Five Favorites

In the past few issues of The Biographer's Craft newsletter, editor (and pal o'mine) James McGrath Morris has been asking biographers to list their top five favorite biographies. This month it's two authors of books on biographies, Carl Rollyson (of Biography: A User's Guide) and Nigel Hamilton (author of How to Do Biography: A Primer), along with Mr. Morris himself. It's always a fun piece, so check it out.

And while you're there, sign up for the monthly newsletter, mailed promptly to your inbox the first of each month--as an added bonus, this month's issue even contains an article on the upcoming Chaplin bio that I mentioned back here. The Biographer's Craft home page, which includes links to all the back issues, is hardlinked over there in the right hand column on this page. Or you can just click here.

Reading through this month's list of five favorites got me thinking about which five bios I would pick as my own five favorites. And because I know you can't wait, I'll write about them here tomorrow.

Oh, and finally, just because I'm always a shameless shill, here's a piece I wrote for Biographer's Craft several months ago on the advantages of keeping misspelled words and botched grammar from your original source materials intact in your final product.