Writing Biography

A member of a book club that recently read "Frank: The Story of Frances Folsom Cleveland," as its monthly selection (thank you!) asked how I had managed to research and write biography. It is a good question.

Biography is, of course, the story of someone's life. Unlike fiction, in which the author must create every aspect of the novel - plot, characters, actions, motives, setting - biography offers a natural backdrop and a natural order to the organization of the material. You have a person who has been born, had a childhood, formative years, adulthood and, eventually, death. That, at least, makes the organization of the book easy - but finding material, particularly when one is researching an historic figure who was fastidious about concealing her private life, - is the heart of the challenge.

My early research was characterized by a simple timeline - key dates (birth, college years, marriage, etc.) - that was enhanced by noting the names of influential people and historical events associated with those dates. In writing about Frances, I spent untold hours in the Microfilm Division of the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, poring over the microfilms of the Grover Cleveland papers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

A research trip to two key places in Frances' life - Wells College, her alma mater, and the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Museum, in Caldwell, New Jersey - provided access to unique archival material. Inter-library loan enabled me to access additional materials although, to this day, I regret not having found the resources that would have enabled me to spend about a week in the Library of Congress going through the papers of many of Cleveland's cabinet members.

Then there is the pure serendipity of finding interesting little tidbits - a name, a reference, a quote that pops up that makes sense because I've been looking at the larger picture. Those are the gems that are the researcher's equivalent of panning for gold and finding the sought-after nuggets.

"Frank" is the product of many rewrites. The first set of rewrites occurred to prepare the manuscript for initial review; the second rewrite was the result of an honest, and much needed, critique. The challenge, to address the observations of a demanding reviewer (who was on target with the comments), was to demonstrate in the telling of Frances' life that she was not just another Gilded Age matron who did good works because it was expected of one in her social class. The message was clear: if I thought Frances was interesting enough to research and write about, convey to readers that she is worth reading about.

If the feedback I have received from readers is any indication, I succeeded in my task.