Biographers From The United States

"This whole business of the slaughter of…birds…for their plumes for millinery purposes is one that every lover of nature and every person of humane feeling who understands the case will regard no less than infamous. This is one of the moral questions—to be classed with the opium traffic and the slave trade—to which there is but one side. In these days there is arising a many-sided and tremendous problem in regard to saving the natural world from ignorant, short-sighted, commercial vandalism. Every tree must be cut down, every plant pulled up, every wild thing slaughtered, every beautiful scene disfigured, if only there is money to be made from it."

"DDT anywhere is DDT everywhere."

"“Now celebrities are not ordinary people,” says Clement. “The world treats them differently and, therefore, they react differently.”"

"“I don’t think Roger…was particularly religious in a Bible, church way,” says Lasley. “His religion was life. Nature.”"

"“I had always thought that accidents happened to other people. From now on I will fasten my seat belt,” he (Roger Tory Peterson) said."

"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

"Novelists talk about their characters starting to do things they didn’t expect them to. Well, I imagine every writer of biography or history, as well as fiction, has the experience of suddenly seeing a few pieces of the puzzle fit together. The chances of finding a new piece are fairly remote — though I’ve never written a book where I didn’t find something new — but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough."

"On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer."

"Unless there is freedom of religion it is useless to speak of any other form of freedom."

"What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam."

""Thomas Nast has been our best recruiting sergeant," said Abraham Lincoln near the close of the Civil War. "His emblematic cartoons have never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism, and have always seemed to come just when those articles were getting scarce." The emblematic semi-historical drawings referred to by President Lincoln did not begin until near the end of the second year of the struggle, though from the very commencement of his war work there had been strong sentiment and pictorial value in the young artist's drawings, undoubtedly due to his own intense loyalty to the Union; and these did not fail, through the medium of his forceful skill, to awaken a wide and eager response."

"Gales of temperament can rage around her—she remains undisturbed ... I have seen her at a time when anyone else would have been distraught with anxiety, come quietly in from the set, eat her lunch calmly and collectedly (for first of all, Lillian believes in keeping fit for her work), then pick up some little book of philosophy and read it steadily until they sent for her."

"It was his custom to stay in bed until noon, and he remained there during most of the earlier dictations, clad in a handsome dressing gown, propped against great snowy pillows. He loved this loose luxury and ease and found it conducive to thought. On a little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers, pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading lamp, making more brilliant his rich coloring and the gleam of his shining hair. There was daylight, too, but it was north light and the winter days were dull, the walls of the room a deep, unreflecting red. His bed was a carved antique affair, its outlines blending into the luxuriant background. The whole, focusing to the striking central figure, made a picture of classic value. His talk was absorbingly interesting—it never failed to be that, even when it left something to be desired as history. Mark Twain's memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with crystal accuracy."

"With Peard and other officers, Nast stopped at the Hotel Trinacria, and next morning set out to view the city. And now, for the first time, he realized some of the horrors of war. There had been a fierce bombardment from the Neapolitan vessels, also from the Palermo citadel and royal palace, before the final surrender. Ruined palaces were on every hand. Whole districts were in ashes. In some of the houses, families had been burned alive. A multitude of men and women, led by monks and armed with pickaxes, were destroying the hated citadel whose capture had cost them so much. Of this scene the artist made a careful sketch, which appeared in the London News of July 28th."

"Solzhenitsyn has re-written George Orwell's novel, using the facts of his life as his pen. He represents the victory of Winston Smith. Truth, it seems, is not only stranger than fiction; it has a happier ending."

"The authentic presence of goodness is love and its manifestation in virtue; the authentic presence of truth is to be seen in the culture's conformity to reason, properly understood as an engagement with the objective reality beyond the confines of egocentric subjectivism; the authentic presence of the beautiful is a reverence for the beauty of Creation and creativity, properly perceived in the outpouring of gratitude which is the fruit of humility. A society informed and animated by such a culture is truly civilized. A civilized man is not animated by a desire to shape himself into an image of his "self," which is itself unknowable, but is willing to allow himself to be shaped into an image of the perfect Person beyond himself."

"Whether it's conscious or subconscious, intentional or unintentional, a work of art always embodies and incarnates in some sense the deepest-held beliefs of an author. Therefore, an author's theology and philosophy, in the context of the times in which the author lives, are clearly going to inform the work."

"Today, after the Soviet Union's demise, and after the statues of Stalin have been ignominiously toppled, it is easy to forget the sheer enormity of Solzhenitsyn's achievement. Quite simply, what he did was considered to be impossible. It was beyond belief that one man could defy the communist state and survive. It was even more unbelievable that he should not only survive, but that he should play a significant role in the state's downfall and that he should outlive the state itself. Solzhenitsyn's life and example flew in the face of the "reality" of the "realists"."

"was, or should be, a key to the treasures of mystical experience, a means of expressing through sub-creation man's unity with the primary Creation of which he is part. It could also, in its highest form, be an expression of the homesickness of the soul in spiritual exile, a longing for that eternal realm for which the soul begins to ache."

"... harassing problems must often be solved in order to produce scholarly biographical writing regarding the supporting actors upon the historical stage. For example, it is commonly difficult to find adequate source materials. In addition, a serious problem of organization frequently occurs. Thus it is not easy to achieve unity in an account of the activities of a minor personage who played a relativity small part in various scenes. Again, there is an almost overwhelming temptation to exaggerate the importance of such a person."

"Man is greatly tempted to see in past events the directing hand of God, or ineluctable Fate, or historical laws. The Americans were long inclined to believe that they were a chosen people, that they had a special mission, that the Deity guided them as He did the ancient Israelits. The historian, alas, must obtain his information from defective human records and remains. He cannot find the decree of the Divine declaring such to be His intentions."

"I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story."

"The recent effort to find a new meaning for the Second Amendment comes from the failure of appeals to other sources as a warrant for the omnipresence of guns of all types in private hands. Easy access to all these guns is hard to justify in pragmatic terms, as a matter of social policy. Mere common law or statute may yield to common sense and specific cultural needs. That is why the gun advocates appeal, above pragmatism and common sense, to a supposed sacred right enshrined in a document Americans revere. Those advocates love to quote Sanford Levinson, who compares the admitted “social costs” of adhering to gun rights with the social costs of observing the First Amendment. We have to put up with all kinds of bad talk in the name of free talk. So we must put up with our world-record rates of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings because, whether we like it or not, the Constitution tells us to. Well, it doesn’t."

"So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are going to take any real and practical steps toward sanity? Everyone knows we are not going to do a single damn thing. We can’t. We are captives of The Gun. The Gun is patriotic. The Gun is America. The Gun is God."

"The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it? Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.""

"I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance."

"Nobody said not to go."

"With my usual sublime self-confidence, I rode roughshod over the objections."

"The mind of a traveler has only one spotlight, and it is always trained on the present scene."

"Free choice is a very precious thing."

"Abductees," Eva said, "are souls that have, for their individual purposes and reasons, chosen the probability of physical form." But through their experiences they are "regaining their memory of source . . . The process of abduction is one form of such, of regaining memory." The abduction "experience itself," Eva said, "is a mechanism to remove" the "structures that impede the reconnection with source," and to purify the physical vehicle in such a way to serve to regain better memory and to bring knowledge to others."

"By definition, a catalogue raissonne employs methodical scholarship to gather and digest in systematic form all that can be known of an artist's work and life. In short the evidence of his intellectual and cultural life."

"The success of The Killer Inside Me and Thompson's good relationship with Arnold Hano unleashed in the writer a creative fury. In the following two years he wrote a dozen novels. These included the autobiographical Bad Boy and the deliriously self-revealing The Alcoholics, as well as such twisted crime classics as A Hell of a Woman and Savage Night, both dark, disorienting suspense stories. Hano's discerning, open-minded editorship allowed Thompson to experiment, to take these tales into strange, innovative territory."

"When this book first appeared in the enchanted island of the 1950s, I was struck both by Arnold Hano's writing style and his daring. The writing is what amateurs call effortless. Reading A Day in the Bleachers, you concentrate on the day, the game, the ball players, the fans, without much awareness of a man at a typewriter grunting and straining through the non-anesthetized labor that precedes the birth of a book. The scene and Mr. Hano's comments simply flow. Everyone who has written seriously knows that sustaining a flowing style is about as effortless as cleaning the Augean stables with a water pistol. [...] This book is about the bleachers, the people on the wooden benches and the ball players beyond. It is about a time and a team and a ball park that are gone. It is the first, and perhaps the best, of all the books written from the point of view of the man in the stands and I am glad to see it get a second chance."

"On Sept. 29, 1954, some 52,751 people jammed into the Polo Grounds to see the first game of that series. One of them was a highly articulate Giant fan named Arnold Hano. "A Day in the Bleachers" tells the story of his own thoughts and experiences at the Polo Grounds, and of the game that day, which will long be remembered in baseball history and folk lore. He writes simply, clearly and amusingly of his adventures there. He has an eye for baseball detail, and also an ear for the dialogue of the fans. He believes that Giant fans, like himself, are unique. He claims that "a Yankee fan is a complacent old fat cat" who knows nothing about baseball. Dodger fans, while not ignorant "are a surly lot, riddled by secret fears and inferiority complexes." Be that as it may, and even though Mr. Hano is not without his own baseball prejudices, he is a unique fan. He has written a pleasing and attractive book, recreating an almost legendary day in the history of baseball. He describes the practice before the game, gives vignettes of other bleacher denizens, and writes us a dramatic account of the game itself—and, though we know its outcome, our interest is held here as it might be in a novel. Bob Feller doing acrobats [sic] in the outfield before the game, Sal Maglie taking the long walk to the clubhouse, Willie Mays' miraculous catch of Wertz's drive—all this is neatly woven into the book. The book charmingly recreates the experience of seeing an important ball game. It will make good reading for baseball fans, especially for unique Giant fans who (with their team still behind the Dodgers) can only wait for last year."

"Jim Thompson. Dead 14 years next month. The Academy Awards are upon us, and as I write this, I do not know what's been nominated for what. But I have a hunch this is the year of Thompson. I believe somebody famous will stand there to thank God and Swifty Lazar, if you can tell the difference, and then with a stifled sob, add a special thanks to Jim Thompson. And people will stand and cheer his name. I only hope Alberta is right, and that Jimmy hears the applause. But I doubt it. Jim Thompson stories seldom have happy endings."

"Jim was a big sheepdog of a man, 6-feet-4, 250 pounds, softhearted, soft-spoken. I never heard him use a dirty word; I never heard him tell a salacious story. Yet his novels are full of such words and stories; he seemed to have a need to dig deeply into the dark depraved nature of man. Nobody did it better. But then, anything he did, he did better. Two years ago, crippled by strokes, he appeared in a film, "Farewell, My Lovely," playing the cuckolded judge. When his wife in the film, played by Charlotte Rampling, carries on with Robert Mitchum in front of him, there is a look on his face that is part bewilderment, part despair and all forgiveness. He was that way, turning up the dark corners of the soul with love and forgiveness."

"Alfie was an organizer. He would telephone the other kids a week before that first practice session (which he euphemistically called spring training), and he would knock on their doors the morning of, and they would look out the windows and say, "Hey, it's snowing," and he would say, "It's not snowing all that hard. See you in a half-hour." So we would gather our tired, cold bodies together, throw on our baseball clothes—old shirts, old pants, sneakers, old baseball gloves—and grab a couple of bats and scuffed-up balls, and we would pile onto the subway and ride to Van Cortland Park. We would run to make sure we'd be first to claim a ball field. Of course we were first. Nobody else was that crazy. My brother would direct practice for a couple of hours, batting practice, catching fungoes, fielding, practicing our curves and drops on the sidelines, fingers aching from contact with batted or thrown baseballs. We threw ourselves across that hard bone of a field so we would be ready when the spring suns finally thawed the ground at our feet. If the still-awake dreams of hunting lions in Africa were the peak moments of my night life, those frozen ball fields of February were the highlights of my days."

""It was not always so," he said slowly. "When I was a boy—stealing horses was not a crime. It was the way of a brave man, a warrior. Horses then served the purposes of the tribe." He could tell them more, but what he could tell them would perhaps disgust them, confuse them. He had told them enough. Tomacito could have told how Indian tribes rode horses, and when the horses grew old and useless, or when the tribe grew desperate for hunger or for shelter, they drank their horses' blood, stripped their hides for teepees, ate the flesh. Cruel, yes, but necessary. They bought horses, traded for horses, and if they had to—and often they had to—they stole horses. The Spaniards came, and then the white man, and they had horses, and the Indians had none, in the beginning. The white man and the Spaniard, on horses, chased the Indian from his own land. The Indians, on foot, were easy to chase, to hunt down, and kill. With horses, the Indians could stand and fight and die, or run and hide and live a little longer. It was an unfair fight from the start, even with horses, but without horses, it wasn't a fight at all. It was a massacre."

"Click. The spare camera was now focussed and working. The lead mare—Barb Nose's—saw the drop. She cut her stride and wheeled and ran along the dangerous edge. Barb Nose ran in the vanguard, protecting the rear, driving the foals ahead of him. Blaze Face had long since cut and run, taking his beaten stallion flesh off to be nursed, to wait for another day, another elder to challenge. The other mares expertly and instinctively followed the leader as she rimmed the mesa, heading for the foothills of the El Gatos. One foal, too, made the cut, on stick-like legs, frightened but blindly following. The second foal had truly been blinded by panic. He strode to the drop-off and never stopped. He was a wild horse, and he had to run, and now he would run free forever. Plunging headlong over the drop, body whirling, his legs still flailing, as he fell through the desert air and past the serrated rock walls of the mesa, he knew nothing of time. He knew nothing of the eons that had gone before him, building this mesa of bluff and sandstone and archean rock. He fell through layers of time, to timelessness, a living thing for so little time. Once a living work of art, now a broken artifact. One foal. Dead. Murdered by man. Murdered by time. The drumbeat of the earth was lessened by one horse's tiny hooves. And all of us were lessened by this new silence. Click."

"Nobody ever wrote so well so fast as Jim. One year he wrote, and we published, nine novels. It was an obsession. Back in 1941, his father had been in an asylum in Oklahoma City, begging Jim to get him out. Jim needed money to get him out, so he said to his father, "Give me a month, and I'll raise the money." His father brightened, because Jim never went back on his word. Jim took a bus to New York City and went door to door to the publishing houses, asking for money for a hotel room, a rented typewriter and meals so he could write a novel. Finally, at Modern Age, they took a chance, and in 10 days he wrote a novel. But things being what they are in publishing, it was a month plus one day before Jim got his advance. The same day, a telegram arrived. His father had committed suicide, ripping the excelsior out of his mattress and stuffing it down his throat. When Jim would drink he would sometimes cry and say, "Why couldn't he have waited another day? Didn't he trust me?""

"Jim Dilley, the father of the Laguna Greenbelt, used to take roses to the secretaries of the county Board of Supervisors when he'd go to do battle over open space with the secretaries' bosses. Jim Dilley was a nice man, kind and gentle. He smoked a pipe. His eyes twinkled as though he knew a joke the rest of us didn't. But he's dead, and the Board is still alive, and that is a joke on us of monstrous proportions. I'm not nice, kind or gentle. The Board keeps rubber-stamping building permits, and this is my goodbye to these shores. After 36 years, my wife and I will soon leave Orange County for Costa Rica, to join the Peace Corps, and that, too, is a joke. We traipse off to bring peace to Costa Rica, which hasn't had an army since 1948."

"She snorted. My wife has three ways of showing disapproval. She harangues loud and long when she is not very sure of her position. Or she may be entirely silent when she is terribly sure. This is usually an act of kindness on her part, as though she were dealing with a dumb animal. Or, lastly, she may snort. This means, I have at last learned, that she disagrees, that she thinks I am a dumb animal, and by God, kindness can go just so far."

"I’m the luckiest fan in the history of the world. When I was a copy boy at the Daily News, I was sitting in the Ebbets Field press box when that ball got away from Mickey Owen. I won a limerick contest and I sat in right field and watched pitch his perfect game. Now, I had to be smart to write the limerick, but Larsen had been bombed in the previous outing in that Series, he could’ve been bombed again. It could’ve been an 11–9 ballgame."

"All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man’s arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made."

"So we went to see Babe Ruth pitch the last game of the 1933 season. The Senators had already clinched the pennant, the Giants had clinched in the other league, so this was just a nothing game. I thought maybe he’d make an appearance, pitch an inning or two or three – he pitched a complete game. He hadn’t pitched a complete game since 1930, and then he pitched a complete game. And before that he had pitched two four-inning stints for the Yankees, so he pitched four times. So he pitched a complete game, he gave up twelve hits, it was not a great pitching performance, but the Yankees won, 7-5. He didn’t strike out a soul. Years later I saw him on Broadway. I went up to him and said, “Hi, Babe.” He said, “Hi, kid.” That’s the way he treated everybody. I said, “You know, I saw you pitch your last game at the Stadium.” This was maybe eight years later or so. I said, “How come you didn’t strike out anybody?” And he said, “I wanted those other eight guys to earn their money!” And that was Ruth."

"He always threw to the right base. We say that about most outfielders. Ruth always threw to the right base. DiMaggio always threw to the right base. The others maybe did, maybe didn’t. Mays most of the time threw to the right base, but Ruth always threw to the right base."

"Sometimes in his last years they’d take him out after maybe seven innings and put in Sammy Byrd or some other right fielder for defensive purposes because he was getting pretty out of shape. And we kids, we knew better, we knew the rule, but we’d yell “We want the Babe! We want the Babe!” from the seventh inning until the ninth inning. Once in a while he’d come out of the dugout and he’d lift up his cap or do something like that. We knew he couldn’t come back into the lineup, but that didn’t stop us. That’s the way we were. We loved him, and he loved us, which was very nice. A great combination. I’d see him in his great polo coat on Broadway sometimes, with his jaunty cap, and his wife and daughter walking along. He was just wonderful."

"You have seen bigger horses than his thirteen and a half, perhaps fourteen hands, his nine hundred pounds. You have seen handsomer profiles than this Roman nose, slightly convex. Burrs cling to his long sweeping tail. His coat is dark and unglossed. Yet look again, while he is still, for he will not be still long. Sense the vitality in those muscles, trembling beneath the skin; see the pride in that high head, hear the haughty command to his voice. For this is a wild horse, my friend. Once he claimed the western range. Then they took his range away from him. But nothing, no one claims him. He feels the wind and the air with his nose, with his ears, with his very soul, and what he feels is good. He tosses his head, once, quickly, and behind him his harem of six mares trot up to join him, and behind them, a yearling colt, a filly and two stork-legged foals. Coats dusty and chewed, tails spiked with bits of the desert, sage and nettle and leftover pine needles from winter climbs down from timberland. The Barb-nosed stallion led his family down to the waterhole. Not Barb from barbed wire, though perhaps the chewed skin was from barbed wire, but Barb from the Spanish horses from which he descended, brought to the New World over four hundred years ago, from the Barbary states of North Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Fez, Tripoli. Indians stole them from the Spaniards; the Barbs stole themselves free from the Indians. Running wild, a few still run free."

"He reacts to many things bitterly, this pleasant, smiling young man, who is 32 years old, married now, with two sons, a sports hero here and back home in Puerto Rico. Clemente reacts to things bitterly because he is an honest man, and a feeling one. Baseball has become a game of automatons performing in mechanical ways. Scoreboards now tell you when to cheer. The words "Go-go-go" light up, and you obediently recite, "Go-go-go." A bugle sounds, and reflexively you murmur, "Charge!" Roberto Clemente is a throwback, as are many of his Latin cohorts—which means he has his flaws. Anger can twist him almost helpless with rage. But it has also made him not only a leader of men—automatons are poor leaders—but also a spokesman for his people. He spoke out, during 1966, in an Associated Press dispatch of August 23..."