I hope this doesn’t come across as a banal question/topic, but *why* are biographies so long?
To clarify, I read a lot of history, and have little issue with doing deep delves(multiple books on the same subject) into topics that I’m interested in, but I find biographies about singular persons clocking in at 900+ pages to be really daunting or even off-putting.
Its my impression that most (popular)history books on a particular topic or event might be..say 550 pages or so, and that might cover a certain topic, decades even and multiple people and viewpoints.
And then there’s a biography about *one* singular person, and that’s covered in 900 pages? 😛
I will admit that I haven’t read that many biographies, but I find that they go into too much detail and minutiae, I get that we are meant to really get to know the person, but is it really necessary to quote *that* many letters or account for *all* their trips or meetings?
In short; why are biographies accepted/published in such, IMO, huge page counts?
And yes, page counts do matter, there are so many books and only so little time.
(I realize I might be a brute/barbarian in my viewpoint here, but…convince me?)
by Somewhat_appropriate
7 Comments
Nothing to convince you of. You don’t like long biographies. Some biographies are long. Some aren’t.
Some peoples’ stories take many pages to tell. A Churchill biography is going to be longer than Keith Richards’. It depends on the person’s life and what the biographer wants to tell about it.
My theory is that the biographies you’re thinking of are those of already famous people (?).
If so then yea they get pretty bloated but the publishers know there is a hungry audience so they encourage size to go with the high price. Maybe?
If you want a leaner biography then I’d recommend “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened “ by Jenny Lawson.
Some people have led very interesting lives and there is a lot to say about them.
Biographies tend to be as long as they need to be. The point of a biography is go in depth on a person’s life. For certain figures, there are biographies of varying lengths you can choose from.
I don’t know that they are always so long, really. If I look at the historical biographies which I have personally I see only two which are super long (of Metternich and of Gladstone; both politicians with very long careers in very important positions), and many others- even of equally powerful people (e.g. James VI & I, Martin Luther, Douglas Haig which are much shorter, about 400 pages.
But it’s certainly true that super-long biographies exist, as do multi-volume ones (like Ian Kershaw’s famous Hitler biography, or Robert Caro on LBJ). I think a biography is often harder to cut down because most are setting out to cover an entire life, and a publisher will be reluctant to say “cut the last ten years out” which is more possible with other histories. And that means going beyond the more conventional periodisation, too- and going beyond when the subject ‘mattered’. As an example- if you’re reading a history of the Nazis you expect it to cover 1933-45, with maybe a few introductory chapters which are earlier. If you’re reading a Hitler biography you want to know what made the man who he was before he was important, and they’ll spend a ton of time on his life in Imperial Vienna or his wartime experience.
Unlike say a general history, readers expect a certain amount of granular detail so to speak; a lot of biography readers will want to know about the subject’s breakfast habits, or their affairs, hobbies they pursued other than what they were known for. A biographer wants to immerse you deeply in the subject’s world and that requires time and detail. And I think it’s quite likely that readers are more accepting of a thousand pages in biography than in other areas, because they want that detail.
But at the end of the day there are big non-biographies and small biographies too. A biography is a project which quite easily grows larger and larger, but so too might other projects.
And incidentally, a recommendation for a small biography- Jane Dawson’s *John Knox* and Lyndal Roper’s *Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet* are both really excellent, the first just over 300 pages and the second just over 400 (although *Knox* has admittedly small text). I don’t know if the Reformation is relevant to your historical interests but if it is then read these!
Biographies are supposed to be a detailed and contextualized telling of an entire life. Depending on what someone did, a lot of context could be really important.
For me personally a good biography goes beyond the “what happened” and gets to the “why it happened” of a person’s life. I can find the major events of their life on Wikipedia. When I read a biography I’m looking for what influenced people’s decisions both internally and externally.
A good biographer provides enough detail so that you can build that worldview – so that you can put yourself in the subject’s view and understand the decisions they made.
That takes a lot of words to pull off well especially when considering the whole life of a person.
Some of the best biographies are the Pulitzer Prize winners, like Robert Caro’s huge books on Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, and John Adams by David McCullough. They’re huge, but superb. Well worth it.