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In writing a biography, persistence aided by nosiness is a requirement. As collaborators, one of the qualities Sandra Jordan and I share is curiosity about the lives of others. When we discuss ideas for subjects for our biographies, we always ask ourselves, “What is their story?” More often than not, the artist’s childhood experiences are reflected in the art she/he makes as an adult. The sculptor Richard Serra at age four witnessed the launching of a tanker, and the angle of the ship’s prow formed a lasting impression, one that is evident in his looming metal sculptures today. The stories artists told us inspired us to move from books about learning to look at twentieth century art to books that dealt with the life and art of individual artists, such as Chuck Close, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and others.
Sandra talked about some of the ways we research, ferreting out new material, last month. Despite all the catalogues we read, interviews, visits to artists’ homes, studios, and museums that exhibit their works, there is so much more we need to discover. What motivated them? What made them unique? We had to examine their successes and failures, as well as their sometimes difficult personalities. Some of these talented people led messy lives. There is no correlation between being a good painter or writer or dancer and being a good person. As biographers, we must decide whether to make judgments or stick to the facts. We try to tell the truth up to a point as nonjudgmentally as we can because our focus is on the art. We tell details of the artists’ lives if they informed the work or shaped their personalities. For example, Jackson Pollock’s best work was done when he was sober; yet alcoholism led to a decline in his work and his eventual death. In Action Jackson, which was geared for younger readers, we focused on the creative process, describing how Pollock made one painting from start to finish. The book was nonfiction but not a biography. Therefore there was no reason to talk about his personal problems in the text, although we there is a reference in a short bio in the back matter. We don’t shy away from controversial material in full length biographies. In Andy Warhol: Prince of POP, geared for young adults, his homosexuality and involvement in the 60’s drug culture impacted his life, as well as his art. But his innovative work and influence in artmaking, films, books, and advertising were our focus. The anecdotal material of his full life was amusing, poignant, and always fascinating.
Another consideration is how much do children at age eight or above know? In our next book Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring (Fall, 2010), we made a number of school visits to share the text and ask questions to find out what dance, art, or music terms young readers know. We could then return to the study, revising and refining, based on what we learned. It was also fun to see what students responded to in showing the illustrations and reading the story of this celebrated collaboration between Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi and Aaron Copland.
The details that delight children, delight us as adults. But in writing non-fiction, especially a biography, the goal is to get beyond the details, to dig beneath the surface, thus obtaining a fuller view of the person’s life. We gain so much more by setting ourselves aside and inhabiting someone else’s skin for awhile. We expand our view of ourselves. We feel better in the company of Martha Graham, Andy Warhol, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, because they struggled with same human problems we all do; yet in spite of difficult times, they worked hard, cared about their art, and managed to say something fresh and meaningful about our culture. They never gave up!

Last week I took a train ride from New Jersey to Washington, D.C., for a quick trip to the Library of Congress. I do it every year or so, both to collect research material for whatever project I’m working on and to gain inspiration from the librarians, archivists, and other people who inhabit this amazing institution. Since visiting this mecca of inquiry is such a valued part of my work process, I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite things about the library.

1. The librarians and archivists are extraordinarily helpful. I spend a lot of my time at the library's Prints and Photographs Division, and everyone who works there seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of their holdings. What’s more, the staff treats every question with respect and interest, while having no end of patience with those of us who have to reacquaint ourselves with mastering the technology and the procedures for requesting material.

2. The breadth of the collections is unsurpassed. Want to watch Thomas Edison’s film of Annie Oakley shooting at targets? See Sitting Bull pose for a picture in swimming goggles? Read the “latest” news from a particular city in 1888? You can do all that and more in the library’s various reading rooms. All you need is a User Card, issued free at the library and good for two years.

3. It’s literally right next door to the Supreme Court and across the street from the Capitol. I don’t consider myself overly patriotic, but I can’t help but get a thrill when I’m a stone’s throw from the iconic buildings of our nation’s capital. Maybe it’s because as a kid, I took the requisite trip to Washington, D.C., with my parents. Maybe it's because I was a history major in college. Whatever the reason, the walk from Union Station to the Library of Congress takes me right past the centers of two of our three branches of government, and I find that awe-inspiring.

4. They have a great cafeteria. I’m a sucker for good, reasonably priced food, and the Library of Congress has a large cafeteria with a great view and a huge salad bar. Having spent many a day sequestered in libraries with no place to eat, I always appreciate the chance to take a quick break and get more sustenance than that provided by an energy bar.

Traveling is always a good thing for nonfiction writers. And I don’t mean, the traveling we do when we are aware that we are in the throes of research. No, that I call intentional research, and that is in its own category of wonderful. It’s the accidental research that I have grown so fond of; that has, in fact, become necessary to my process. The serendipitous discovery, shall we say? And serendipity, I believe, is critical component to a good story.

Accidental and serendipitous—these may not be two words that people associate with nonfiction. And yet, for me, they carry as much importance as the intentional, well-planned research tasks I set for myself. If I had figured this out at the age of 20, I might not attribute my consciousness of the importance of accidents and serendipity to being older and wiser, but there it is. It has taken a couple of decades of doing the work in a linear fashion to figure out that the nonlinear bears equal consideration in the process.

This week, I have been in Chicago, and my head is spinning. I have stumbled upon so many tidbits of information I didn’t know during visits to the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium—and even sitting in the theater watching Jersey Boys. My synapses are firing. My brain is sifting through the many “wow, really?” moments that have awakened new areas of consciousness and I now know, can really trust, that at some point in time a story will begin to form in my mind from these nuggets I have filed away. Will it be another space-related topic? Or will I return to my roots and look at animals in a whole new way for me? Perhaps one of the fascinating things I learned about the relationships in the art world will trigger something.

Two things I know for sure—1) the stimulating accidental research that occurred this week will bubble in my brain and 2) at some moment in the future a serendipitous comment or action will bring it shooting to the surface and an idea will emerge.
What this means to me is that the simple act of living my life has a direct and profound impact on the work that I pursue; the work that I love. And as I scroll through my colleagues’ posts just through the past few days, I see we have this strongly in common. What could be better than that?

At my last meeting with my writer buddy, all too long ago now, we began an interesting discussing on the nature and meaning of the hero in American society. She was exploring the idea through the endearing superhero loving main character of her middle grade novel. I was trying to understand why every time I started research on a new subject, I found heroic qualities in the most unexpected places.

Sports heroism is easy enough to relate to. It’s not difficult to admire the guy who scores the winning basket at the buzzer, hits the home run in the bottom of the ninth, or sends the champion down for the count with a swift left hook. Yet once you’ve spent some time getting to know these people, you quickly realize it’s their more human qualities that make them so appealing. Joe Louis was a dominating heavyweight boxer, but he was a champ to me for looking beyond the media’s portrayal of his opponent, Max Schmeling, as a symbol of Nazism and seeing a decent, hardworking athlete and friend. Hank Greenberg hit many amazing home runs for the Detroit Tigers but it was his willingness to stand proudly as a Jewish ballplayer in the 1940s that made him such a powerful guy.

Still, hero should not be confused with fabulous all around person who you’d like as a family member. It turns out a fair share of American heroes are some of the worst fathers you’d ever want to meet. Joe Louis was once at an event and didn’t even recognize his own son. One of Hank Greenberg’s sons stopped talking to him altogether after years of a strained, distant relationship. Even Jackie Robinson had such a difficult relationship with his son that he blamed himself for his drug addiction and early death in a car accident.

After researching all of these sports heroes, I turned to more historical figures. From what I already new, I wasn’t convinced I’d be interested in their heroic qualities. But then I remembered the common weakness I had found in so many strong men and I decided to start there. Thus my greatest discovery while researching became uncovering a popular, war-loving, powerful man of the 20th century who turned out to be one of the most loving father’s I’ve ever read about.

His name was Teddy Roosevelt. I read hundreds of the many thousands of letters he wrote to his children. His letters to his “bunnies” as he called his six children were sweet, funny, and endearingly personal. This was a man who knew his children and enjoyed being with them. Teddy was not the best athlete ever but he was an ace at pillow fighting and hide and go seek. Yes, he also happened to be the President of the United States but as Teddy himself once said, “compared to this home life, everything else was of very small importance from the standpoint of happiness.”

I had discovered a side to a man that kids had undoubtedly never read about. And I felt confident I could show them a fundamentally important reason to admire this famous hero. Research mission complete. Until the next subject.

Way back a few centuries ago in the mid-1980s, long before anyone had ever heard the word “internet,” I was assigned to write an article for Smithsonian magazine on the decline of a once-loved American institution, the drug store soda fountain. The research for my story led me to seek newspaper and magazine articles from the heyday of soda fountains in the early- and mid-20^th century.

If you are of a certain age, you will understand what I mean when I say that this endeavor resulted in my spending many hours in a public library squinting through a gargantuan, eye-straining machine known as a microfilm reader. If you are younger than that, herewith a brief explanation: to make back issues of certain magazines and newspapers accessible for years to come, a few companies were in the business of photographing the publications, page by page, and printing them onto acetate film in a much reduced size.

The film was called microfilm and in order to actually read it, a researcher could put the film into a machine called a microfilm reader and turn a cranking device (later replaced by an electric motor) in order to scroll to the section being sought. Lenses magnified the film onto a screen. Needless to say, it was no easy feat to find the right section and you had to watch unwanted pages whiz by, often zipping past the part you wanted. It was a pain in the . . . eyes. But who knew that such things as personal computers and internet browsers and search engines and digital archives would make the job a lot easier if only we were willing to wait a few decades?

Despite the trials of research by microfilm (and, slightly later, microfiche, a close cousin of microfilm that used flat sheets of film instead of rolls, thus avoiding the need for scrolling), it had some advantages. When you looked for an article in the New York Times about an especially popular soda fountain in Queens, as I did, you didn’t just get that article in isolation, but you got a glimpse into the world of 1951, as captured on the pages of the Times. There were other articles on the politics and culture and society and sporting events of the day, and there were advertisements that presented the tenor of the times as well as anything a journalist could have written. (In the course of reading about that Queens soda fountain, for example, I learned that big shiny luxury cars were selling for under $2,000. I reached for my credit card but then remembered that there were no credit cards back then.)

In the course of my research on soda fountains, conducted on the microfilm reader at the Wallingford (CT) Public Library, I stumbled upon a very short article, a space-filler, positioned on a back page of the New York Times of July 8, 1951. It briefly told the story of a 66-year old Swedish grandfather named Gustaf Håkansson who had just completed a 1,000-mile bicycle race despite having been barred from the race on account of his age. (How laughable that is in the context of a modern era in which athletes ten or fifteen years older than Gustaf routinely complete grueling races of many kinds -- but this was the early 1950s). Hakansson had, in fact, started his personal race well ahead of the other racers and, 158 hours 20 minutes later, he finished to the rapturous cheers of thousands of fans who had turned out just to see him — the official racers weren’t due in for another day!

Gustaf’s story enchanted me, a lifelong bicycle lover, and I decided it needed to be told in its stereotype-bashing entirety. First, of course, I had to find out the story in its entirety.

Using The Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature, an index that was then a staple on the reference shelves of libraries, I was able to find a more lengthy article about Gustaf in a long-defunct magazine called Lifetime Living. The article filled in some of the details, but I thought I’d need even more if I wanted to get into the mind of Gustaf and the psyche of his adoring fans. I hoped to see why he is, even to this day, remembered as a hero in Sweden.

Luckily, I had a Swedish friend living in the States who was getting ready to visit her family over the holidays. She offered to look in old Swedish newspapers for articles on the bushy-bearded bicyclist. She found several good ones and actually translated them into English for me. Another friend, studying at the University of Lund in Sweden, did further research with the help of a librarian friend.

The result was my picture book Supergrandpa, illustrated by Bert Dodson, later republished as Super Grandpa (with an audio CD of me reading the story with Swedish fiddle music in the background). In telling Gustaf’s story, I decided to “embroider” the actual facts to add to the dramatic tension, but in a page of back matter, I explained what actually happened.

To me, the most provocative lesson of this story is not about a bicycle ride in Sweden more than half a century ago. It is about differences in research methods between the internet era and the microfilm era. I’ll take the enormous power of the internet over the squinting inefficiency of microfilm readers any day. But let us not forget that sometimes the forgotten ways had their own power. Had I not been seduced by the charm of an old newspaper, the story of Gustaf Håkansson would probably still be buried in the back pages of a paper published on July 8th, 1951, and hardly noticed after July 9th.

And, one more post on July's theme of "great discoveries while researching"...

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." Pablo Picasso

"An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks would be a good idea to give them." Andy Warhol

"Every good artist paints what he is." Jackson Pollock


When researching a new artist, I always find myself asking the same question: "Why the heck did _____ make this?" And, then, after every class discussion, I'm giddy with new found knowledge about the passion of the artist.
Here's the truth: Yes, I took art history in college. For my entire Freshman year, three days a week, five hundred students stumbled into a darkened auditorium. For the next two hours, the instructor in a monotone voice explained slides of pictures from Janson's History of Art. Those chairs were cozy. And, the room was always toasty warm. Perfect sleeping conditions. If you weren't fast asleep, you spent the entire time fighting the natural response of nodding off.
I think I did well in the class only because the exams were multiple choice questions, straight from the book.

Now, while checking which artist I assigned for my own class, I ask, "What the heck was _______ thinking when he created this?" By the way, the benefit of running the program is that I purposely assign artists/artwork instead of letting the volunteers pick out what they want to present. Personally, I'd never make up my mind, but this system challenges me to find something that I (and the students) can relate to.

For example, panic struck when I realized Andy Warhol was the artist who I assigned to my son's Kindergarten class. Yes, several cool Warhol t-shirts were already in my closet, but how to explain Warhol to six-year-olds? What would interest them to sit still and listen for at least 10 minutes?

• Andy Warhol had 25 cats all named Sam in his house.

• Pablo Picasso had cats in his studio and his paintings were very reflective of his emotions.

• Jackson Pollock was influenced by his childhood growing up in the vastness of Wyoming and the west. He had a tame crow named Caw Caw.

So, have I discovered anything particularly amazing in the course of researching nonfiction? The first thing that comes to mind is the story of Mrs. Hopkins. I found out about her in 1986, when I was painting the cover for a new paperback edition of Patricia Clapp’s well-researched work of historic fiction: Constance: A Story of Early Plymouth (originally published by Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard, 1968). Reading it led to my first historical picture book: Three Young Pilgrims (Macmillan: 1992) and my Adventurous Life of MYLES STANDISH and the Amazing-But-True Survival Story of PLYMOUTH COLONY. (Nat’l Geographic, 2006). The genuine, flesh & blood Constance was about 14 when her stepmother, Elizabeth Hopkins, gave birth to a child in the early autumn of 1620, in the course of an already pretty dashed uncomfortable voyage. It was not a story I’d heard in school.<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

Nor had I heard of Tisquantum’s saga, a.k.a. Squanto’s Amazing Adventures. The Patuxet tribesman had been taken to England long before he astonished the Mayflower “Pilgrims” with his knowledge of English, and even before he’d translated for Captain John Smith in 1614. It was after that stint that Squanto was kidnapped. The greedy and dastardly Thomas Hunt, one of Smith's comrades, sailed off with him and 26 other Natives. Hunt took his captives to the Spanish port city of Malaga and sold them at the slave market there!

Those terrified, despairing captives had to look up at the moon and know for sure they'd never see its light shining on their homes ever again. Some were dragged off to North Africa. Squanto ended up with Spanish monks, thence to London and back across the Atlantic to Newfoundland. The governor there hooked him up with Thomas Dermer, another English sea captain in need of a translator. Back to England Squanto went with Captain Dermer, who was preparing to explore Cape Cod Bay. So it was that, in 1619, Squanto finally got back to what the captain termed "my savage's native country."

No one was home. While he was away from his home village of Accomack, smallpox killed everyone he’d ever known. When a boatload of bedraggled English folks arrived, including Mrs. Hopkins and the new baby, they established their new colony where Squanto's people once lived. As far as William Bradford was concerned, Squanto had survived to become "a special instrument of God:" He’d saved Bradford and many a Plymouth Pilgrim from starving to death. It’s a tragic tale and, yes, maybe I'm amazed (thanks Paul McCartney).

George Little amazed me. After his cold, exhausted horse gave out, this teenaged Pony Express rider cut open his saddlebags, stuffed the mail into his shirt, then wallowed, slid, and tramped through a mountain snowstorm the rest of the way into Salt Lake City. (They’re Off! The Story of the Pony Express. 1996)

I was knocked out by the idea of an army of workers laboring away by the light of a harvest moon, busting to finish work on New York’s glorious ditch. If not exactly amazed I was certainly enchanted by the notion of all sorts of quaintly-dressed people firing cannon, lighting bonfires, waving flags, and playing fanfares on their drums and cornets when the "Amazing, Impossible Erie Canal" (1994) finally opened for business, October 26, 1825.

Studying for The Remarkable Benjamin Franklin (Nat’l Geographic, 2005), I first read about this endlessly curious, philosophizing scientist & author from the colonies, stopping on his bumptious journey across the Salisbury Plain and getting out of his stagecoach to see Stonehenge. Wow. It’s July 1757. B.F. is 51 years old. Here I am, 252 summers later, still mildly thrilled at the notion of that canny old bird wiping his brow, pondering those stones and whomever cut, hauled, and set them – all for what? The holy calculation of the circling heavens? There they stood, upon many a solstice, singing? Dancing? Pondering the rising of the moon, the same moon that silvered the sails of the Mayflower, captives upturned faces, and mountain peaks poking through the clouds. The constant, inconstant moon that Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin walked upon forty years ago today. Amazing.