4 ms·
The Future of Biography
- ggambetta 8y agoStopped reading at "how many readers will want a heavyweight linear narrative about a Dead White Male?"
- cafard 8y agoI do find Robert Caro awfully hard going. Having said that, when the DWM is LBJ, I would be open to reading a less minutely documented linear biography. Based on what I see on bookshelves, DWM biographies (of presidents, military leaders, sports figures) still do sell.
- bena 8y ago> When you download future biographies of, say, Leonard Cohen or Justin Trudeau, with one tap you’ll be able to watch a concert version of “Hallelujah” or the filial eulogy to Trudeau père. This has been the promise of the web since the beginning. I'm willing to bet that by 2047, this still isn't a thing (using the beginning of the WWW and then going forward that many years). > Plenty of tomorrow’s biographers will bypass print altogether. The death of paper has been predicted many times. We use more paper now than we did then. > Podcasts and YouTube biopics free their creators from the constraints of linear chronology in a way that is harder to achieve with the written word. A. No, it's not really harder. And B. the biopic has existed for as long as films and it has not killed the written biography. > Charlotte Gray (charlottegray.ca) is a historian whose latest book is The Promise of Canada: 150 Years—People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country. And she promotes her own book. Which I find ironic given the article about how books are done. Why not a podcast or YouTube series that can free her from the constraints of the written word? Basically she wrote a biography of Canada.