That Vladimir Nabokov should wind up as a master stylist of the English language is wildly improbable.

You really want the life and times even with a Twain or a Wilde the voice alone wouldn’t justify the volume. Q: You’ve said in talks that biography is a like ‘gossip with footnotes’ can you elaborate more about what readers of the genre should expect?Ī: I like to think that a great biography illuminates a slice of history through an individual temperament and at the same time does something of the reverse. It’s what we’d all prefer to forget about ourselves, the anti-Kodak moment. Joan Didion points out that her notebook entries consist of ‘what some would call lies’ ‘I always had trouble,’ she writes in On Keeping a Notebook, ‘distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened.’ What you’re in search of, as the biographer, is ‘that bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast,’ as Yeats had it. Vera Nabokov left a few pages that belong in that category she began a notebook on Lolita’s triumph.

The holy grail is the diary written not for posterity, but that its author never expected anyone to read. Nearly all of the documents of the French foreign ministry written about the American Revolution were composed to mislead one party or another. But documents mislead and mangle too the US intelligence reports on Saint-Exupery’s wartime activities in NYC are hilarious in their misapprehensions. Q: So much of your time is spent researching primary sources and historical documents how much of a grain of salt do you carry with you as pour over these materials, especially when you encounter letters or diary entries which are subject to the biases of human memory?Ī: A biographer should be skeptical by nature - perhaps nowhere more so than in interviews. We caught up with Schiff to learn more about what it takes to write biographies. Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Stacy Schiff (pictured, via) has written about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French aviator), Vera Nabokov (wife/muse to Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov), Benjamin Franklin (American diplomat/inventor), and most recently, Cleopatra VII (the last queen/pharoah of Egypt).

Stacy Schiff Shares Advice for Aspiring Biographers

Vera nabokov biography