The current harvest of popular political biography-a higher and more literate form, perhaps, of the TV and tabloid stories that reigned during the decade of O.J., Diana, John Jr., Columbine, and Elián González-comes to us, in part, courtesy of the end of ideology and of the idea of historical inevitability. It is as if Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory of history, a rather heavy 19th-century idea, had been genetically crossed with People magazine to create a genre of historical infotainment: retrospection compounded of scholarship, vivid period drama and soap opera at the highest levels.
In the age of chaotic electronic information, there seems to be an indefatigable production line turning out big, solid biographies, written to the weight and bulk of footlockers. Robert Caro's epic life of Lyndon Johnson, now running to three volumes, with more to come, is one of the great American biographies.Īnd so on. Edmund Morris is taking a break from his Theodore Roosevelt sequence to write a book about Beethoven. Doris Kearns Goodwin, biographer of the Kennedys and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, will publish a new examination of Abraham Lincoln next spring. Rockefeller's biographer, has written a brilliant new study of Alexander Hamilton. In Grace and Power, Sally Bedell Smith has brought her impressive gifts as a reporter to bear upon the Kennedy White House.
The young British writer Simon Sebag Montefiore has just produced Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, a savagely intimate portrait of one of history's more impenetrable characters. The first years of the millennium have become, for interesting reasons, a golden age of popular political biography.
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