: the Story of a Friendship that Changed America is obviously another example, though that book rather overstates its case. Grant and Sherman: the Friendship that Won the Civil War also somewhat under-delivers, though I enjoyed reading it. Anyway, I’d like to see a group of chapters where each chapter centers a particular relationship or group of relationships
In each, the other person or people would be fully profiled, a mini-biography. Both their perspective on Grant and Grant’s experience of them would be included. Of course, the stories would overlap to a significant extent, but each chapter would have a distinctive focus.
Fathers and Sons
U.S. Grant had interestingly imperfect relationships with both his father and his father-in-law. Had he become permanently estranged from both and then repeated their shortcomings with his own children, that would have been understandable–but that’s not what happened,
Julia Dent Grant
Mrs. Grant was not only the love of her husband’s life but also a major source of information on him, through her memoir. And she was an interesting and impressive person in her own right.
William Tecumseh Sherman
Yes, there’s already been a whole book on this friendship, but it left some important points out–like how did they become friends? What drew them to each other–why did the friendship work for each of them? And how did the later years of their friendship go? There was a falling out, and Sherman was critical of Grant for a long time, but to what extent they patched up their friendship, and to what extent they were actually estranged in the first place (Sherman was capable of being a devoted friend and an implacable adversary at the same time) seems unclear.
John Rawlins
John Rawlins dedicated his life to Grant to an extraordinary degree, becoming a virtual extension of him. Why? How? What does it mean about Grant that at least three people, Rawlins, Sherman, and Mrs. Grant, devoted themselves to him?
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln was, of course, central to the context of the latter third of Grant’s life, but the two also became close friends.
Issues
I’d like the book to also contain a series of essays on issues–both personal and national–relating to Grant’s life.
Horses
Grant was a horse whisperer. Also, he liked horses the way some people of later generations like cars–he liked their speed and their beauty. It’s not possible to tell his story without them.
Friendship
The earlier section included several individual friendships, but this would more cover his social life in general–how was he with people?
Alcoholism
Not only was Grant probably an alcoholic, but accusations and denials concerning his drinking loomed large in his career, to the extent that it’s difficult to say how much he really drank.
Warfare
Yes, I would confine the stories of his soldierhood to a single chapter. Not that it’s not important, but it’s so well-covered elsewhere.
Civil Rights
Grant’s work for the welfare of Black people, Jews, Native Americans, and women, is startling, important, and complicated by contradictions. He committed the single most egregiously anti-Semetic act on American soil, later trying quite genuinely to make amends. He briefly owned a slave himself and allowed his wife to own one or more as long as doing so remained legal. And he honestly thought that the best thing for Native Americans would be for them to lose their culture and become just more American colored people. And over course his efforts to protect both Native American and Black lives ultimately failed, overwhelmed by a vicious tide.
Building America
Grant either started, tried to start, or at least proposed a long list of important things, from the Panama Canal to a form of international diplomacy that prefigured the U.N. He doesn’t get credit for this stuff.
Legacy
The concluding chapter would discuss not only what Grant’s legacy is but how perceptions of it have changed over time and why.
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