On Writing Biography

     I am an academic.  That word smells bad to most people who think of academics as isolated specimens who live in something called ivory towers.  I don't like the word very much either, mostly because I don't like academics very much, not personally (they think way too much of themselves) or professionally (for the same reason).  They pose a lot.  They feel superior.  They make me sick.
     But that doesn't alter the fact that I am one.  For me, however, the word carries a different set of connotations.  For me being an academic is a noble calling.  For me the word identifies a person who dedicates his life to study, to research, to advancing knowledge by publishing previously unknown findings.
     At least that's the way it was taught to me by a great mentor, Warren Stanley Walker.  He was an academic too, the best kind, a scholar who pursued his work as though he were searching for the Holy Grail itself.  And he published a long string of impressive books and articles.  To follow in his footsteps was an honor I hardly thought myself worthy of.  That's why it's a noble calling to me.
     As I pursued a Ph.D., I fell eventually under the wing of another scholar of the first order, Kenneth Silverman at New York University.  Ken won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in 1984 for a biography called The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, and under his guidance I wrote a mostly biographical study of an early American poet, statesman, and businessman, David Humphreys from Connecticut.  It was published in 1982.  Then I wrote a full-dress life of the mid-century poet John Ciardi that was published in 1998 and got an award from the influential Choice magazine, Academic Book of the Year.  After that I tried my hand at autobiography, and published my own life in 2011.
    Which brings me to the work I'm occupied with right now, a look at the private life of nineteenth-century American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.   It isn't finished yet, and I don't have a publisher lined up for it yet either, but so far the book I'm calling "The Rustle of Silk, Longfellow in Love" seems to be coming along fine.  I can almost see the end in sight.  Not quite, but almost.
     Now and then, my non-academic friends show an interest in the mysterious work that keeps me tied to my computer for such long hours.  But how can I tell them about the business of biography?  How can I explain my calling without posing as an intellectual or "putting on airs"?
     It's tempting, of course, to launch into a lecture on conducting research, on taking usable notes, on learning all about the times as well as the work of your subject.  And it's tempting to talk about the art of organizing notes and creating an outline and writing sentences one at a time until they make paragraphs that eventually work themselves into chapters that finally become a book.  But that's way out of touch with what people, even good people, want to know.  It's way too much of an answer.
     I came up with an analogy.  "It's sort of like working on a ten-million piece jigsaw puzzle," I say.  "You've got all the pieces in front of you (if you've done your research right), but now you have to collect all the pieces and see which ones go where.  Eventually you will have the image of your subject, but until you've put the last piece into place, the whole thing is incomplete.  It's tricky that way."
     In the end, unfortunately and unavoidably, the business of being a scholar and writing biography turns me into what I dread most:  an isolated specimen living in an ivory tower.  I am an academic.