I just started reading “Telling the Untold Story” by Steve Weinberg. On page six he writes:
“An accomplished contemporary biographer must be an investigative journalist, historian, psychologist, sensitive interviewer, gossipmonger, and compelling storyteller rolled into one. The best biographies capture life at a deeper, more intense level than does any other form of literature. Through biography, we learn how other individuals have handled the stuggle between freedom and fate. Leaving a mark on on this earth beyond one’s immediate family is unusual; biographies tend to be written about people who have managed to leave such a mark. Biographies scratch beneath the subject’s personal myth, looking for the slippages and the fittings.”
And on page 14 he shares these words written by Margaret Oliphant in 1883 and quoted by Edgar Johnson in One Mighty Torrent: The Drama of Biography:
“The position of the biographer carries with it a power which is almost unrestrained, the kind of power which is doubly tyrannous to use like a giant. Not even the pulpit is so entirely master, for we all consider ourselves able to judge in respect to what the clergyman tells us and we have his materials in our hands by which to call him to account… but the biographer has a far more assured place, and if he is not restrained by the strictest limits of truth and honor, there is nothing else that can control him in heaven or earth…He has it in his power to guide the final deliverance, like that judge whose summing up so often decides the final verdict.”
I’m not sure I believe that biographers are quite so god-like, but holding someone else’s life in your hands is an awesome responsibility not to be taken lightly.