Enough Already

Do we need more bios of the very well known?

by Bill Morris -- Publishers Weekly, 2/27/2006

After my first two novels were published to warm reviews, I thought I was on my way as a writer. I thought wrong. When my third novel failed to sell, I decided to write a biography of Harley Earl, the father of American automotive design. Earl started out making custom cars for Fatty Arbuckle and other early stars of the motion-picture industry in his native Hollywood. Then in 1927 he moved to Detroit, where he became a legend at General Motors, a flashy dresser with an acid tongue who roared around town in otherworldly "concept" cars and hobnobbed with the likes of Alfred Sloan and Bob Hope. Earl's life had it all—celebrities, gorgeous cars, money and power, art, womanizing, blackmail, even a suicide in the family.

When I learned that one of Earl's grandsons had amassed a trove of documents on Harley's life and career, we struck a deal: he would provide the raw material; I would write the biography. I thought I was on my way again.

Wrong again. My collaborator and I spent months refining a proposal. We found an agent. And I started having visions of the auction—a dozen rabid editors locked in a room while their bids kept jumping like kangaroos on a scalding griddle.

Wrong yet again. One editor rejected it by saying, "Harley Earl is an unknown figure and I fear the book is terribly small." Another editor wrote that it's difficult to resurrect "a forgotten subject." The fact that these rejections were often accompanied by a flattering word or two about my writing ability made it all the more frustrating.

A theme quickly emerged—it wasn't me; it was him. Or rather, anyone with a similarly low public profile. Publishers seem to believe that only well-known people are worth reading about. The obverse is even more distressing: less famous people, no matter how fascinating or influential, are not worth reading about.

In the past year alone, American publishers have come out with at least half a dozen new books about the Beatles and twice as many about Pope John Paul II, as well as new retellings of the over-examined lives of Theodore Roosevelt, Chairman Mao, Elia Kazan, Jimi Hendrix, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Sam Cooke, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Darwin, Rosa Parks, Wernher Von Braun, Pol Pot and, of course, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. A quick Google search reveals that through the years there have been roughly 13,000 books on Lincoln and more than twice as many on Washington, give or take a few thousand.

These people all have two things in common: their names are instantly recognizable, and their stories have been told before. In some cases dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times before. And that, it appears, is precisely what makes them irresistible to American publishers. They may not have the capacity to astonish, but at least they don't carry the dreaded baggage of risk.

So while the publishing industry whines incessantly about its anemic bottom line, it continues to pump out biographies about the same old people. While I don't expect anyone to care much about the distress of one aspiring biographer, I do think there's more at stake here. Maybe, just maybe, sales wouldn't be so flat if publishers were willing to take a risk every once in a while. Crazy as it sounds—maybe readers actually want something fresh and new.

The chocolate tycoon Milton A. Hershey and the British soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon are not exactly household names, yet recent biographies of them are enjoying favorable reviews and respectable, if not spectacular, sales. Hmm, perhaps Harley Earl's biography still has a pulse.

Or maybe I'll write a biography of Paris Hilton.