Sheryl Monks | March/April 2012

Penelope Niven

EXCERPT

Penelope Niven is the author of four biographies, a children's book, and a memoir. Her subjects include Carl Sandburg (Carl Sandburg: A Biography, Scribner 1991), James Earl Jones (Voices and Silences, Scribner 1993), and Edward Steichen (Steichen: A Biography, Clarkson Potter 1997). She has recently completed a biography of Thornton Wilder, forthcoming from HarperCollins in October 2012. Her biography of Steichen was featured in the New Yorker and Biography and named one of the thirty-two Best Books of 1997 by Library Journal. Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet (Harcourt 2003), her first children's book, was named a Junior Library Guild selection and one of the New York Public Library's Best Children's Books of 2003. In 2004, the same book received the International Reading Association Prize. Her memoir, Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water, was published by Harcourt in 2004. Niven founded and directed the National Carl Sandburg Oral History Project and served as principal consultant on the PBS film Carl Sandburg-Echoes and Silences. Her work in biography has earned three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004, she received the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state's highest civilian honor. From 1997 to 2009, she was Writer-in-Residence at Salem College.

Sheryl Monks: One of my favorite stories about your career as a biographer comes from your daughter, award-winning author Jennifer Niven (The Ice Master, Hyperion 2000, and other books). Will you share that story?

Penelope Niven: When Jennifer went into middle school, in Richmond, Indiana, where we then lived, her teacher asked all the children on the first day to tell a little about themselves and their parents. I was, by that time, deeply involved in the research in the Carl Sandburg papers. Jennifer said, when it was her turn, "My father works at the college. And my mother is obsessed with this dead guy." This is one of the best definitions of biography I've ever heard. You do have to be obsessed with your dead guy or your dead lady, whichever the case may be. It is an obsession in the best sense of the word.

Monks: When did that obsession begin? Throughout college and later, you wrote poetry and short fiction. What made you shift to nonfiction?

Niven: Speaking to Amy Lowell about her biography of Keats and his of Lincoln, Sandburg said, "Ain't it hell the way a book walks up to you and makes you write it?-Don't you feel almost predestinarian?"
In the strangest, most mysterious way, I didn't choose to write biography. It somehow felt as if it was "predestinarian." It just didn't occur to me with the first book to say, "I'm going to write a biography of Carl Sandburg." Somebody else had to tell me that maybe I should consider doing that. I resisted it energetically because I'd never done it, I'd never thought about doing it, and I had no idea about how to go about doing it. The woman who told me I should write the biography was Lucy Kroll, who was Carl Sandburg's literary agent. She gave me the courage to think I could do it.

Monks: How did you meet Lucy Kroll?

Niven: I went to Connemara, Carl Sandburg's North Carolina home, in the summer of 1977. The house had become a National Park and National Historic Site. I simply went as a tourist to this antebellum house and mountain estate where Sandburg had lived out the last years of his life. He and his family came down to North Carolina from Chicago and the shores of Lake Michigan searching for more space and privacy and a more temperate climate. He lived the last twenty-two years of his life in this beautiful place. I stepped into his house and was transfixed by the evidence of a writer's workshop. This was a twenty-two-room, 245-acre writer's workshop. My fascination with Carl Sandburg began at Connemara.
My background is in American literature, but I had no particular interest in Sandburg until that day. It was an opportune moment because the National Park Service was concentrating on the physical property at this newly acquired national historic site. However, they were not yet doing very much work with Sandburg's papers, which were evident everywhere you turned in the house.
So I began working as a volunteer, helping to organize the papers. I worked summer after summer, and then I began to do it year-round. As the work grew, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the volume of papers left in the house by the Sandburg family far exceeded the expectation of what might remain there. Not only was there this magnitude of research papers, but there were questions regarding the governance of these papers. The University of Illinois Library had bought Sandburg's papers and books in 1955-56 and had removed, according to the bill of lading, four and a half tons of material, more than 10,000 books and uncounted pages of manuscripts, letters, and other papers. But all of these other papers remained at Connemara.
My focus from the beginning was to help preserve these papers, help get them where they needed to be and where they legally belonged. That involved the National Park Service, the Sandburg literary estate, and the University of Illinois Library. I spent months of each year for several years organizing Sandburg's papers, retrieving them from under the bed and inside the ashes of the stove in his writing room and under the eaves and in the cellar of his house. As I studied these papers, I began to discover the identities of individuals who were very important in his personal and creative life, and I began to meet and interview some of those people.
Unbeknownst to me, I was doing the groundwork for writing biography. I didn't know it at the time. It didn't occur to me. But I was immersed in those papers. I was living with Sandburg's papers and books. I was reliving so much of his life through the evidence he had left behind. In the course of this work, I met Lucy Kroll, Sandburg's literary agent in the last years of his life. After several years went by, I said to Lucy, "I've interviewed more than 150 people who knew Sandburg, and I've organized at least 30,000 pages of letters and manuscripts. They're now available at the University of Illinois. His interviews are available through the National Park Service and the university. Now, somebody needs to write a biography of Carl Sandburg." People who'd written Sandburg biographies before did not have access to this wealth of material. Lucy said to me, "I know. You will write it, and I will represent you." I said, "I couldn't possibly do that. I wouldn't know where to start. I've never written a biography." That's when she said to me, "Every biographer has had to write a first biography." I was not sophisticated enough then about the literary world to understand the significance of my good fortune. Here was this major, marvelous literary and theatrical agent who had turned Carl Sandburg's creative and business life around, who had represented him in ways that were so fortunate for him and his family. And she was willing to take me on. I simply had to trust that somehow I would figure out how to do it.

Monks: Did you unearth anything in all those papers that helped you figure it out? There must have been reams of information about the Lincoln biography. What did Sandburg the biographer teach you about writing biography?

Niven: I've learned key lessons from each of my biographical subjects. From Sandburg, who was a very fine biographer, I learned that you have to look at your subject connected to all his social roots. Sandburg said you can't write about a subject, Abraham Lincoln or anybody else, apart from his social roots. In other words, you need to write about his family life, his community life, his national culture, the time and places in which he lived. Sandburg also said you have to learn to "appraise the witness." You can't automatically believe everything anybody tells you or everything that anybody writes about your subject. You have to appraise the credibility of the witness.
He taught me so much about logistics and strategy. For example, I came across batches of material where he had written the word "Weave." I soon figured out that this was material that he had discovered in his research after he had already written about this particular episode or event, and he was going to weave this in later. You see this around my house. In that corner over there, I have the last boxes for the Wilder biography, a stack with "Weave 1930s," "Weave 1940s," material that has surfaced since I wrote those chapters. Sandburg, in those days before Xerox machines, would frequently go to a library or historical society to do Lincoln research. He was working on a tight budget, as most biographers do. He would ask the librarian to lock him in overnight and he'd stay there all night making his notes. Thank goodness for the copy machine. Once, early on in my work, I did ask one college librarian to lock me in, and I worked until one o'clock in the morning. Fortunately, the night watchmen didn't forget I was in there.
But Sandburg was a great teacher. One of the most valuable techniques in biography that he taught me is the importance of selecting material. Sandburg writes about this in his epic poem, "The People, Yes."A "hopeful biographer" says, "I shall arrange the facts and leave the interpretation to the reader." A "somber historian" replies, "The moment you begin to arrange you interpret." So I always keep that in mind when I have to choose what goes in and what can't go into the book. The basic act of selecting and arranging the facts is a vital act of interpreting and framing the story.

Monks: That must be a challenge when you're selecting from a vast collection of materials. How difficult is it to maintain objectivity while you're interpreting and framing? Is the biographer inextricably woven into the story?

Niven: Somebody said to Sandburg, when he was talking about trying to keep himself out of his six-volume Lincoln biography, "No matter how hard you try, your soul gets written into your work; your soul's in there on every page, one way or another." It's very difficult for the biographer to be invisible, but I work hard not to intrude on that connection between my subject and my reader. And you're right about the challenge of the selection and the shaping of the book. I've found that if you really listen, if you really pay attention to your subject, every one of your biographical subjects will show you the shape of the book; they've all shown me the way. And that's been such a fascinating process. I taught a course at Salem College on the narrative, whether in fiction or nonfiction, because there are common elements that undergird both of those forms. For example, in biography, just as in fiction, you have to find the dramatic arc; you have to identify the conflicts. You have to develop the characters. Every life is a novel. You have to try to get to those essential ingredients, whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction. You have to use many of the same structures and techniques. Either way, they cross over, which is not to say you ever invent anything in biography. But you still have to look closely at that life to see where the climactic moments were, the pivotal moments, the fundamental conflicts, inner and outer.

Monks: It must be difficult to be working and writing, and at the same time continually researching. How does that process work?

Niven: It's immensely complicated, and of course you immerse yourself in the private papers and published work as quickly and deeply as you can. In the case of the literary figure or the visual artist, you immerse yourself in the published work, in what the artist put out there. You read and re-read. Last year I knew less than I know this year. You constantly revisit the artist's work; you constantly revisit the archival material. I've found that research never unfolds itself in a neat, orderly, chronological sequence. You have to learn to do your research where you can do it, when you can do it. And you have to build files very carefully. New material is always coming along.
In my own case, after ten years of research for example, thinking I had got through the major part of the Wilder research material at the Beinecke Library at Yale, there suddenly came the realization that there were what turned out to be eighty-eight banker-sized boxes full of material that had not been catalogued. These had to be gone through very carefully. I've spent several months weaving into the existing manuscript the uncatalogued material that had an impact on the sequence of the life, the dramatic arc, the conflicts, and all those factors.
It's very complicated. Perhaps in my case it's more complicated because of the immense archive of Wilder material and the vast numbers of interviews that could be done. Then it's further complicated by the fact that I have been very fortunate with my Sandburg, Jones, and Wilder books to have total, unhampered, complete access to all the material with no restrictions. Often there are restrictions that keep a biographer from having that latitude. So it would require almost a book in itself to describe in any sort of detail the way that the research unfolds and the logistics of it all. It's a great question because, as you clearly perceive, this is fundamental to the process.

Monks: So it's a matter of composing and recomposing and constantly reshaping the story as it unfolds in the research.

Niven: Exactly right. Some people don't perceive that about biography. You're constantly reshaping. You synthesize and you analyze and you do a lot of interpretation, and you come to a lot of conclusions, which often you have to revise as new material surfaces or as you simply become more aware of what has transpired in this life. It's a huge responsibility to do this, to try to do justice to another person's life and work.

Monks: When do you know that you've uncovered all you can? Are there questions that remain unanswered?

Niven: There are always questions that remain unanswered. Someone once asked Sandburg when he was going to finish researching and writing the Lincoln biography. He said, "You never finish a biography. You just have to know when to stop." And that's the truth. It's exhausting work. But the exhaustion is offset by the fact that it is endlessly fascinating. As I've considered other biographical subjects from time to time, or if somebody has asked me if I'd be interested in writing a biography of so and so, I investigate and explore, and if I think I would be bored in fifteen minutes with that life, I don't consider it. There has to be some innate affinity for that subject and that life in order to sustain you for what you know is going to be a long, long voyage.

Monks: Is there ever a point where you think you might know your subjects better than they know themselves?

Niven: I once said of Carl Sandburg, "I think I know Sandburg better than I know anybody else, maybe even myself." Did I know him better than he knew himself? I doubt it. The most introspective of my subjects was Thornton Wilder. Fortunately for his biographers, he wrote extensively in journals and in letters in his endeavor to probe and understand himself.

Monks: Wilder offers advice for reading the great letter writers. He says we should read the material three times, with increasing concentration. The first time we read, he says, it is as a literary exercise; the second time, we draw a profile of the personality or the subject; and finally, the third time, diving even deeper, we arrive at the "news of the soul." Is this an apt description of the process involved in biography?

Niven: It's a wonderful formula for biography. He wrote this in a lecture that he was invited to give at Yale on the great British letter writers, but he expanded it. He was invited to give the lecture after the great success ofhis novel, The Bridge of San Luis Ray, in which he had actually based a character on one of the great French letter writers. But it's not only a beautiful formula, it's a very reliable formula for getting at the subject-and I so deeply believe in those layers of excavation where, as you say, you hope to gather the "news of the soul."
It is particularly true with Wilder because he himself lived with the most drama in his interior life. I knew going into the Wilder biography that my challenge was going to be to try to get at the "news of the soul," which fortunately, we can do-at least in part-because of the vast body of his letters, his journals, and other writings when he does reveal so much of his "inward life," as he called it. In this same lecture, he says something that intrigued me from the very beginning and put me on alert. He says that "Art is confession; art is the secret told." He goes on to say that art is confessing but also concealing and retaining this knowledge or this experience that he may think he wants to confess.
So I thought, Wow, that's a challenge! I need to look at his books, look at his novels and plays and essays for the confession-but also for the concealment. It's a two-fold job. I try to see what he's confessing, what he's concealing, and the tug-of-war between those things. That's been a particularly fascinating process. You work with that challenge, knowing you'll never discover the whole answer. You may only know part of the answer. It keeps you constantly on the alert, which is a good thing, so that you edit what you're doing very carefully.

Monks: That echoes Sandburg: "It's all there in the work. Everything that matters about me is in my work." How difficult is it to extract that information so that a reader can see the interior life? Is it easier to write about the visibly dramatic outward life than to write about the inner life?

Niven: Yes. The inner life is fundamentally where all of us live. It may be easier when you're writing about a subject who had four wives and wanted to fish and fight bulls. That's certainly not to minimize the difficulty of writing about the exterior life-but it may be a simpler process for the biographer.

Monks: Which subjects did you focus on while you were a graduate student? Were you being subconsciously pointed toward Sandburg and Wilder?

Niven: Two of my graduate school professors helped to point me in this direction, although I didn't realize it at the time. The best professor I've ever had is Dr. Edward Wilson at Wake Forest University. In addition to being an inspiring teacher, he did so much to help me appreciate, for the first time really, the importance of biographical context when you're trying to read and interpret a writer's published texts. He set me on fire to want to know who these writers were as people and where the art came from and how the creativity manifested. So even though I didn't ever say then, I want to be a biographer, Dr. Wilson gave me my first vivid understanding of the importance of biographical context.
With Dr. John Broderick, I had courses in American literature, largely 19th-century American literature. I didn't particularly care for what I knew about Sandburg's work in the 20th century. However, Dr. Broderick gave me the grounding in American literature that has served me so well with Sandburg and Wilder. Then Dr. Broderick gave me an appreciation of the critical process. I would say those two pivotal professors were equipping me for what was to come.

Monks: How does your work with James Earl Jones, your only living subject, compare with your other subjects?

Niven: It's very difficult to compare other than to say that it is quite a different experience to work with a living subject. I never laid eyes on Sandburg, Steichen, or Wilder. Never saw them or heard them lecture, for example. I've certainly seen film footage of all three of them, so that's been helpful. I interviewed people who knew them, so that's helpful. But sitting down for a conversation and looking into the eyes of the person who has lived this life and done this work that you're writing about is just incomparable. It's a wonderful way to get to know somebody much more quickly.

Monks: Was it a collaborative effort? Did you share responsibility of selecting, formatting, composing, bringing the information forward?

Niven: It absolutely was, and unlike many books about celebrity figures, this book was actively written by two writers. James Earl is a very good writer, and because he stutters, he cares passionately about every single word he speaks or writes. He thinks about those words; words matter to him with an intensity that I think people who don't have the challenge of the stutter can appreciate. He was an active, hands-on participant with this book. We did hundreds of hours of interviews over a period of several years. We worked really hard and experimented with the voice of the book. Was it going to be first person or third person? Ultimately, we realized it needed to be in first person, except for my voice in the prologue. But yes, it was very much a collaborative process. He was extremely open. He made everything accessible in his family and professional archives, his vast archive of photographs, in particular. We shared the same literary agent, Lucy Kroll, who was James Earl's agent long before she was mine. And he was quite happy for me to go through all of his papers-and we're talking about several file cabinets of papers having to do with his career, correspondence, and contracts.

Monks: Have you ever had a problem accessing information?

Niven: Yes, I had some problems with the Steichen book, but his daughters and granddaughter were immensely helpful, as were his nieces, the Sandburg daughters (Sandburg married Steichen's sister). Of course, Sandburg was deceased, but I worked with his two marvelous literary executors and his generously helpful daughters. I had complete access to the papers and documents, blanket permission to use anything I needed, with no right of review. In other words, no one could look over my shoulder at the evolving manuscript. I've also been very fortunate to have all this extraordinary openness with James Earl Jones, and now with the Thornton Wilder estate.

Monks: You've said before that each member of a subject's family exerts a force on the biography. Can you elaborate on that? Also, what challenges do biographers face when dealing with families?

Niven: One of the most interesting things I've discovered in working with families is that coming to an understanding of the family dynamics opens a unique and quite reliable way to get to know the subject you're writing about-not just what you learn from the family, but also what you learn firsthand about how the family interacted with each other and with the subject. When I was working on the Sandburg biography, there were three surviving daughters. I interviewed each daughter at length over several years, and it was as if each daughter had had a completely different set of parents. The birth order made a difference, the age of the parents at the time that the child was in high school or elementary school, for example, made a difference. I think that's also true in many, many families-the chemistry in the relationship between parent and child can differ, the circumstances can differ.
Some critics have written that I spend too much time on the family life. They're usually, if I may chauvinistically say so, male critics who make that observation. I don't think it's just because I'm a woman and a mother as well as a daughter and a sister that I feel that the family life can be at the crux of any life.
For example, with Carl Sandburg I was able to discover the extent to which his creative decisions were often driven by his family responsibilities. He had two disabled daughters. By 1920, when he was forty-two years old, and early in his literary career, he knew that these daughters were always going to be financially dependent on him. What many people interpreted as stinginess on his part was really the frugality exercised by a devoted father. With Steichen, there were difficulties in the first marriage which had an enormous impact on what he was able to do creatively. And he again had to make certain professional decisions because he had to provide for his wife and his two daughters and to help support his mother and father. Those realities shaped so much of what he was able to do.
With Steichen and Sandburg, brothers-in-law, family provided wonderful material. There are beautiful poems and The Rootabaga Stories Sandburg wrote for his children. With Steichen, there are luminous photographs of his children. Steichen also wrote a very imaginative children's book, and although the book was unpublished, he published a landmark collection of photographs for children in cooperation with his daughter Mary.
With James Earl, there's the story of his father who was an actor, Robert Earl Jones, and the interaction and tension in the family that was bringing James Earl up as a child because they didn't approve of actors. The more he got to know about acting, the more he wanted to do it. But it was something he had to conceal for a long time.
Thornton Wilder, who never married, was one of five children in a remarkably close-knit family, and from the time he was thirty years old, he was financially supporting his mother, his father, his sisters, and himself. The other feature of the Wilder family story that is so remarkable is that the whole family was very much involved in writing. All of them, both parents, the five children, wrote, encouraged each other, listened to each other's work, and never withheld criticism of it if the work needed to be criticized. There was not only a very personal engagement of the family, but there was a literary connection, sibling to sibling, children to parents. They're as interesting in their way as William and Henry and Alice James.
So that is the family force that you can see exerted in the life of your subject. And I'm very fortunate that in almost every case, it's been a pleasure to work with the families. My relationships with the families have continued way past the books. And the challenges probably come down to the fact that it truly is an act of audacity, at one level, to write a biography, to endeavor to write about someone else's life. You have to remember that your subject was somebody's son, somebody's husband, somebody's father, somebody's brother. So what do you do? You respect that. At the same time, you have an obligation to your reader to be as objective about the truth, as immaculate with the truth, as you possibly can be. So that means if somebody's father is reputed to have had love affairs and if that's part of the story, you have to examine that, you have to deal with that head-on in the book. Otherwise you compromise the integrity of everything that you do. There is the awareness of responsibility, that impulse to protect and be diplomatic, combined with that fundamental knowledge that you cannot compromise even for an instant the veracity of your work.

Monks: Is it typical to have unrestricted access? Have family members tried to hide information or block access?

Niven: In my experience, the matter of access has been negotiated by my literary agent, and we have that understanding at the outset of the work. What sort of access am I going to have? There are probably as many variations for provisions for that as there are literary estates and writers and artists and biographers. It's hard to establish a principle. I'll tell you the conditions under which I have been able to do my work.
With the Sandburg estate, I had unrestricted access. That meant that I could study anything, I could look at any papers and any materials and documents, and I could quote freely from those. That's the ideal thing. In addition to that, there would be no review of my manuscript. Nobody-the executors, the family-nobody was going to insist on reading my manuscript beforehand. With the Steichen estate, the widow in this case declined permission and access to many letters and documents and certainly photographs. That was something that I understood, my agent understood, and my editor understood, as we entered into the process. We knew that would be challenging, and it was. I was so fortunate to have wonderful literary agents and then the generous support of the other Steichen family members, even though they did not control all the permissions and rights. But we worked through that. In the Steichen book, I was not able to use all the photographs I wanted to use. I was not able to quote at length from letters. I could quote within the realm of copyright fair use. That's usually interpreted by the publisher. My publishing group was Random House; they said I could quote ten words or ten percent of a letter, whichever is less. In storage, I have great big notebooks of the Steichen letters, highlighting on each one the ten words I wanted to quote. So that was a challenge. With James Earl Jones, permissions were a breeze. With Wilder, again, I've had the same wonderful relationship I had with the Sandburg estate-unrestricted access, unrestricted permission to quote, and because the estate controls most of the rights to the photographs, I can use any of those. It's just ideal. I can't tell you how much it expedites the work. Also, it will be less complicated with the published work because my biography is being published by HarperCollins, Wilder's long-term publisher. That greatly simplifies the work of clearing those permissions.
So is it typical to have unrestricted access? Three out of four times, I've been fortunate to receive that. Most biographers I know do have unrestricted access, although sometimes it varies in terms of the review of the manuscript. Some estates retain that right. Some writers and artists in their wills prohibit the quotation of their published work, much less their unpublished work. So it's an arena that needs to be explored very carefully before a biographer enters into an agreement to write a biography. You need to understand what all the circumstances are and to have all that clearly delineated before you write the first word.

Monks: Previous biographers of Wilder, for example, didn't have access to all the material you've been able to use.

Niven: That's right. It's very difficult to go forward in that circumstance. You are assembling a great big puzzle and you may not know that you don't have all the pieces. You may have a pretty good idea that you don't have all the pieces, but you may not know that for sure. I work constantly with that awareness, surrounded as I am by all these Wilder papers. What have I missed? What have all of us missed? What hasn't yet surfaced? Are there papers in somebody's attic? We just don't know. That's part of the challenge.

Monks: Has anyone ever worked diligently to hide information?

Niven: Without going into detail, I learned after the fact with the Sandburg and the Steichen books that there was someone who had either forgotten to share some material or decided not to. And there is a similar situation with the Wilder book. It's no secret that Wilder's sister, Isabel Wilder, who was so important in his life as his companion, his hostess, his secretary sometimes, his literary agent sometimes, was working on her own book about her brother. Even toward the end of her life, when she was in her eighties, she was still working on her book. And of course, there was material she didn't want to share until she finished her book. She did withhold that material, much of which has recently surfaced. Who knows what may have been held back by the friends or family or associates of any biographical subject? I think about my own family. If I came across something that I thought in any way might embarrass or compromise my own mother and father, I'd probably "forget" to mention it, or perhaps even hide it in the attic or even destroy it. That's why it's such a remarkable act of generosity when a family does cooperate to the extent that the Sandburg, Jones, Steichen, and Wilder families have done.

Monks: Wilder wrote three different drafts of a lecture he never finished on the craft of writing biography. Yet he also said, "What would Keats or Walt Whitman or Queen Victoria say if they read their biography? Wouldn't they cry out that this is only one tenth of the truth? All that is really myself escapes." What was his interest in and opinion of biography?

Niven: He was interested in biography as a literary form because he was exploring literary forms in general as a teacher and a lecturer. In addition to his unpublished notes and reflections, he is most revealing on biography in the lecture he gave on the great letter writers. I paid a lot of attention to that.
And sometimes Wilder parodies or pokes fun at biography and biographers. He makes you laugh out loud in the Bridge of San Luis Ray when he writes about a Franciscan monk who is essentially a biographer, and he makes such fun of that poor little man who is finally burned at the stake. Two of the best parodies of biography I have ever come across are Wilder's earnest little monk who gets burned at the stake and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. In Woolf's novel, the subject is a 17th-century nobleman who morphs over time into a Victorian heroine, and when we last see her, she has become a modern, 20th-century woman. Her wickedly funny comments on biographers and their craft can keep a biographer grounded!
So anytime I get a little too full of myself, I turn to those books. In Wilder's novel, Brother Juniper is writing about these five people who've died when a bridge collapses. He decides to search out every detail he can learn about these victims of the great tragedy. Wilder writes, "In compiling his book about these people, Brother Juniper seemed to be consumed by the fear that in omitting the slightest detail, he might lose some guiding hint." And here I am with my 1,200-page manuscript. Oh mercy! "He was forever being cheated by details that looked as though they were significant, if only he could find their setting. So he put everything down on the notion perhaps that if he re-read the book twenty times, the countless facts would suddenly start to move, to assemble-" Brother Juniper goes on and on about the difficulties of oral history. He makes a chart to diagram the attributes of fifteen victims and fifteen survivors of another tragedy. He gives them points for goodness, piety, and usefulness. I haven't done this yet. Perhaps I should try it!

Monks: Is there anything in those eighty-eight boxes of uncatalogued material that will surprise readers?

Niven: These boxes were reserved by Isabel Wilder for her own book. They are for the most part very personal papers, letters exchanged within the family circle, diaries, and journal pages from Isabel and Charlotte and their brother Amos Wilder, and wonderful photographs nobody had seen or remembered seeing.
These resources were extremely important, particularly helpful in writing the biographical portraits within the larger portrait-portraits of Amos Parker Wilder, Wilder's father, and Isabella Niven Wilder, his mother, whom we didn't know as well as we wanted to. So much was revealed about the father who was quite a nationally known figure himself as a journalist and orator. He was a diplomat in China. There were pages and pages of diaries he'd kept in China.
I could write a full-fledged family biography of those amazing Wilders. So yes, those are very personal papers, essential in a comprehensive biography. I shudder to think what a loss it would have been had I not been able to use those papers.
Probably the most significant body of papers within those eighty-eight boxes has to do with Charlotte Wilder, the sister who was the first born daughter. She was a gifted poet, a prize-winning poet, who suffered a great deal in the later part of her life. So many of her manuscript pages and journals and letters were there, and it was very moving to see them close up. Sometimes you just put your head down on the library table and weep, particularly for what you know is coming ahead. Charlotte would be subjected to a lobotomy. I can remember with the Sandburg book, writing about Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale, who loved each other madly, but she knew she was not going to be able to be the poet she wanted to be if she married Vachel Lindsay. They had a very tragic time. She married someone else in 1914. Lindsay committed suicide in 1931. Sara committed suicide in 1933. Knowing all that, I can remember getting to a certain point and saying, "No, Sara, don't do that. No, Vachel, don't do that." You get that involved. Biography just breaks your heart sometimes.
I must say, of all of them, the two who have given me the most laughter are James Earl Jones and Thornton Wilder. James Earl has this wonderful sense of humor and this deep, rollicking laugh. Thornton Wilder will absolutely make you laugh out loud. He makes me laugh out loud at least five times a day. Even in the hardest, grimmest times of his life, he was witty, hopeful, and often ebullient, in spite of everything.

Monks: How do up-and-coming biographers come to biography?

Niven: They come to it from many directions. Sometimes wonderful biographies are written as extensions of doctoral dissertations. My friend Anna Rubino comes to mind with her excellent biography (Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Communication, Beacon 2008) which grew out of her dissertation at Yale. Often journalists become good biographers. They're accustomed to interviewing and researching, so it can be a natural evolution for them. Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster 2011) is an example. Sometimes it's the kind of "predestinarian" experience that I feel I've been so fortunate to have. You find yourself caught up in the material, the papers, the life, and all of a sudden find yourself writing a biography. So many children who love to write say, "I'm going to be a novelist" or "I'm going to be a journalist when I grow up." I've never ever known a single child who said, "When I grow up, I'm going to be a biographer," even though most young readers love to read biography. There are certainly MFA programs in writing, but I'm not aware of many programs focusing on biography. And it's such a complex process that it would be very helpful to have more graduate courses in the art of biography. Life prepares you to write biography as well. I don't think I could have started writing biography at a much younger age. I think you have to have lived a certain span and depth of life, certainly to write about a subject who lived a very long life.

Monks: Is there anything you wish someone had told you, some advice you might share with budding biographers?

Niven: It's probably a good thing that nobody told me how hard you'd have to work, how long it would take, what a challenge it is to live your own life while you're writing that other life, especially when you know how that other life is going to turn out. Of course, I would have done it anyway! Probably the most important advice I've received, which I would deeply regret not having received, was the advice that Lucy Kroll gave me when she said, "Trust yourself. You're the only person in all of time who can write what you can write," echoing her literary client, the great dancer Martha Graham. "Only you can do what you can do." I wish that somebody had urged me to work harder in other languages. I wish that I were fluent in French, for example, because Steichen was fluent in French. Wilder was fluent in several languages, and often translated the words of others. That would've been helpful. Don't confine yourself to English. Work on those other languages. And live a rich, full, adventurous life of your own!

AWP

Sheryl Monks is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. Her short fiction has appeared in RE:AL, Backwards City Review, Southern Gothic online, Surreal South, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Night Train, and storySouth. She is currently writing a novel set in McDowell County, West Virginia.

From Thornton Wilder: A Life

As a teenager, Thornton Wilder felt that unless he was writing "a story or piece or something," he didn't have "any right to breathe." He was discouraged that when he wrote a story and showed it to his teacher and classmates "to vindicate" his existence, his writing was spurned. "I don't mean to acquire anything-just to vindicate and so live." By the time he was eighteen writing had already become a refuge and an absorption for him, as well as a means of vindication.

He wrote at odd times, in odd places, and one favorite venue was any class in which he was bored or disinterested. By the spring of 1915, in the flyleaves of his first-year algebra textbook, he set up a table of contents for miniature plays he had begun to write, or planned to write. He called them Three-Minute Plays for Three Persons. They were distinguished by exotic settings and characters and, of course, the economy of action and character development mandated by the three-minute framework. Sitting in algebra class in his worn, outdated, second- or thirdhand clothes, Thornton transported himself into another world, vividly populated by characters he imagined and invented, or characters he had read about. He also planned to create full-length dramas, which would, he daydreamed, be staged in theaters where they would "alternate with The Wild Duck and Measure for Measure." He had grand visions of having his plays produced, and even cast them "with such a roll of great names as neither money nor loyalty could assemble." The world he imagined could, at least for a time, supersede the real world he inhabited.

"Authors of fifteen and sixteen years of age spend their time drawing up title-pages and adjusting the tables of contents of works they have neither the perseverance nor the ability to execute," he wrote in 1928, when he was thirty-one. But the perseverance and execution would grow eventually out of his dreaming imagination, and the hunger to express it.

Excerpted from Thornton Wilder: A Life by Penelope Niven, forthcoming October 30, 2012, by HarperCollins. Copyright ©2012 by Penelope Niven. Licensed by arrangement with Penelope Niven and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.