26 Questions in 2026 (#11)

To kick off the new year the Classics Club posted a list of 26 questions designed to help members consider their relationship with reading classics. I plan to answer one question every few weeks throughout 2026. 

#11 -Favorite biography about a classic author you’ve read, or the biography on a classic author you most want to read, if any?

I love a good biography, and picking a favorite, even when I limit it to just considering biographies of "classic authors" is impossible. Here are 5 literary biographies that I enjoyed:

1. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
2. Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life by John H. Timmerman
3. The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene
4. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? by Marian Meade
5. Virginia Woolf: A Writers' Life by Lyndall Gordon

On my TBR list are biographies of Barabara Pym, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Dick Francis, Anais Nin, Josephine Tey, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dashiell Hammett, Margaret Wise Brown, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather. 

The Unquiet Englishman

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene 

by Richard Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The author of this excellent biography is a Canadian poet and scholar who teaches at the University of Toronto. 

Graham Greene is best known as a novelist, and this book discusses his various books and stories in detail. More interestingly, however, Greene was a journalist and associated with Britain's MI6. This took him to troubled places around the globe including Africa, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and South America. The part of this biography that I found most fascinating was the way the author wove background information on 20th century history into Greene's many travels and political involvements. 

This biography was also written in a very engaging style. The chapters are short and each is quite focused on a particular episode or issue which made this 500+ page book very quick reading. 
I am counting this book toward the Canadian Reading Challenge.

Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form

Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form 

by Ira B. Nadel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This volume is essentially a collection of six essays on various aspects of biography as a literary form. I found it thought-provoking and in sections very interesting. The tone of the writing is very academic which made it rather slow going. One of the essays looks at the various approaches biographers have taken in writing lives of George Eliot which was a good way to really see the choices that are being made by the authors of biography.

"Nonetheless, when a biographer recognizes that the life he writes is in itself and aesthetic construct involving fictions, imagery, style and narration, parallel to the inner life of his subject, itself a fiction, the result may be a biography that is at the same time literary and truthful. It will also reflect the ambiguous, self-contradictory, illogical individual that is its subject." (p. 118)

When he wrote this book Ira B. Nadel was a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.  He is the author of multiple biographies in addition to this study of the form. I am counting this book toward the Canadian Reading Challenge.

99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret 

by Craig Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I first picked up this book (at a library book sale I think) I thought it was a novel, and in some ways (having now read it) I think I was correct. Technically it is a biography of HRH the Princess Margaret (1930-2002), sister to Queen Elizabeth II. It was published in Britain under the title Ma'am Darling.

Rachel Cook, writing in The Guardian, said:

Brown has done something amazing with Ma’am Darling: in my wilder moments, I wonder if he hasn’t reinvented the biographical form. Subtitled 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, it is described by his publisher (which, infuriatingly, hasn’t given him an index) as “kaleidoscopic”. But this doesn’t do it justice. It is a cubist book, a collection of acute angles through which you see its subject and her world (and, to an extent, our world) anew.

I really liked the form of this book -- each chapter (or glimpse) is a self-contained view. Some are diary entries from various people who met PM, others are press clippings, lists of related things, narrative descriptions of events in her life (like you would expect to find in a biography). Some of the glimpses are fictional "what-ifs" presented as if they had happened: a marriage to Pablo Picasso, and PM becoming Queen of England. This multiplicity of viewpoints comes together into a fascinating portrait of a life lived in a very strange fishbowl.

The New York Times Review of this book concludes with what I think is an accurate depiction of what this book does:

"Without ever explicitly positioning Margaret for our pity, Brown reveals how we elevate in order to destroy. Who or what, in the final reckoning, is the true grotesque — the absurd, unhappy princess, those desperate to get close to her, or the system propping them all up?"

This was one of my 20 Books of Summer and I it counts toward the Nonfiction Reader Challenge in the category of "social history." I already have a book for that category however, so this one becomes one of my "wildcard" titles.

Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin 

by Benjamin Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected this book to be boring, but it wasn't. Even though it was written more than 200 years ago it didn't seem old. Franklin is funny and self-depricating and his stories of his life, and what he learned as he went along were a delight. 

“But on the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by imitating the engraved copies, their hand is mended by the endevour, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible”

My Dad recommended this book to me when I was in High School making it my oldest TBR title. I am counting it toward the Back to the Classics challenge in that category. This book is also on my TBR Pile Challenge list. It is also one of my 20 Books of Summer.

Blowing the Bloody Doors Off

Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life 

by Michael Caine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This memoir by British actor Michael Caine was part reminiscence and part self-help book. He described what happened in his career and shared stories about the rich and famous (all quite kind -- whenever he criticized someone he didn't name them) and mixed into the stories were the lessons he learned and advice he had to offer on how to get ahead in the world, even if you aren't an actor. Find someone amazing to be your spouse was key to his success. I enjoyed the book; Caine's writing style is very chatty and appealing. I was not familiar with many of the movies he made, but am interested now to see more. I watched Without a Clue which was quite funny and have The Quiet American on hand to watch soon. 

This title counts toward the Nonfiction Reader Challenge in the 'celebrity' category.

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen 

by Rumer Godden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this biography for #RumerGoddenReadingWeek2021 

I knew nothing about Andersen's life before reading this book so I have no idea how accurate a depiction it is. I decided to read it because the library I work at owns it. It was a very charmingly written book and read more like a fairy tale than a biography. As she did in Black Narcissis, Godden included details of the settings in her tale:

"The clouds often floated below the house; there was stillness and rest in the dark pine trees standing round it, in the big forests that led away; there was beauty in the bright green grass and the juicy violet-colored crocus; there was peace in which to write his poem, the poem that haunted him and that he had begun in Paris." (p. 130)

There are numerous sections of Andersen's work quoted throughout to illustrate various points which was helpful as I was not that familiar with his writings. There are a lot of places where we are told very specifically what Andersen was thinking about a person or an experience. I presume there must have been letters and diaries, but this isn't stated in the book and some of them are from periods of Andersen's life before he went to school which seems odd. Godden maintains a distinct authorial voice throughout the book, she is clearly telling us about this man rather than immersing her readers in the episodes to see things for themselves. This is helpful to the reader as the significance of events to Andersen's later development is explicit. 

 

Overall I enjoyed this book and plan to read some more of Andersen's tales. Godden does offer some helpful advice regarding translations and suggests that the ones by R. P. Keigwin are the closest in style to the original Danish and that the style is an important part of what makes these stories special.

Save Me the Plums

Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir
by Ruth Reichl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this memoir which was mostly bright and breezy tales about the fabulousness of working at Gourmet. The ending, when the magazine folds, was sad but felt like a brave front. It was like the version of the you would tell an acquaintance about your life falling apart. This probably wouldn't have bothered me (after all I'm not even an acquaintance of Reichl's) except that her earlier book My Kitchen Year was so much deeper and more affecting. Reichl is a great story-teller though and both books are worth reading.
Linking up with Weekend Cooking. This is one of my #10booksofsummer titles.

Eminent Victorians

Eminent Victorians 
by Lytton Strachey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First published in 1918, Strachey's portraits of four legendary figures of the Victorian era revitalized the art of biography. The impression I got of each of these "eminent" people is of a very human and very flawed individual whose actions (and errors) affected the historical events they were part of. 
The profiled victorians are Cardinal Manning, a Catholic Cardinal and Archbishop of Westminster; Thomas Arnold, an educator and the father of poet Matthew Arnold; and Charles George Gordon, a career British soldier whose debacle at Kartoum at the end of his life  is the focus of the profile.  The fourth subject was Florence Nightingale whose profile I found the most interesting of the group.  Her image as a kind "lady with the lamp" nursing Crimean soldiers was not nearly as intriguing as the management and organization that she undertook to get those soldiers beds and food which the army had neglected to plan for. 
Strachey was part of the Bloomsbury group and, instead of the ponderous celebratory tomes that had been typical of biography, he wrote lives with “a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant.” 
This book is one of my Classics Club titles and also counts toward the 2019 Mount TBR challenge and the Back to the Classics Challenge (20th century classic)

Practicing History

Practicing History 
by Barbara W. Tuchman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a bit of a hodge-podge as it includes essays on how to be an historian as well as essays about various historical issues. All of it is fascinating. Tuchman's style is clear and concise, but elegant in the choice of language. It is also filled with asides, many of them rather sharp, on the events being discussed.

"'One threat' to leave France to face Germany alone might have brought Clemenceau 'to compromise' (which suggests a capacious ignorance of the Tiger)." --from a review of a book on Woodrow Wilson, p. 155

I love the phrase 'capacious ignorance'. The essays on Israel, written at a point when its future existence was by no means certain, gave me a new perspective on the current state. The final section of the book is brief pieces, some articles and some speeches, that are contemporaneous with the events they discuss (the Vietnam war and the Nixon administration mostly). I was struck by the fact that many of her concerns about the direction American government was headed, have been borne out in the years since. 

As a resource on how to write history and biography there is a lot of useful information here.

"The problem is how and what to select out of all that happened without, by the very process of selection, giving an over- or under-emphasis which violates truth. One cannot put in everything: The result would be a shapeless mass. The job is to achieve a narrative line without straying from the essential facts or leaving out any essential facts and without twisting the material to suit one's convenience. To do so is a temptation, but if you do it with history you invariably get tripped up by later events." -from "The Historian as Artist" p. 49

The essays are also peppered with inspiration on life in general.

"Since life is only fun when you attempt something a little beyond your reach, I will proceed..." - from an address to the US Army War College on Generalship, p. 276

 I am counting this book toward the 2018 Nonfiction Reading Challenge.

Reckless Daughter

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell
by David Yaffe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think that Joni Mitchell's Blue is the best album ever, so I was very interested to learn more about her. This book was a sympathetic biography, Yaffe is clearly a fan, but it was thoroughly researched and seemed to show Mitchell in an objective way. I'm not musical and I was a bit lost in some of the parts about chord progressions and tunings, but they were fairly brief and sprinkled through the book rather than all in one long incomprehensible section. My favorite part of the book were the stories about how, when, and because of whom she came to write various songs. I read this during April, which is National Poetry Month, which seems fitting as Mitchell was definitely a poet.

Camille "Paglia had included Join in a collection called Break, Blow, Burn, an anthology of what she considered to be the forty-three greatest poems in English, beginning with a Shakespeare sonnet and ending with 'Woodstock'." (p. 356)

This title counts toward 2 of my reading challenges, the Canadian Book Challenge and the 2018 Nonfiction Reading Challenge.

Biographer's Craft

The Biographer's Craft
by Milton Lomask
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Katherine Anne Porter, speaking of fiction, could have been speaking of biography when she said that a human life 'may be almost pure chaos' and that 'the work of the artist, the only thing he's good for, is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.'" (p. 39)

This slim volume contains lots of useful information about the writing of biography including ideas on selecting a subject, organizing your material, sources of information on your subject, discussion of what makes a good biography, and info on what makes good writing. It is an older book and the concept of online research is not part of it, but that info can be found elsewhere.

An example of the advice about structure:

"...every opening should do at least four things. It should (1) announce or foreshadow the main theme of the work (2) meet whatever objections potential readers may have to your subject, (3) orient the reader as to time and place, and (4) engage his mind and heart." (p. 53)

I am counting this book toward the 2018 non-fiction reading challenge.

Review: I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti

I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti by Giulia Melucci
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I don't really get memoir as a genre, so my issues with this book may be more me than the book. It was like listening to the stories of a new acquaintance who way over shares. The recipes were good though and if you don't have a basic repertoire of Italian recipes these would be a good place to start. This audiobook did inspire me to make an artichoke risotto.

Review: Where I Belong

Where I Belong by Alan Doyle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was an interesting book about the early life of Newfoundland musician Alan Doyle (of Great Big Sea). Doyle and I are the same age, but our childhoods could not have been more different.  I never cut the tongue out of a Cod, and am hoping to keep it that way. Doyle is a great story teller and I was fascinated by the life he lived and his perspective on Catholicism made a lot of sense to me. (It does seem like trying to understand stuff about your religion should be encouraged, not punished). 

I have seen Great Big Sea perform here in New Hampshire (where I live) a couple of times, so this book qualifies not only as a Canadian Book Challenge title, but also meets the September mini-challenge to read "a book written by a musician from your home province. If you do not live in Canada, by a Canadian musician who has performed in your current country."

Lisa reviewed this book last year. 

Review: Kitchen Confidential

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you are bothered by coarse language this is not the book for you. However, the pirate ship mentality and outrageous behavior of Bourdain and his crews was incredibly entertaining. I am never eating at the Rainbow Room again, but otherwise came through this book about what goes on in restaurant kitchens unscathed. The same cannot be said for the author.
I listened to this as an audio, read by Bourdain, and it was like listening to him telling the various stories which worked really well.

I am counting this toward the Foodies Read 2015 challenge (as a memoir/biography).

Review: Who is Wayne Gretzky?

Who Is Wayne Gretzky? by Gail Herman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My nephew (he's 8) liked another book in this series so when I came across this one I picked it up for him. "The Great One" played hockey from the time he was a little kid and broke all the records. I like the format of this book--the biography is mixed in with sidebars on related geographic and historical info--and learned not only about Wayne Gretzky but that Alexander Graham Bell was also born in Brantford, Ontario.
This counts toward the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: Birdseye

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Birdseye's life was interesting, but perhaps not eventful enough to support a full biography. The book seemed a bit thin on substance. The side-trips into Labrador history and the histories of the various businesses Birdseye was connected to made for good reading, but the connection to the subject of the book didn't seem all that strong.
I listened to the audiobook version of this and the narrator, Jon Van Ness, did a good job with it. However, he had a midwestern-sounding accent and that seemed out of place to me as he was narrating the life of a New Englander.

This book counts toward the Foodies Read Challenge and the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One 1884-1933
Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume II: 1933 - 38
by Blanche Wiesen Cook

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"In many ways Eleanor Roosevelt remains a bellwether for our belief system. A woman who insists on her right to self-identity, a woman who creates herself over and over again, a woman of consummate power and courageous vision continues to challenge our sense of what is acceptable and what is possible. To this day, there is no agreement as to who Ealeanoir Roosevelt was, what she represented, or how she lived her life. Her friends and her detractors have made extravagant claims of goodness and mercy, foolishness and naivete. She has acquired sainthood and been consigned to sinner status. Many of us, especially those of us born daughters in a world that encouraged daughters to sit along the sidelines of action, are drawn to her because of her vision and her commitment to an activit's life. She continues to haunt our memories and inspire our days, because she never gave up on life; she never stopped learning and changing. She worked to transform our world in behalf of greater dignity and more security for all people, for women and men in equal measure" (from the Introduction to vol. 1, p.3)

This two volume biography presents a sympathetic, but not entirely laudatory, view of a woman who struggled with many personal challenges yet accomplished a tremendous amount for the good of others. The men in her world, including her Uncle Teddy Roosevelt and her husband, FDR do not come out looking particularly good. And whatever your mother-in-law is like, she is a dream compared to Sarah Delano Roosevelt.

I was struck by how many of the things ER was fighting for (universal healthcare, equal pay for women, peace) are still ongoing battles. Many of the arguments ER made in columns and speeches could be made today and would be just as relevant. Weisen Cook uses many letters and other documents from ER's life to tell her story and then provides a context and a wider view to put those primary documents into perspective.
This biography is engaging and well written and the life it describes is inspiring. There is also a tremendous amount of good advice in this book. Including this offered by ER to women involved in the 1936 political campaign: "You must finish the day's work when the day's work is done. You cannot get discouraged too easily. You have to take defeat over and over again and pick up and go on. Be sure of your facts."

Jane Austen: A Life

Jane Austen: A Life
by Carol Shields

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This really wasn't a biography. It was an examination of the work of Jane Austen and how the few things that are actually known about her life might relate to that work. It was however, a very enlightening look at the work of a great novelist and the time in which she lived. Shields, an excellent novelist herself, also discusses, at some length, the creative process of the writer. Ultimately there is more speculation here than solid information, but the speculation seems grounded in research and this is a book worth reading.

This book counts towards the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
by Patrick McGilligan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have seen many of Hitchcock's films (most of the American ones), but I didn't know anything about his life. This book was a very story-like telling of Hitchcock's life and brought in a lot of other biographer's work in a way that I thought balanced the picture of the various rumors and controversies. I found the fights that Hitchcock had throughout his career with censors, and the compromises that were made in the films to deal with those censors, especially interesting. I would have liked to know more about Alma Hitchcock. It is clear that she was incredibly important to Hitchcock, both personally and professionally, but it isn't really clear who she was as an individual. There is a very detailed filmography (and a separate listing of TV credits) included which tells you where Hitchcock's cameo is in each film.