Creating Lives: An Introduction to Biography

Background Information

In her book, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, Hermione Lee gives several definitions to which we can turn to attempt to construct our own understanding of biography. Lee actually gives three Oxford English Dictionary definitions with which to work; interestingly enough, they have evolved over time. For the sake of expediency, we will utilize the most recent version which was taken from the New Oxford Dictionary of English of 2001 which defines biography as "an account of someone's life written by someone else." ⁷ To satisfy my own curiosity as to what the most current definition might be, I turned to the internet and found it defined as "a written account of another person's life." ⁸ Lee goes on to give us two vivid, powerful and distinct images with which to further complicate our understanding of the nature of biography: "an autopsy or an oil portrait." ⁹

All of these definitions and depictions, simply stated as they are, do not give a clear, unambiguous meaning. Is there a standard and reliable definition of biography? To which I can answer an emphatic "maybe." As I see it, the definition of the term itself is much like its practice; for biography, and the "true" story of the person's life it is meant to give an account of, meaning is most firmly in the eye of the beholder. I imagine this "eye of the beholder" as the reason for huge number of biographies dedicated to the same subjects. Because biographers are human, as much as they desire to have strict adherence to the facts, elements of bias – both positive and negative – can find their way into writing. Because of this, we must remain watchful for those who might unintentionally rewrite history.

For the sake of presenting a baseline from which to teach first grade, as well as most all elementary children, the most practical way for us to look at biography is by using Lee's metaphor of an "oil portrait." ¹⁰ As elementary teachers, the opposite view of "autopsy" reveals more than our children need to know at their tender ages. For example, it is more important for our children to see Benjamin Franklin as an inventor, a founding father, a statesman, and an ambassador than as the shameless womanizer he is alleged to have been. When speaking of Frederick Douglass' life in slavery, gruesome details of flesh being stripped from his back mercilessly by an overseer's whip, although true, is better left to high school teachers and college professors. The entirety of Douglass' existence could very well be reduced to that single image in a child's mind and become the stuff of nightmares. Using today's movie ratings as an analogy, in first grade, anything above a G rating is better left to a more appropriate time. Saying he was "beaten" is sufficient. I do not believe it an exaggeration to say that all my children have some schema regarding "being beat" — that they understand the idea and can process it. Even in the biographic sketches we provide of Helen Keller, while it is important for them to know how she became deaf, blind, and mute, it is also important to emphasize that her illness happened long ago at a time when medicine to make her better had not yet been invented. Helen Keller's biography should be viewed by the children as a heroic rise above her disability, not as a cautionary tale. The last thing we want to do is implant fear in six-year-olds so that every time they have a fever that they will be terrorized by the thought that their bout of the flu might leave them forever visually and hearing impaired.

In the early grades, "biographical intrusion" ¹¹ into the personal lives of our American heroes and role models is not our goal. Our goal is set forth in the Virginia Standards of Learning. In History 1.2 it clearly states that "The student will describe the stories of American leaders and their contributions to our country, with emphasis on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington Carver." ¹² I find the use of the word "stories" in this standard to be appropriate, although I am not sure that it occurred to the VSOL writers at the time, that much of what we teach about these figures is not always unvarnished fact. The reality is that some of the figures we introduce in the early grades have been idealized and mythologized to a point where it is hard to discern where the idealizing stops and the mythologizing begins. In those matters, I find the idealizing much less problematic than the mythologizing. As teachers, we have an obligation to teach facts, so far as we know them to be true. We are not in the business of perpetuating rumors and building "tall tales." Tall tales have a time and place. They are an important part of Americana in and of themselves and it is important that we address that aspect as we encounter such tales in the biographies. They need to be differentiated as a separate genre. In the strict sense of history or the study of biography as "life writing," they cannot be taught as fact. So, there is an ever present caveat that we must heed, and encourage children to question what they read: Did George Washington cut down his father's cherry tree and nobly admit to it? Did he really toss a silver dollar across the Potomac River? Did Benjamin Franklin fly a kite in a rainstorm? Did Abraham Lincoln really split rails or was it just a political ploy to make him seem like a "man of the people"? Was the relationship between Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan "sunshine and lollipops" all the time? The concept of "what is true?" can be introduced and discussed in the early grades.

All the figures we will introduce in this unit have been written about countless times. The number of juvenile biographies of George Washington alone could fill an entire section of most children's libraries. The same is true of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln as well. Because of this oversaturation, selecting texts is a subject that cannot be taken lightly. In her book, Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography, Hermione Lee uses the term "versionings" to describe what happens when multiple biographers write and rewrite the stories of particular subjects and how their "making up, making over…and reinterpretations" ¹³ influence retellings of life stories. It is our responsibility as teachers to teach facts, but we can also convert this problem of "versioning" into an opportunity to encourage critical thinking and examining more than one source. It is not too early, even in first grade, for students to develop healthy skepticism about feats (like the "coin toss" of Washington) that sound more like the stuff of legend than fact. It is important that we present these figures realistically; the more real these people seem, the better the children can connect them to their own lives.